By Gary Anderson

Best Defense office of foreign ethics

In 2004-5, I did a study on the future of the Taliban for Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who was then the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. After the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, the Taliban had appeared on the run, but three years later, they were making a comeback. What I found in the study was that the Karzai government was the chief enabler of the resurgent Taliban movement. Afghan governmental corruption and incompetence was making the Taliban look good in comparison, despite years of misrule when that organization was in power. As a commander, and later as the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Eikenberry angered Afghan President Karzai by urging reform, and ultimately failed in his attempts to get Karzai to clean up his government in a meaningful way. Today, the Taliban are back in spades. This has damaged every aspect of the U.S. war effort because it affects security, governance, rule of law, and development. These are the pillars of coalition strategy in that unhappy country.

Corruption is exacerbated by the highly centralized Afghan form of government. All provincial (state) and district (county) officials are appointed by the central government in Kabul. On paper, there is nothing wrong with centralization. Many highly-developed democracies such as Japan have basically the same system. It even semi-works in Iraq. Those countries have good transportation and reliable communication systems. This allows the central government to control things that go on in governance in the provinces. None of that is true in Afghanistan. Consequently, it is nearly impossible for the Kabul government to closely monitor the performance of governance and development in the provinces, much less remove incompetent or corrupt officials.

The most pernicious corruption in our province was caused by the provincial commander of the Afghanistan National Police, the provincial prosecutor, and the director of public health. The head cop was a competent administrator, and kept the provincial capital relatively secure; however, he did so by hoarding personnel and resources badly needed by the outlying districts that he was supposed to be supervising. Outside the provincial capital, he was making a handy side-living running a protection racket for drug dealers and smugglers. Some of his handpicked appointees in my district were running extortion and burglary rings.

The prosecutor was making his money by encouraging defense lawyers from all over Afghanistan to send their wealthy clients to our province where he could guarantee light sentences or mere fines for serious offenses. The director of public health for the province, one Dr. Tariq, is a real piece of work. Over three years, he managed to misspend or divert $9 million dollars of World Bank funding, the vast majority of which was U.S.-provided.

While working at the district level, I had success in purging the worst of the bad cops in mid-level leadership positions by threatening to invite Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post to report on police corruption. This did cause the chief to replace to purge eight of them. It was a small start, but a start.

Once I got to the provincial capital as the governance advisor for the entire province, we caught a few breaks; they were caused, not by blatant corruption, but by gender issues. What finally did in the police chief was his reported rape of three female officers who had the gall to file complaints. Although they were eventually forced to retract their charges, a national uproar ensued, and the Afghan national government was embarrassed enough to reassign the top cop. However, to the best of my knowledge, he has not been held accountable for the rest of the corruption he fostered.

The prosecutor became a target because there was national level focus on the fact that many of his client protection scams were related to so-called "honor killings." In these crimes, husbands or other relatives kill a woman or girl for embarrassing the family by such heinous crimes as demanding a divorce or working outside of the house. The scrutiny was encouraged by us, and allowed our local national security directorate commander to organize a sting operation that finally jailed him. However, before he could go to trial, the former prosecutor used his connections to get permission to travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual Haj religious pilgrimage. To the best of my knowledge, he is still on the loose.

Despite our compiling a package on Dr. Tariq and sending it to Kabul, he is still on the job. One of the most appalling charges is that at least 11 women died in childbirth for lack of midwives that World Bank funding had provided for the hiring of such medical personnel in the last year alone.

Almost everyone in the province knew that all three of these characters were bad actors, but no one could do anything about it because they were hired and paid by Kabul. It took outside action by foreigners and the public glare of the media to do what little that we could. Until the Afghan government allows some form of local public review of provincial and district officials, the government of Afghanistan will be its own worst enemy.

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel, was a district governance advisor in Afghanistan's Badghis Province. With transition of the district to Afghan security control, he became the provincial governance and rule of law advisor.

By John Stuart Blackton
Best Defense chief Afghanistan correspondent

Before responding directly to Major Wharton, let me step back a bit and put the concept of Afghan corruption into context.

The simple definition that most of the current practical work on corruption uses is something along the lines of: "corruption is the abuse of public position for private gain." This is a moral and legal perspective that assumes a shared social agreement on the distinction between public and private and an agreed moral and legal view of what constitutes abuse around that public/private distinction. 

These basic conditions have not been met for most of the last 500 years in Afghanistan. To the extent that they have a historical basis in the country, it is quite recent as I will endeavor to illustrate in my remarks today. 

The "abuse of public position for private gain" construct is a top-down view of the process. It takes the standpoint of the state. For my purposes, as the United States Military tries to relate the real, empirical fact of widespread corruption in Afghanistan to a population-centric approach to achieving stabilization of security, it may make more sense to take a bottom-up view of the process. 

