In Afghanistan, corruption starts at the top

hamid karzai was just sworn in to a second term, so let's take a look at the corruption record so far and see what's likely in store in his coming five-year term...

this is from karzai's official biographer, nick mills, writing in foreign policy...

At the start of his second term, Karzai is under immense pressure from the new governments in Washington and London to grasp the nettle and clean house. But since the day in December 2001 when he was named head of the new post-Taliban government and had the support of the vast majority of the Afghan people, he has shied away from the hard decisions that might have set Afghanistan on a more promising course. I'm not sure if he has it in him to do it now.

this from pratap chatterjee in tomdispatch...

Hamid Jalil, the aid coordinator for the Ministry of Finance, points out that wasting money on unnecessary projects ... has helped to hobble Afghanistan's progress in the last eight years. "The donor projects undermine the legitimacy of the government and do not allow us to build capacity," he says, adding in the weary tone you often hear in Kabul today, "corruption is everywhere in post-conflict countries like ours."

Former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani summed up the whole profitably corrupt system that has run Afghanistan into a cul-de-sac this way. "It's not crazy, it's absurd," he says. "Crazy is when you don't know what you're doing. Absurd is when you don't provide a sense of ownership and a sense of sustainability."

and, in spite of all the damning evidence, the u.s. decides to make nice...

As President Obama nears a decision on how many more troops he will dispatch to Afghanistan, his top diplomats and generals are abandoning for now their get-tough tactics with Karzai and attempting to forge a far warmer relationship. They recognize that their initial strategy may have done more harm than good, fueling stress and anger in a beleaguered, conspiracy-minded leader whom the U.S. government needs as a partner.

[...]

The new approach, which one official described as a "reset" of the relationship, will entail more engagement with members of Karzai's cabinet and provincial governors, officials said, because they have concluded that the Afghan president lacks the political clout in his highly decentralized nation to purge corrupt local warlords and power brokers. The CIA has sent a longtime field officer close to Karzai to be the new station chief in Kabul. And State Department envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, whose aggressive style has infuriated the Afghan leader at times, is devoting more attention to shaping policy in Washington and marshaling international support for reconstruction and development programs.

'round and 'round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows...

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Employees want good leadership...? I'm shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED...!!

i've been pounding on this point for years... every single goddam book on management and leadership you pick up says virtually the same thing... it's taught in both graduate and undergraduate management programs... it's proudly pointed to as the way the company does business in the opening pages of every corporate annual report... there's only one problem... it isn't practiced, but i guess that's also the american way... we're at our best when we're telling everybody how things should be done but heaven forbid we should do it ourselves...

Money's Nice, but a Good Boss Is Better

When it comes to sizing up the quality of their workplaces, federal workers value strong leadership and straight answers from their bosses more than even pay and benefits, according to a new comprehensive study of the federal workforce.

one of the things i like best about teaching and training non-u.s. folks is when, after making a point about leadership or management, i get the inevitable comment that says, "well, that may work in the u.s., but you gotta understand this is (fill in name of country here)"... that's when i throw back my head and laugh... after looking at all the nonplussed stares, i lean forward conspiratorially and say, "here's a dirty little secret... it doesn't work THERE either because we don't practice what we preach... so, if you figure it out and do it, you'll be WAY ahead of the u.s..."

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Aid to Afghanistan... I'm sure Hillary is talking about attacking the symptoms rather than the disease...

i read this as i sit here in kabul, working for a "civilian" aid program...

The billions of dollars spent in U.S. aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years have been largely wasted, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

"For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work," she said. "There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line."

[...]

Since 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $5 billion in Afghanistan, according to figures on the agency's Web site. Clinton oversees USAID, which has boasted a number of success stories, including building hundreds of schools, distributing 60 million textbooks and vaccinating 90 percent of children against polio. But a report by Oxfam last week charged that much of the U.S. aid in Afghanistan is wasted on consulting costs, subcontractor fees and duplication.

Clinton's blunt comments on past aid programs -- which appeared to also indict the broader international effort -- will probably raise the bar for the administration's aid programs. "We are scrubbing every single civilian program," she said. "This is part of my mission as secretary of state. We are looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent and where it's going and trying to track the outcomes. We want to see real results."

i would be the very last person to argue that aid programs in afghanistan have been a resounding success... far, far from it... however, i would also be the last one to voice one iota of confidence that those in washington have any ability whatsoever to discriminate between the aid programs that have added value and those that haven't... so, what hillary says means to me is that they're going to jump in and "scrub" programs wholesale in the time-honored tradition of attacking the symptoms rather than the disease...

also, it's definitely worth noting that she doesn't mention the much more staggering sums "wasted" on military expenditures...

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