Pass the buck: Afghans are to blame for corruption in Army, says U.S. general

One of America’s top generals has taken a page from the Red Army’s book of excuses for the Soviets’ nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, the one titled “Blame The Afghans.”

Gen. Robert Cone, the commander overseeing the buildup of the Afghan National Army and Police, went on the record with Reuters last week about the obstacles he faces, saying: "The final point is corruption, corruption, corruption. It is endemic."

"It has amazed me in my time here how Afghans will hurt other Afghans,” he continued, “when they have been given a great opportunity to ... run a programme that is going to help so many...”

Journalists who covered the Soviet withdrawal 20 years ago heard the same sort of grumbling. “We only came here to help the Afghan people,” one conscript told me as she and her comrades from the Berlin Regiment motored north into Turkmenistan in February, 1989. “And yet they fought us, they killed our people, they resisted.”

Omitted from this lament was any mention of the more than one million Afghan civilians who lost their lives during the Soviet occupation, and the five and a half million forced to take refuge in Pakistan and Iran.

Similarly, Gen. Cone tells less than half the story when he points his finger of blame over corruption.

Afghans were not responsible for promoting a clerk named Zarar Muqbul to the post of Interior Minister - the Karzai regime’s policing boss - and for keeping him there for two full years after his outrageous abuse of office became common knowledge.

Zarar was promoted, then protected by the Bush administration’s officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and by the American private contractors who dominate the Interior Ministry (so perniciously, in fact, that Zarar’s successor, Hanif Atmar, has installed Canadian officials to keep the Americans at bay, according to highly-placed diplomats in the capital.)

Afghans didn’t appoint Rahim Wardak, one of the country’s least accomplished military figures, as Defence Minister, nor are Afghans to blame for keeping Wardak in that post long after the $17 billion army project began to falter. Wardak owes his job to the Bush administration.

It wasn’t Afghans who led the way in setting al Qaeda and the Taliban packing off to Pakistan in November, 2001, only to let them thrive in the embrace of the Pakistani military - subsidized by U.S. tax dollars. That honor, too, goes to George W. Bush.

It wasn’t an Afghan, back in December, 2001, who personally ushered the notorious Soviet-era mercenary Rashid Dostum into the post-Taliban, Western-backed interim government. It was the Pentagon’s Gen. Tommy Franks.

Five Decembers past, in 2003, it wasn’t an Afghan who boasted about the Taliban:  "It is no great surprise that those who have been defeated and removed will be looking to come back ... but they will not have that opportunity.” That was U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

It wasn’t an Afghan who encouraged Hamid Karzai to stack his cabinet and palace staff with ambitious Pashtuns, in the vain hope of depriving the Pashtun-centric Taliban of support. It was an Afghan-American neo-conservative, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul.

Afghans weren’t chiefly responsible for elevating small time warlords like Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gubuddin Hekmatyar to the status they enjoy today:  leaders among America’s most wanted Afghan terrorists. Their benefactors, twenty years ago, were Charlie Wilson, Zalmay Khalilzad, Robert Oakley and a host of other Reagan-era dilettantes.

And today? Is there other evidence Gen. Cone might usefully consider before making further speeches about “how Afghans will hurt other Afghans?”

For starters, how about the exploits of Bernie Madoff and his Wall Street contemporaries? What does the news from New York tell us about racial profiling and fraud?

The bottom line is that graft has swept Afghanistan because the Bush administration’s policies have unleashed the wolves, both the native and foreign varieties. Ordinary Afghans have been sidelined, and left to fight for survival. 

Hopefully the Obama era will bring changes. But if fixing blame is the priority, the generals won’t need to look far. A mirror in the latrine will do the trick.