Raymond Barrett

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has secured a second five-year term after a controversial run-off election scheduled for yesterday was cancelled by the country’s independent electoral commission.

Former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah withdrew from the contest a week before the second round of voting, questioning the impartiality of the electoral process and alleging widespread corruption within the Afghan government. An outright victory for Karzai in an election last August was overturned after allegations of electoral fraud.

Corruption was largely ignored by the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force during the president’s first term. A certain amount of graft was seen as the ‘cost of doing business’ in a war-ravaged tribal society where former warlords had morphed into ‘provincial governors’.

However, regional experts say this ongoing corruption has been giving succour to the Taliban insurgency in recent years and is now affecting the international community’s previously fawning view of Karzai.

The main factor fuelling a culture of widespread malfeasance is opium. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reports that, since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, poppy cultivation has increased from 8,000 to 123,000 hectares.

The profits from this massive drug trade are believed to permeate every facet of political and civil life, from cabinet ministers to regional police chiefs. The economic realities make for sobering reading. In 2008, total GDP was estimated at around $10 billion, while the combined export value of Afghanistan’s opium industry was valued at $3.4 billion.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the forthcoming Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, pointed to the blurred lines within the country’s drug enforcement agencies.

‘‘Many power brokers in Afghanistan – including some of today’s staunchest eradicators of the poppy crop and members of the Ministry of Interior’s counternarcotics section – have been involved in the drug trade,” she said.

Targeting opium profits has also proved difficult. A highly-organised ‘narco-commodity exchange’ launders money through regional trading centres such as Dubai, allowing for payment through wholesale consignments of consumer goods and construction materials.

The most embarrassing example of this institutionalised corruption has been the accusation levelled at the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, of profiting from the drug trade. Earlier this year, president Karzai pardoned a man convicted in 2007 of using a police truck to smuggle drugs – the nephew of the president’s campaign manager.

Keeping one’s own supporters happy is an essential political lubricant in a tribal society such as Afghanistan. But as their commitment increases, the UN and Nato will simply have to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.