CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT

emained on the embassy’s agenda, U.S. activities and goals in this area reflected
low expectations of progress. Certainly, much of the blame for such little
progress against corruption rests squarely with Afghan leaders who failed to
meet benchmarks for reform or hold the most corrupt actors accountable. 485
At the same time, however, the U.S. government underestimated the leverage
it had over the Afghan government and politically connected individuals. 486
While the lack of Afghan cooperation on anticorruption stymied many
U.S. efforts, the United States could have more aggressively brought pressure to
bear by conditioning security and development assistance on tangible progress.
U.S. agencies might have developed a cohesive strategy for increasing the costs
for Afghan political leaders to support a corrupt system, including pursuing
revocation of visas against corrupt Afghan officials and their families; pursuing
more robust U.S. law enforcement actions against corrupt Afghans with dual
U.S. citizenship; and making seizures in the United States of the proceeds of
Afghan corruption.
The U.S. failure to fully employ these tools suggests U.S. officials believed that
using them carried too high a risk of jeopardizing more direct security and
counterterrorism objectives, such as ensuring a continued international troop
presence and maintaining control of battlefield detainees. These judgment calls
reflected the primary U.S. policy objective in Afghanistan: to disrupt, dismantle,
and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return
to Pakistan or Afghanistan. The problem was that corruption continued to pose
a security threat in its own right and threatened U.S. security and stability goals.
If the United States had devoted more resources to studying and understanding
the issue of corruption, it might have recognized the threat of systemic
corruption to its core security goals before corrupt networks became
entrenched and much harder to tackle. It was not until 2010 that U.S. agencies
initiated systematic efforts to map corruption in, for example, Shafafiyat and to
vet contractors through TF-2010 and vendor vetting units. Although these efforts
prevented some U.S. contracts from going to malign actors, they proved too
little, too late to dismantle corrupt networks.
It is impossible to know how employing all available tools might have
compromised U.S. goals for the SPA, BSA, the security transition process,
and reconciliation. What we do know, however, is that the Taliban insurgency
remains a serious threat to security and stability in Afghanistan. 487 During the
2014 presidential elections, Ashraf Ghani told the Guardian that “the Afghan
public is sick and tired of corruption; we are not going to revive the economy
without tackling corruption root, stock, and branch.” 488 Perception surveys
continue to show corruption as a major source of frustration for the Afghan
population. 489 The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators show slight
improvement in Afghanistan’s “control of corruption” as of 2014, but the country
remains in the bottom six percent of all countries ranked. 490 While demonstrating
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SIGAR I CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT I SEPTEMBER 2016