We’re for real: but how many fake cops have been used by crooked officials to steal?

Skyreporter today reveals further evidence of the alarming extent of the theft of foreign financing intended for Afghanistan’s national police, the ANP. 

Sources employed by European nations participating in the international effort to train, equip and pay Afghan policemen claim that supervision of the program has been so shoddy that an official census of the ANP has had to be launched. The belated count is now underway.

In other words, no one really knows how many policemen on the force’s roster truly exist, and how many are “ghost” officers created solely for the use of corrupt officials, who cream international aid money for themelves.

This Keystone Kops mismanagement caper would be laughable if not for the consequences it poses for both the Afghan people and their international allies. Afghans won’t have a justice system - and foreign military forces won’t be free to return home - until the country’s new police force and army are up to strength.

European authorities estimate that the number of policemen currently on the Ministry of Interior payroll, about 76,000, could be padded by as many as 30,000 false identities.

Bizarrely, the Bush administration’s private contractors working inside the Interior Ministry are reportedly frustrating efforts by German and European Union officials to conduct their census and establish an accurate payroll.

The Americans are on contract to DynCorp Aerospace Technology, one of the five top US private military companies benefiting from Washington’s aid to Afghanistan. The DynCorp consultants have, in effect, pre-empted the survey results by distributing identification cards to far more individual policemen than are thought to exist. Already some 42,000 ID cards have been issued, with 20,000 more in the works.

Clashes between DynCorp staffers and European officials have frequently degenerated into the two sides refusing to communicate with each other. Shouting matches are not uncommon - complete with “F-words” being exchanged - according to sources close to President Hamid Karzai’s office who have witnessed the battles.

Karzai is regularly criticized for losing control of his ministries, but a Presidential Palace source tells skyreporter that “the Afghan government enjoys little sovereignty or independence” with regard to problem departments. As a result, Afghan officials could only stand on the sidelines as the Bush administration insisted the ANP become a paramilitary force to help counter the Taliban, while European donors argued the police should focus on keeping law and order.

“On paper, the Germans have been the lead country for police,” the palace insider explains, “but initially they were only spending about $50 million. In 2006 the US came in with much, much more money, and they basically told the Germans and Europeans to get lost.”

Since February, 2002, Germany has invested 70 million Euros. Canada will contribute $30 million this year alone. But since 2005, the United States has put the most money in to the force’s funding mechanism, the Law and Order Trust Fund Afghanistan (LOTFA), which pools the resources of 13 nations with the UN and the European Union – at least $350 million to date, with another $128 million set to be spent through 2008.

As previously reported here, at least 30% of the funds are lost to corruption (please see DONOR NATIONS ACQUIESCE TO FRAUD, Aug. 31, in Recent Stories).

Officially the UN Development Program oversees LOTFA, but it's the US Defense Department, backed by the American Embassy in Kabul, that dominates the police and army projects. Practical management is in the hands of DynCorp and MPRI, another American private military company. Their consultants – former policemen, soldiers, lawyers, accountants and other professionals – insist on taking the lead in training, mentoring and, of course, the channelling of money.

“What we’re witnessing with DynCorp issuing all these ID cards is the same old story,” says one diplomat familiar with the MoI. “The Americans want to meet their recruitment targets, they want to show results. Getting the numbers straight isn’t such a high priority.”

From the Palace, an equally critical view: “To DynCorp, losing 30% of the budget to corruption is just cost-of-transaction. And yet the US Embassy preaches to the President about the need to crack down on thieves. It just doesn’t add up.”

That’s fighting talk – but sadly in keeping with the tenor of negotiations among Afghanistan and its “international friends” on this issue.

Coming up on Skyreporter, how the government of one of the LOTFA funding nations, Canada, is handling the crisis – by covering it up, and muzzling Canadian diplomats and civil servants.