Correspondent's Notebook
Corruption in Afghanistan
11 September 2009
This week’s Correspondent’s Notebook from Karon Snowdon discusses how the West’s support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai is being tested by the claims of massive fraud surrounding the presidential election.
Continuing evidence of vote rigging and fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential election risks further losses of Western support for Hamid Karzai’s administration.
He was previously championed by the United States, but the smell of corruption around the President is growing worse.
As the Election Complaints Commission struggles to deal with 2,000 complaints of electoral fraud, the votes from hundreds of polling stations have already been annulled.
But as Hamid Karzai appears to have exceeded the 50 per cent of votes needed to avoid a second round run-off with his closest rival, no-one seems to know what to do in the short term.
Should there be another election or some sort of power-sharing among the major political players including the leading opposition figure Abdullah Abdullah?
Either way, Francesc Vendrell, a former special European Union and United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, believes Mr Karzai is beyond redemption and should no longer have international support.
“The key thing is not to give the impression to the Afghans that we continue to support a government that has no legitimacy, because you will ruin our image which is already pretty tarnished with the Afghan public,” he said.
But Mr Vendrell says its not the time to abandon the Afghan people yet again.
“I still believe that the Afghan people deserve our support. We did not do a very good job, we marked them first in a war against the Soviets. We used them and then we dropped them like hot potatoes and we have made lots of mistakes since 2001,” he said.
Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy is also under a cloud from the failure to rein in the opium trade, which is not only funding the Taliban insurgency but swelling the bank accounts of many in the government.
And just as the worst of the vote rigging seems to have taken place in Mr Karzai’s home province of Kandahar, it is also where the opium trade is doing well.
Farmers are growing poppies on 30 per cent more land than a year ago.
That compares to a 10 per cent reduction across the country as a whole, according to the latest report from the UN.
The Governor of Kandahar is Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai.
Afghanistan remains the supplier of 90 per cent of the world’s opium, the raw ingredient for heroin.
A recent conference in Sydney, Australia, on Afghanistan was notable for the almost unanimous level of despair of the participants about the damage the drug trade is having on the people, on security, and the level of government corruption needed for it to thrive.
It is now thought that within Afghanistan, corrupt officials make more money from the drug trade than the Taliban, while the biggest profits as always go to the traffickers outside the country who control the trade.
Of concern is the growing web of criminal narco-cartels in Afghanistan that are spreading through Iran, Russia and Central Asia.
Well informed observers say the Taliban long ago lost its opposition to the drug trade.
It’s moved from a practical means of funding their war to an addiction to the money itself.
Greed, observers say, is perhaps a more dangerous motivation than ideology, one that makes efforts to reduce the trade harder.
Another worry is that even if Afghanistan cracks down on its drug production, someone has had the foresight to stockpile an estimated 10,000 tons of heroin in the last few years.
That’s enough to affect prices and fund many more insurgents.
As Western public support for Afghanistan falls, whoever assumes power after this tainted election process, will have to make real efforts to go after the criminals, even where evidence exists those in high office.
