CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT

U.S. government documents increasingly cited corruption as generating
widespread disenchantment with the government and support for the insurgents’
cause. 211 Several reports described ordinary Afghans’ complaints of corrupt
provincial and district officials, fraud involving development funds, and nepotism
in which “incompetent or warlord types” were appointed to government
posts. 212 The police were seen as highly corrupt and extorted citizens at illegal
checkpoints, and officials charged bribes for transporting goods across the
border. 213 One of the major findings of a 2009 field report prepared for DFID was
that respondents consistently cited “government corruption and partisanship at
provincial and district level[s] … as a major reason for supporting the Taliban and
Hizb-i Islami.” The report assessed that people turned to the Taliban as a way of
expressing opposition to the government. 214
Adding to these alarm bells, the Afghan presidential elections in September 2009
were marred by massive fraud facilitated by election officials. 215 The Electoral
Complaints Commission, which had a majority of UN-appointed international
commissioners, ultimately threw out nearly 25 percent of the votes. The corrected
results required a runoff between Karzai and Abdullah, but Abdullah withdrew on
the grounds that he “did not want to provoke a confrontation with Karzai or risk
partisan violence, even though he feared the runoff would bring a repeat of the
fraud that marred the first presidential poll.” 216
The election controversy undermined the credibility of Karzai, the UN, and
the international donor community regarding corruption. The UN and donor
community were discredited in the eyes of many Afghans for failing to remedy
systemic flaws in an electoral process they had put in place, and for ultimately
supporting a Karzai victory, despite his likely role in the election fraud. 217 As noted
by Sarah Chayes, former special assistant to ISAF commander General Stanley
McChrystal, this support for Karzai “was profoundly destructive to a rule of law
principle.” 218 On the other hand, the fraud-ridden elections appeared to toughen
the new Obama administration’s resolve to address high-level corruption in the
Afghan government.
Corruption Funding the Insurgency
Parallel to these developments, U.S. officials were arriving at a crucial insight:
U.S. money was flowing to the insurgency via corruption. This realization was the
result of new efforts to trace the insurgency’s funding sources. In 2008, the White
House assembled the Afghan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), modeled on a similar
unit in Iraq. 219 The ATFC’s objective was “to identify and help disrupt the material
and financial funding streams that were supporting the Taliban and other terrorist
organizations.” 220 Under Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) leadership, with
Treasury and DOD co-deputies, the unit began operations in late 2008. Initially,
the ATFC’s mandate did not specifically include corruption. 221 However, from
the beginning of its operations, the ATFC’s analyses shed light on a complex
and interdependent web of corruption among GIROA officials, drug traffickers,
transnational criminals, and insurgent and terrorist groups. 222 As Kirk Meyer, the
DEA special agent who led the ATFC from 2008 to 2011, stated:
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SIGAR I CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT I SEPTEMBER 2016