Eugene Robinson:Corruption fighting, Afghanistan style

[cal04]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/09/AR2010090905401.html

Just how corrupt is the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan? It should be clear by now that President Hamid Karzai doesn't want us to know. He'd prefer that we just keep sending our troops and our dollars, and not ask too many questions.

Karzai's government announced this week that American and allied advisers, dispatched to Kabul to help investigate massive and endemic graft, will no longer be allowed to do any actual investigating. Karzai's chief of staff told The Post that the government is still determined to eliminate corruption, but intends to do so "within an Afghan framework."

And what a framework it is. Karzai is evidently upset that foreign advisers helped build a case against one of his high-ranking aides, Mohammad Zia Salehi, who is charged with soliciting a bribe -- $10,000 plus a new car -- from a money-exchange firm. In return, according to the charges, Salehi was supposed to derail an investigation into allegations that the company, called New Ansari, had illegally shipped $3 billion in cash out of the country. Most of the funds ended up in Dubai, where many of the wealthy Afghan elite have settled.

(snip)
I'm not naive. Anyone familiar with the history of American foreign policy knows that this isn't the first time the United States has lavished guns and butter on a corrupt regime. We did it all the time when policymakers believed we needed allies, however unsavory, who would serve as bulwarks against communism. But the way we supported, say, the old Duvalier kleptocracy in Haiti is different from what we're doing in Afghanistan, where our generosity is not just in dollars but in young American lives. This is more like our embrace of the corrupt government in South Vietnam -- and we all know how that turned out.