CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT

in the U.S.-led intervention eroded, as international aid agencies, contractors, and
ISAF were seen as complicit in the corrupt behavior of the Afghan government.
The U.S. government did not sufficiently appreciate early on these potentially
devastating consequences of corruption and did not mount an effective strategy to
mitigate against corruption. Short tours and frequent turnovers of U.S. civilian and
military officials, coupled with the lack of specialized anticorruption expertise,
led to poor institutional knowledge of the complex risks of corruption and
inconsistent attempts to address it.
By the time U.S. agencies invested resources in understanding the nexus of
corrupt officials, criminals, drug traffickers, and insurgents, and sought to prevent
U.S. funds from reaching them, these networks were deeply entrenched and
extremely difficult to dismantle.
Lesson 2. U.S. agencies should develop a shared understanding of the
nature and scope of corruption in a host country through political
economy and network analyses.
In Afghanistan, the United States was slow to acknowledge the systemic and
entrenched nature of corruption, which in turn delayed its awareness of how
corruption threatened core U.S. goals. The Afghan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC),
put in place in late 2008, was arguably the first organization to understand the
nexus of corruption, criminality, narcotics, and the insurgency by tracking money
flows and using network analysis. The unit relied on DOD, Justice, and Treasury
personnel and expertise, and communicated its findings across agencies in Kabul
and Washington. As a result of the ATFC’s and others’ work, by 2009 U.S. officials
were increasingly concerned about the corruption threat and the need for
strong anticorruption efforts. Executive branch agencies established several
organizations, conducted studies, and pursued programs to address different
aspects of corruption.
A critical first step to understanding the corruption threat was for U.S. agencies
to jointly conduct high-level, thorough political economy analyses of criminal
patronage networks and their associated money flows. Such analyses laid the
groundwork for a common understanding of the problem and identified potential
allies and obstacles.
Lesson 3. The U.S. government should take into account the amount of
assistance a host country can absorb, and agencies should improve their
ability to effectively monitor this assistance.
Tens of billions of dollars injected into the Afghan economy, combined with the
limited spending capacity of the Afghan government, increased opportunities for
corruption. This was exacerbated by poor oversight and contracting practices
by donors and the pressure to spend budgets quickly. For most of the 2002–2014
period, appropriated U.S. reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan surpassed
45 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP, reaching a high of 105 percent in 2010 and
never falling below 22 percent (see figure 4, p. 51). 498 According to a 2009 OECD
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SIGAR I CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT I SEPTEMBER 2016