CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT

Lesson 5. U.S. strategies and plans should incorporate anticorruption
objectives into security and stability goals, rather than viewing
anticorruption as imposing tradeoffs on those goals.
While recognizing the short timelines imposed by U.S. domestic political realities,
policymakers must acknowledge the likelihood of an extended engagement
and therefore place greater priority on long-term governance objectives. In
Afghanistan, the United States repeatedly allowed short-term counterterrorism
and political stability priorities to trump strong anticorruption actions.
Policymakers tended to believe that confronting the corruption problem—for
instance, by taking a hard stand against corrupt acts by high-level
officials—would impose unaffordable costs on the U.S. ability to achieve security
and political goals.
But in the long term, this was a false choice. In fact, corruption grew so
pervasive that it ultimately threatened the security and reconstruction mission
in Afghanistan. In 2009, U.S. officials became increasingly concerned about
corruption and began to mount a more energetic response. That response,
however, ran up against deeply entrenched, corrupt networks, and an Afghan
government resistant to meaningful reform—as illustrated by the Salehi arrest
and release, and the Kabul Bank crisis. Both events demonstrated the vast scale
of corruption and the complete lack of Afghan political commitment to address it.
The U.S. reaction was to soften its own political commitment to fighting
corruption. U.S. officials spoke out strongly against corruption and consistently
pressed the Afghan government for reforms, but applied the greatest diplomatic
leverage to achieving security or stability priorities like concluding a bilateral
security agreement and managing the security transition, rather than imposing
stiff sanctions against corrupt actors. Moreover, interviews and press reports
revealed that not all U.S. agencies shared the same objectives with regard to
fighting corruption, specifically alleging the CIA maintained relationships with
some corrupt individuals as assets, while other agencies sought to investigate
and prosecute those same individuals. This lack of coherence in the overall
U.S. approach to corruption undermined U.S. efforts to fight it.
Lesson 6. The U.S. government should recognize that solutions to endemic
corruption are fundamentally political. Therefore, the United States
should bring to bear high-level, consistent political will when pressing the
host government for reforms and ensuring U.S. policies and practices do
not exacerbate corruption.
Fighting systemic corruption requires inherently political solutions. The
U.S. government must be prepared to invest political capital in encouraging a host
government to carry out critical corruption-related reforms. It must also have the
political will to provide resources for necessary oversight of U.S. assistance, and
to hold back such assistance when it proves ineffective.
Senior officials interviewed for this report, as well as many government,
academic, and think-tank entities, argue that the U.S. response to corruption
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SIGAR I CORRUPTION IN CONFLICT I SEPTEMBER 2016