Viewed from the perspective of a 30-year old Afghan male head of household, corruption (let's simplify it to "bribery") is a functional tool. One pays a bribe for one of two reasons: 

• To get something, or
• To prevent something

A bribe is only useful to our putative Afghan father if he is transacting with an official who has something to offer (public services, for example) or with an official who seeks to do something damaging to him that can be averted with the bribe. 

For most of Afghan history over the last five centuries the state was not sufficiently powerful to make institutional bribery a very useful, instrumental tool for an ordinary Afghan man. The state offered almost no services (so he couldn't buy much of value from an official) and the state was not actively taking too much (it was not a notable collector of taxes and it was not raising and maintaining a large standing army by conscription). Afghanistan was on the periphery of two great imperial systems that did, in fact, offer a range of public services and possess serious capability to take away goods, land and chattels from their citizens. The Mogul Empire, to the east, was a massive taxation machine raising enormous revenues to support an expensive imperial establishment and a massive standing army. The Persian state, just to the west, was a similarly expansive tax machine with a costly central government. Elaborate and extensive systems of corruption permeated life in the Mogul empire and in Persia. Even minor citizens at the bottom paid bribes to mitigate having to pay more onerous taxes or having to supply sons to the army. They paid bribes to gain favors and services from an elaborate system of local and provincial governors who could offer or withhold things of considerable value to citizens.

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By Haider Ali Hussein Mullick
Best Defense chief Pakistan correspondent

I just got back from my third trip to Pakistan this year, where I examined the scope and scale of its counterinsurgency strategy and al Qaeda's response.

The bottom line is that al Qaeda's big plans for world dominance have failed, but its ability to keep the United States and allies on high alert is increasing. There are two primary reasons for this paradoxical situation: First, al Qaeda's very successful nine-year 'train the trainer' program, which multiplies its strength without expanding its numbers. Second, the August floods that devastated Pakistan are a game changer, a godsend for al Qaeda, diverting 30,000 Pakistani counterinsurgents and key enablers (helicopters, engineers, medics, etc.) away from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to flood relief and reconstruction activities. To overstretch armies, smart insurgents always pray for the opening of multiple fronts. The damage from the floods couldn't be worse -- 1/5th of Pakistan (size of New England) inundated, seven million people lost their homes, and $30 billion in total damages. The timing was equally terrible: The Pakistani surge was finally working, and troops were holding Swat and South Waziristan since 2009.

Today, the nuclear-armed Pakistani army is under great stress, and reluctant to go into North Waziristan, home to al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and the Pakistani Taliban. The army is the police, National Guard, relief organization, reconstruction agency, and governing body in critical areas in the north and south, while the weak civilian government is perceived to be corrupt, inept, and aloof as it wrestles with the Supreme Court. Half of 180 million Pakistanis are under the age of 25 and facing high prices, unemployment and little opportunity. They watch the rich pay virtually no taxes and they find solace in U.S. and India bashing, and blissful ignorance about their actual enemies, which are the al Qaeda syndicate, corruption and poverty. Al Qaeda couldn't ask for a better home.

What's worse is that we don't have any good options in Pakistan, and President Barack Obama has made that clear again and again. But we can make our bad options better. If there were a 9/11-type attack post-marked Pakistan there would be retaliatory airstrikes against terrorist camps -- but Washington doesn't have a 'day-after plan'. We need a strategy that deals with such an attack and strives to balance terrorist interdiction (with or without Pakistani help amid imminent danger) with U.S. civil-military aid and outreach to the Pakistani people. Today we must maintain the Catch-22 of supporting nuclear-armed, comatose Pakistan, knowing that it won't wake up, walk on its own or hug us anytime soon. But we must combine that with a long-term roadmap to bring the countries together, to imagine the impossible by doing the possible. We must continue to assert our security interests, help Pakistan help itself, and make our partnership transparent to the Pakistani people. Hope is not a policy, but striving for a more effective partnership with a nuclear-armed country that is the second-largest Muslim nation, that is home to al Qaeda, and that borders Iran, China and India, is.

Read more here to learn about al Qaeda's post-9/11 metamorphosis, and how the United States can better partner with Pakistan to degrade al Qaeda and associates.

Here is a report review by a CNAS colleague of mine.

By Jennifer Bernal-Garcia
Best Defense illegal drugs correspondent

I sat down recently with the 2010 National Drug Threat Assessment  NDTA), which came out last month. Bottom line up front: good on thoroughness, bad for your morale.

