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Afghan President Hamid Karzai has delivered a scathing rebuke to Canadian soldiers and taxpayers by nominating to his cabinet a disgraced former minister who presided over the embezzlement of up to one-third of Canadian aid dollars donated under the U.N.’s Law and Order Trust Fund (LOTFA).
In naming Zarar Muqbul as his new counter-narcotics minister, Karzai delivers a forehand smash into the court of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is already under fire for proroguing Canada’s House of Commons - in part to avoid a parliamentary committee’s probe into the Afghan government’s mistreatment of battlefield detainees.
The siphoning off of Canada’s LOTFA contributions is arguably a more flagrant abuse of trust than the issue of prisoner abuse. The financial support is intended to strengthen the National Police and kick-start Afghanistan's rule of law.
Canadians have donated at least $80 million to the scheme since 2002, with the Harper government tipping in $12 million seven months ago.
The embezzlement and detainee scandals share a common denominator: the Prime Minister and his aides have tried for years to sweep both under the carpet.
Zarar Muqbul’s story was broken here on Skyreporter in May of 2007, and in greater length in an article for the July/August 2007 edition of Policy Options, the journal of Canada’s Institute for Research on Public Policy.
Stephen Harper’s PMO refused any comment at the time, and duly muzzled Foreign Affairs, the RCMP and Canada’s embassy in Kabul. Two of the same officials who censored diplomat Richard Colvin’s reports on detainee abuse similarly blocked Skyreporter’s queries about Zarar Muqbul: Afghan Task Force chief David Mulroney and former ambassador to Kabul Arif Lalani.
Here are excerpts from the 2007 Policy Options article, Covering Up For Karzai & Co, by Arthur Kent, beginning with the account of an undercover investigator for Afghanistan’s security services:
* * *
It’s Abdul Rab’s other wars that wear him down, that make him sigh with fatigue and discouragement. “What do you see there?” he asks, pointing at the rear view mirror. He’s not talking about the donkey carts and taxis.
“It’s Kabul, the home of our worst enemies. All the big people, working for themselves. And against us, against Afghanistan.”
He tells the story of a colleague, a general in the Karzai regime’s Interior Ministry, which oversees policing throughout the country. The general was driving north from the capital one day, when he came across a police officer beating a man at a checkpoint. The general stopped and confronted the officer, ordering him to stop.
“The general asked what the man had done to deserve such a beating,” Abdul Rab says. “’Smuggling,’ the policeman told him. But there were no drugs or other goods in the car. The policeman was just after money.”
This stop-and-bribe practice by corrupt policemen led to a strike by Afghan truckers in April. Known as “mushkil tarashi,” the bribes can cost long-distance drivers up to ten thousand dollars a year. Hauling freight across the country, say from Iran to Pakistan’s Khyber Pass, a trucker could be stopped 400 times.
In this case, the driver was lucky: the general who rescued him from the policeman’s fists also happens to be stridently honest. Still, the crooked cop defied his order to free the driver, instead pulling out his cell phone.
“He called Zarar’s office,” Abdul Rab says, laughing, “and spoke to Zarar himself.”
Zarar Ahmad Muqbul is President Hamid Karzai’s Minister of the Interior. The checkpoint was located in Zarar’s hometown of Charikar, north of Kabul. After a brief conversation, the police officer reported that the minister had ordered the car impounded and the driver arrested. Both were taken back to Kabul. Later in the day, Minister Zarar alleged that the general was secretly in league with the driver, smuggling heroin.
“It came down to two stories,” Abdul Rab says. “So the honest people at the ministry had a choice. Either they would believe their general or the minister. But there wasn’t even a question. Everybody knows the general to be a good man, and that Zarar has been sharing bribe money in Charikar for years. Even the people of his own town hate him. He can’t go there without a lot of security.”
Abdul Rab’s tale might seem grim enough if Minister Zarar was just a small time hood, using local cronies to put the squeeze on passing truckers. But the multi-tiered graft afflicting Zarar’s department is so chronic, so extensive and so resistant to correction, that the Interior Ministry is regarded by most seasoned Afghan observers as one of the most corrupt branches of the Western-backed Afghan regime.
So much international aid money has vanished into the concentric rings of corruption that make up the Karzai administration that no reliable estimate exists of its total dollar value. Similarly, Foreign Affairs officials in Ottawa have resisted repeated requests, for the purposes of this article, to estimate the total sum of Canadian aid to Afghanistan.
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Zabul province sprawls northward from the Pakistan border in epic sweeps of desert landscape. Zabul’s poverty is relieved only by the traffic flowing along the highway between Kabul in the east to the neighbouring province of Kandahar in the west. Zabul is preyed upon by the Taliban, who move arms and men through the backcountry and regularly attack remote police and army posts.
