Waste and fraud are deep there, but American officials have no “unified anti-corruption strategy in Afghanistan,” according to the U.S. reconstruction effort’s watchdog.
“This is astonishing, given that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and a country that the United States is spending billions of dollars in,” said John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.
“Yet there has been no progress made toward developing a unified anti-corruption strategy,” Sopko said. “In fact, things could get worse with the drawdown.”
He was referring to the scheduled drawdown of U.S. military forces in the southwest Asian nation to 5,000 troops by the end of 2015.
Sopko was speaking Friday at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.
Some Afghans concerned about the extent of corruption in their country, Sopko said. He noted that Integrity Watch, an Afghan non-governmental organization, found that corruption was ranked by citizens there as the second most serious problem facing their country, trailing only security.
“While 18 percent of the respondents in the 2012 survey said they faced corruption within the past 12 months, 21 percent of respondents said they faced corruption in the 2014 survey,” Sopko said.
The corruption is most extensive in Afghanistan’s government, according to the survey’s respondents.
Nearly a third of the respondents said their households were deprived of access to electricity due to corruption, and nearly a fifth said it kept them from seeking higher education, according to Sopko.
Those percentages are for “the exact same areas where U.S. agencies commonly claim great success,” Sopko said.
“In fact, the corruption percentages for electricity and education are not only up from 2012, but they are also higher than for justice by the courts and security by the police,” he said.
Go here to read the full text of Sopko’s address.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