Some takeaway points:

While the failure of the "war on drugs" is an oft-rehashed theme, the NDTA goes into specifics. The availability of most illegal drugs -- heroin, marijuana, meth and MDMA -- throughout the country is increasing, mostly as a result of ramped-up production in Mexico. Apparently the costs resulting from lost productivity associated with drug abuse, the burden on the justice system, and the environmental impact of drug production are a staggering $215 billion.

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Last night I went to see David Kilcullen, the most quotable Australian since the Brothers Gibb, report on his most recent tour of Afghanistan. This is a great way to begin a speech:

One afternoon about six weeks ago I got ambushed in a valley in Dora Nur, in Nangarhar province...

Kilcullen, who is now a consultant to NATO and the U.S. government spent much of his time explaining how the war effort in Afghanistan is being crippled by the debilitating corruption of the Kabul government. (I'd bet this is similar to the straight talk Secretary Clinton is delivering today on her visit to Afghanistan.) He said a Western diplomat in Kabul told him that the government there reminds him of the Nationalist Chinese government in 1949, with an urban elite trying to scrape together as much wealth as they can before time runs out and they have to scoot.

Kilcullen described a "cycle of corruption" that is destroying Afghanistan:

Corruption

Leads to

Rapacious behavior of government officials

Leads to

Rage and alienation of the people

Leads to

Operating space for the Taliban

Leads to

Growing Taliban strength

Leads to

Taliban encouragement of poppy cultivation

Leads to

Poppies producing funds that corrupt government officials

Leads to

More corruption

And so on

"Poppy is the Taliban CERP," he said, a chilling phrase to anyone who knows the major role that that U.S. military acronym refers to money that American commanders used to win friends and influence people. The farmers who grow the dope only make about $800 million total annually, he said, with the vast majority of revenue, more than $3 billion, being split between drug lords, the Taliban, and government officials.

His bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either tell the Kabul government we are pulling out, or put in enough troops to actually break the cycle of corruption, which he said would be a minimum of about 40,000. "We either put in enough to control, or we get out." The worst thing we could do, he added, is put in enough troops to get more people killed but not enough to do anything to break change the behavior of corrupt officials. Also, he said, it is more about what you do than the actual number of troops -- "If you do it wrong, you could put it a million troops and it wouldn't make any difference."

Without quite saying so, he also indicated that time is a factor right now. "We're seeing a lot of money leaving the country. We're seeing tribes associated with the Northern Alliance re-arming. ... A lot of people are getting nervous." He talked about how attuned local Afghan leaders in remote areas are to American politics, being familiar with the various stances of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Carl Levin. "Right now we're sending kind of a message of indecision."

One surprise to me was that he isn't particularly worried about the possibility of al Qaeda moving back into Afghanistan. "I hope so," he said, explaining that it would be a strategic gain for us to see the terrorist group leave Pakistan and move into parts of Afghanistan that essentially are "the moon with gravity."   

John Moore/Getty Images      

First there was Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the former congressman who pled guilty to taking a bunch of defense-related bribes and is now doing the time in a federal prison in Arizona. Now, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune, six people at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command have been indicted for supposedly accepting bribes in relation to defense contracts. The federal employees were involved in providing support to Southcom's counter-drug efforts.  

My worry: What if these cases are more common that we know, but are only surfacing in San Diego because of an aggressive local law enforcement office and a newspaper that is interested in the subject?

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

I asked my old Washington Post colleague Brad Graham, whose new book on Donald Rumsfeld is just about out, to explain to me the difference between Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates. Specifically, as some astute readers asked here the other day, why when Rumsfeld poses questions it is meddlesome micro-management, while when Gates does it he is being Churchillian?

Here is Brad's reply:

It does appear that Gates, who after succeeding Rumsfeld seemed bent on setting himself apart from his predecessor in approach and tone, has in some ways come to mirror him. The micromanaging and the overruling of the military chiefs are just a couple of examples. Indeed, as Ryan Henry, who worked under both Rumsfeld and Gates, told me when I was writing the biography, the longer Gates has served, the more he has come to understand why Rumsfeld was the way he was.

But in personal style, Gates has remained distinctly different from Rumsfeld, and this has been a key to his success. He has shown little of the arrogance, the dismissiveness, the discourtesy of his predecessor. He has managed to convey firmness and decisiveness without being overbearing and offensive. Most significantly, he has restored a measure of accountability without breeding deep resentment and making himself unpopular. While Rumsfeld in six years fired only one top official (Tom White), Gates in two-and-a-half years has already removed six (Harvey, Pace, Fallon, Wynn, Moseley and McKiernan). And yet Gates has none of the bullying, domineering image that Rumsfeld seemed to cultivate. Rather, he has demonstrated an ability to exercise strong civilian leadership with reason and just cause.

