Corruption in Afghanistan… and the Future of Afghanistan
I think it is pretty obvious that if you pump a ton of money into a country’s economy from outside, it creates massive incentives for corruption. I am surprised by how often people push back on this. It isn’t as if the empirical evidence on this score is unclear. Large development projects have always fed massive corruption. Corruption is closely linked to large projects even in the United States, for Pete’s sake. When you’re talking about spending the equivalent of a country’s GDP, you are of course going to massively distort the local economy and produce a wave of corruption. So, this is not surprising to me:
Afghan corruption: How to follow the money? – washingtonpost.com
According to senior Obama administration officials, some of it may be going to the Taliban, as part of a protection racket in which insurgents and local warlords are paid to allow the trucks unimpeded passage, often sending their own vehicles to accompany the convoys through their areas of control.
The essential question, said an American executive whose company does significant work in Afghanistan, is “whether you’d rather pay $1,000” for Afghans to safely deliver a truck, even if part of the money goes to the insurgents, or pay 10 times that much for security provided by the U.S. military or contractors.
The question with Afghanistan isn’t whether we’re going to end corruption there or, heck, even manage to suppress the insurgency. The question is, then what? Let’s say everything works out as well as we could hope. AQ remains exiled. The insurgency shatters and most of the fighters reconcile. What is left is a desperately poor country, with a massive military (relative to its population and wealth), and an entire economic elite whose way of life is built around diverting international aid dollars.
Run with that scenario for 10 years or 15. Maybe it turns into South Korea, but more likely you get a dysfunctional state, prone to military coups, and constantly being threatened by competition among elites for a bigger piece of the pie. It remains a country that for a variety of reasons will continue to tempt external actors to play out geopolitical games — the Iranians looking to manage their Balochi problems, Indians looking tweak the Pakistanis, Pakistanis trying to create “strategic depth.” In the meantime, various and sundry jihadis will continue to focus on the country due to its connection to the “glory days” of the 1980s.
The best case is simply not likely to transition into a sustainable state. And of course, the United States will want to remain involved until the place is stable, and yet our actions while perhaps managing short-term challenges probably undermines the possibility of a long-term solution.
The Afghan war is the epitome of a worldview focused on the in-box — crisis management over strategic planning.
