Truckloads of trouble? Afghan police paymasters cash in on foreign aid

While the U.S. and its NATO allies wage a high-profile war against the Taliban, another growing threat to Afghanistan’s security – the crisis in the Karzai regime’s justice system – is receiving little if any effective Western intervention. The scandal over heroin policing at Kabul Airport continues to fester, and skyreporter will reveal tomorrow new evidence in the chronic mismanagement of foreign funding by President Karzai’s Interior Ministry.

Both situations pose hazards to the Afghan people and the international forces campaigning on their behalf. Heroin profits help finance the Taliban’s war effort, while corruption within the Interior Ministry saps the credibility and effectiveness of police forces across the country.

A peaceful demonstration last week at Parliament House in Kabul re-focused attention on the airport scandal triggered by President Karzai’s Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabet. As chronicled previously in skyreporter’s AFGHAN HEROIN series of film reports, Sabet’s removal last October of the respected drug-busting chief of airport police, General Aminullah Amerkhel, has been followed by a reported surge in heroin shipments.

Demonstrators demanded Gen. Amerkhel’s reinstatement, alleging that the Attorney General’s continuing attempts to arrest him are part of a wider conspiracy. Muhammed Akram, head of the Chardi district council, told reporters that Kabul’s trafficking gangs were behind Amerkhel’s removal.

The grubby spectacle of two of Afghanistan’s top law men squaring off in public over heroin policing seems likely to drag on, with President Hamid Karzai and his regime’s international sponsors continuing to favour photo-opportunities over meaningful remedial action.

However, last week’s cozy display between Karzai and Canada’s Stephen Harper is in sharp contrast to the evident pilfering of Canadian tax dollars by officials within the Kabul regime’s Ministry of the Interior.

Tomorrow and Thursday, skyreporter will detail how promises made last year to the governor of a key front-line province in the war against the Taliban have been shamefully broken: foreign funding for the salaries of his police detachments has disappeared into the maze of corruption that is the Interior Ministry.

According to police sources within the ministry, money administered through a U.N. program called the Law And Order Trust Fund For Afghanistan (LOTFA) continues to be looted by top officials and their cronies. Consequently governors regularly find that funds forwarded for provincial policing salaries have been skimmed by at least ten percent. Or, as in the case of the governor we’ll profile tomorrow, salaries are habitually held back by as much as three to four months, making it impossible to determine exactly how much has been embezzled.

This, despite LOTFA’s launch four years ago to prevent just such larceny.

Polls reveal that when questioned about corruption endemic in the Karzai regime, most Afghans agree on two things. First, that wrongdoing is most prevalent in the justice system. And second, that the internationally-backed Karzai administration is more corrupt than either the 1990’s Taliban regime or the Soviet-backed Communist government of the 1980’s.

Who’s fault is that?