In March of 2006, the governor of Zabul, an imaginative and successful administrator named Delbar Arman, made a direct plea to the visiting commander of U.S. and coalition troops in the region, Canada’s General David Fraser. Please ensure, he asked, that President Karzai and his functionaries pay Afghanistan’s policemen, in full and on time. Many officers and men in Zabul’s most restive districts hadn’t received their salaries in three months.
Gen. Fraser, who believes that Arman is the kind of leader the international community needs to support, relayed the request up the chain of command. Then politicians and bureaucrats got involved, both Western and Afghan. One year later, Zabul’s police salaries are four months in arrears, a shameful betrayal of a province viewed by the U.S. and NATO as an indicator of the Taliban’s capabilities. In early June, Taliban gunmen attacked a police convoy in Zabul’s Shahjoy district. Sixteen policemen died in the fighting.
A U.N.-administered program called the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, or LOTFA, was launched four years ago to distribute policemen’s pay. Canada is one of 13 nations bankrolling the fund, along with the European Union and the U.N. This year Canadian taxpayers will donate $30 million to the effort. Trouble is, LOTFA has yet to come up with a way to place international aid directly into the hands of individual policemen. For now, the money must first find a way through – yes – the Karzai regime’s Interior Ministry, and across the palms of people like minister Zarar.
According to one general at the ministry, who laments the “losing battle” against corruption fought by honest officials and staff members, up to 30% of the department’s foreign-donated finances go astray. Routinely, he says, at least one-tenth of provincial police funding is embezzled, mainly by officials posted to the ministry’s headquarters in Kabul. The withholding of money for salaries for many months, he explains, helps conceal the crimes.
Canada has police and military officers stationed within the Interior Ministry, as does the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In Ottawa, Foreign Affairs responded to queries about the Zabul scandal only by pointing a finger at the United Nations. “LOTFA is subject to the internal and external auditing procedures provided for in the financial regulations, rules and directives of the UNDP.”
This foreign bureaucratic smokescreen is matched on the regime’s side by a determination to deceive at every level. For instance, President Karzai’s General Independent Administration of Anti Corruption and Bribery. This body has a staff of more than one hundred, who have toiled for 18 months without a single substantial conviction. It's chief, Izzatullah Wasifi, appointed personally by Karzai, was recently revealed to have spent four years in Nevada State Prison in the 1980's. He had tried to sell $100,000 worth of heroin to an undercover agent in Caesar's Palace.
Prior to being appointed to the anti-corruption post, Wasifi served an abortive spell as governor of Farah province, again at Karzai's behest. Elders in the provincial capital demanded his recall, objecting, sources say, to their new governor's drunken and debauched behaviour.
In this context, Canadians and other foreign sponsors of the Karzai regime need not wonder where so many of their tax dollars are winding up. The cash is in the hands of criminals in high office, who cover their tracks and sustain their grip on power through a complex web of connections, many of which are well known by Western political, diplomatic and military authorities.
* * *
The footnote to this litany of wrongdoing is the damage it is inflicting on Canada’s own political culture. Governments can be expected to spin and evade and make every effort to keep the public in the dark about the grimy underside of contentious issues. Journalists depend upon this kind of official evasion. It gives us a raison d’etre, a mission to reveal and explain.
But it would be remiss of this correspondent, after 28 years of reporting regularly from Afghanistan, to fail to point out the remarkable degree of secrecy maintained by the Harper government regarding Canada’s Afghan initiatives. Even the Kremlin was less manic in its information control during the Soviet occupation of the 1980’s. It is regrettable to report that perhaps the only undisputed policy success in Afghanistan chalked up by the Prime Minister’s Office is the complete stifling of virtually every public servant concerned with any aspect of the mission.
In Ottawa, one high-ranking official with oversight responsibilities in several of the areas covered by this article contacted me after hours, “ashamed,” he said, to have to request anonymity. “The PMO spends more energy trying to control people than accomplishing goals,” he said. “Here’s how things work: questions come to us, people want us to explain the mission. We call the PMO to ask approval. They tell us to put it writing, in an email. We send it in, and wait. Usually the approval never comes.”
He went on: “We have to constantly fight the system. But if you’re not going to let people do their jobs, what’s the point? We’re being handcuffed.”
A more senior figure at an Ottawa-based agency states: “This Prime Minister’s approach, and that of his staff, is a considerable impediment to the public’s ability to comprehend what the government is doing. It’s really a different way of doing business than anything we’ve experienced before.
“The PM and his advisors treat every issue as if it’s his own, as if it’s personal. It’s just very strange, and it results in a management style that blocks every door, including the ones that might actually take the government forward.”
Arthur Kent’s film reports and articles are available online at www.skyreporter.com.
He has reported regularly from Afghanistan since 1980 for networks including the CBC, NBC News, BBC News, PBS and The History Channel, as well as for the Calgary Herald, Britain’s The Observer and Canada’s Maclean’s magazine.
