Envoy Says Corruption Helps Taliban Win Recruits

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Rampant corruption in Afghanistan provides the Taliban with its No. 1 recruiting tool, the Obama administration’s special representative to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, said Wednesday. But he insisted that the United States was taking adequate precautions to cut down on the misuse of billions of dollars in American aid to the country.

Responding to deepening unease on Capitol Hill about where aid money is going, Mr. Holbrooke said recent reports of billions of dollars in cash being flown out of Kabul International Airport wrongly suggested that American civilian aid was being siphoned from Afghanistan.

“We’re not missing money,” Mr. Holbrooke said at a hearing of the House subcommittee that oversees financing of the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development. The shortage of banks in Afghanistan, he said, means that Afghans use cash for most commercial transactions, which they then transfer, legally, in vast amounts to banks in Dubai.

Mr. Holbrooke acknowledged that some of the money probably came from illegal activities like drug trafficking. He said corruption was still endemic in Afghanistan, describing it as a “malignancy” that could destroy everything the United States was trying to achieve there. The Taliban, in its propaganda, highlights the corruption of local officials to lure people to the insurgency.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/world/asia/29diplo.html

[Ross K]

1. Francis Ford Coppola will probably be gone when this debacle ends

I guess somebody else will have to make Af/Pakalypse Now.