Significantly, too, Gates has brought a sense of balance to a Pentagon that Rumsfeld had kept in a swirl. His lack of flare and self-promotion have been a relief after the theatrics of his predecessor. In the Rumsfeld tradition, Gates has persisted in prodding the military to think outside its box. But he has taken a quieter approach and, at the same time, refocused the military transformation process. He talks less about what might be needed for future wars, placing more emphasis on current needs and on how to wage unconventional warfare better.

You didn't ask, but the question of Rumsfeld versus McNamara also may be of interest, since McNamara is the only other Pentagon leader whose term rivals Rumsfeld's for controversy. Both Rumsfeld and McNamara came to the Pentagon from the corporate world exhibiting arrogance and impatience, and both showed similar characteristics in office: keen analytical minds, insatiable appetites for data, predilections for new methods and approaches for problem solving. McNamara may have been more soullessly analytical, and Rumsfeld more intuitive, but both sought tighter civilian control of the military and ordered reappraisals of U.S. strategy. Both also brought with them contingents of civilian aides who shared their determination to shake things up and a propensity to clash with the Joint Chiefs. And both became embroiled in unpopular wars.

Where they differed most notably was in how they ultimately viewed their own tenures. Despite his public cheerleading for the Vietnam War, McNamara privately became dubious about its wisdom and effectiveness while still in office. In later years, he increasingly recognized that he had failed as defense secretary because of mistakes he and others had made in Vietnam. By contrast, Rumsfeld did not leave office doubting his handling of the Iraq War. He has acknowledged no major missteps or shown any remorse on the subject to date. Asked in my final interview with him last fall whether he harbored any regrets, Rumsfeld sounded tired of such queries. "Oh, that's the favorite press question," he quipped."

This is why I think it is essential to conduct a thorough investigation of the U.S. government's unfortunate record of officially-sanctioned torture over the last eight years: Bushies argue that they may have done bad things, but at least, when they made torture national policy, they kept the country safe from attack.

What has got me stewing about this, oddly enough, is the British government's stalwart reaction to losing the American Revolution. In the aftermath of that wrenching disaster, British officials conducted a painful and thorough examination of how to better provide for the security of their nation. It was fortunate they did, because the consequent reforms helped them get in shape to withstand Napoleon two decades later. As Kevin Phillips puts it in his terrific book The Cousins' Wars, "Much of the change that helped to beat Napoleon in Europe was seeded by frustration over defeat in North America."

Bottom line? Just because you have an embarrassing problem, you shouldn't try to hide it, because dealing with it may prepare you for an even bigger challenge down the road. So let's get the torture and interrogation situation straightened out before the next big terrorist attack. My preference, as I've stated before, is for a truth and reconciliation commission that offers an amnesty period during which people would be invited to step forward. Anyone not 'fessing up during that time would face the possibility of prosecution. Again, I think this effort should target those who departed from American history and made torture national policy.

(And follow-up on yesterday: Yes, I do believe torture has two victims, the human suffering it and the human inflicting it. I believe there is a pretty good body of evidence collected on how torturers often are haunted and eroded by their long past acts.) 

I hate the fact that my country's leaders panicked after 9/11 and embraced torture. It saddens me to watch this.

I can still remember when it was the bad guys who tortured people in the movies. Here's the test I think is useful for judging abuse: What would I think of this being used against captured U.S. military personnel? Or kidnapped reporters?

Police in Guatemala police rousted out an training camp being run there by Zeta, one of the major Mexican drug cartels. Reportedly the fleeing trainees left behind some 500 hand grenades, along with some rifles and ammunition. The camp also had an airstrip, an obstacle course, and a shooting range with moving targets.   

I was on a panel last night in Manhattan with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the bane of the New York media, and Alex de Waal. McCaffrey was his usual interesting self. Darfur expert De Waal made a comment that struck me: When catastrophe is averted -- famine, civil war, genocide -- the media tends to shrug and ignore the good outcome. The implication, I think, is that successes tend to be neglected while failures are overemphasized, and bureaucrats and diplomats wind up looking more incompetent than they are. I think he is right. As of this morning I don't have any good ideas about how the media might do better in this area, but I'd be interested in suggestions.

De Waal also was quite critical of the International Criminal Court's issuance of an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Nothing good will come of it, he said, if I am summarizing his views correctly.

ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images

I just loved that headline. Go ahead and read the article if you must. Among those dismissed were the governor of Lebap province. The deputy minister of oil and gas got away with a reprimand. I am not making this up.

I am guessing that local newspaper headline writers aren't even allowed to refer to him as "Berdie" or "Berd-man."