Salaries rip-off: how Skyreporter revealed the embezzlement scandal four months ago

Afghan President Hamed Karzai has informed his Interior Minister, Zarar Ahmad Muqbul, that he’ll be first to go in a long-overdue housecleaning of the ministry that is widely regarded as the Kabul regime’s most corrupt.

However, the firing comes while officials of Karzai’s foreign sponsor nations are bitterly at odds over how to rehabilitate the department and its problem child, the Afghan National Police.

As skyreporter revealed in a series of reports in May, the Western-supervised Interior Ministry, responsible for policing and provincial governorships across Afghanistan, is alleged to lose as much as a third of its internationally-donated funding to embezzlement and fraud.

In addition to his failure to clamp down on corruption, Zarar is also said by a number of his senior officers to have profited from the hated police stop-and-bribe practice, known as “mushkil tarashi,” in his hometown of Charikar, north of the capital.

Shamefully, Zarar’s administrative incompetence has been clear to the Interior Ministry’s international funders since before his elevation from deputy minister in 2005. But as one of the few ethnic Tajiks in President Karzai’s cabinet, Zarar has been spared the axe – until now. The ANP’s woes have become one of Kabul’s most glaring sources of embarrassment, a running saga of scandal and controversy that is rattling the regime right down to its Western-financed-and-mentored foundations.

Just this week, skyreporter revealed how the ANP’s foreign sponsors have had to conduct a census to determine how many of the force’s personnel are “ghost” identities – fake cops created by corrupt officials who help themselves to money intended for salaries and expenses.

Meantime, prosecutors have prepared a dossier on a top police general, Sakhi Baiani, the Afghan American who has served as the MoI’s Head of Administration – but who is now said to have “disappeared” after helping himself to a half-million dollars of the ministry’s finances. It’s alleged that Baiani was carrying one-fifth of that sum, in cash, when he vanished on the road from Kabul to Zabul province.

Zabul has featured regularly in the Ministry of Interior’s crime scenarios, most recently in the case of the missing policemen’s salaries reported here May 31st (please see MINISTRY OF BRIBERY AND FRAUD in Recent Stories). Zabul’s governor, Delbar Arman, told skyreporter that one year after receiving assurances by officials from Canada and the US – two of the police force’s funding partners – the Interior Ministry was still four months in arrears with his policemens’ salaries.

As of this writing, Zarar is still technically in his chair at the Ministry’s headquarters in Kabul. President Karzai is said by parliamentary sources to have failed, thus far, to find a suitable replacement – the same predicament that has stalled the sacking of his accident-prone Attorney General, Abdul Jabar Sabet.

Diplomatic circles in the Afghan capital are buzzing with expectation of a wholesale cabinet shuffle when Ramadan concludes next month. But at least one wag in the community of international specialists overseeing the Karzai regime’s travails expresses doubt.

“There are plenty of competent Afghans who could turn these ministries around,” he says. “Trouble is, most of them know who’s really to blame for building the regime on sand. Us – the ‘internationals.’”

Coming up on skyreporter, will Afghanistan’s foreign friends dig in and do the necessary repairs? Or will the crisis of corruption bury them, too…