„Korruption, Patronage und Klientelismus am Beispiel von Afghanistan sowie Gegenmaßnahmen in künftigen Kriseneinsätzen“

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Enquete-Kommission Afghanistan des Deutschen Bundestags, 25 September 2024

The German parliament, the Bundestag, published an extensive academic report on “corruption, patronage and clientelism [KKP] in Afghanistan and countermeasures in future crisis operations” by a team comprising of Afghan and non-Afghan authors, including Conrad Schetter, Susanne Schmeidl, Timor Sharan, Rodrigo Bolaños Suárez and Boubacar Haidara (in German).

Here a quick working translation of parts of its summary:

In the case of Afghanistan, all other goals such as state building, creating security, consolidating peace, fighting poverty, etc. were subordinated to the “war on terror”. The USA, as the leading nation, consciously focused on maintaining and supporting the patronage systems of former warring parties. It became apparent that the first decision (the deployment of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban) set processes in motion that were difficult to reverse and led to a path dependency of the international crisis intervention in Afghanistan. In the first few years, the USA established political structures that promoted KKP at all levels. This was clear in the political processes in which the USA, like the UN, itself pursued patronage policies and tolerated election manipulation to a large extent. This was also visible in the reconstruction. Many gateways for the manifestation and increase of KKP were established.

The provision of too many financial resources with too few absorption capacities, the strengthening of a rentier state and the prioritization of quick successes at the expense of lengthy state reconstruction work led to the increase in both “small” and “large” corruption.

• The light footprint approach and the lead nations approach prevented coordination and thus opened the door to KKP.
• The emergence of an uncontrolled reconstruction industry and parallel structures contributed to enormous resource inefficiency.
• The widespread lack of KKP control mechanisms and the lack of a long-term strategy
  prevented a rethink of the direction of the crisis operation.

The more political and civil reconstruction were rolled out, the more KKP manifested itself in various processes. The crisis operation in Afghanistan was not able to counter the rules of KKP with other rules (especially good governance) quickly enough. Combating KKP could not take place under these circumstances; at best, containment was possible. At the same time, KKP did not cause the intervention to fail, but rather represented the symptom of a crisis intervention that was not aimed at social and political transformation, but rather at influencing selected political processes or actors through targeted incentives.

(…) As a basic rule, we found that the more interactions international and German institutions had with Afghan society and the Afghan state, the more exposed they were to corruption. At one end was the Bundeswehr, which had little interaction with the population in its largely isolated Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). On the other side were the implementing organizations (IO), in which Afghans made up the majority of the workforce and which were confronted with corruption on a daily basis. The situation is different with patronage and clientelism. Because the Bundeswehr and the IO were equally confronted with this. According to our results, all German organizations played on and promoted certain patronage systems. The priority of the German crisis operation was to ensure the safety of German Bundeswehr soldiers through cooperation with the dominant patrons. (…)

It is clear that the Afghan understanding of KKP was different from that of the international community and was characterized by a broadly interpreted, moral assessment. In particular, the double standards that the international community demonstrated during reconstruction were perceived by many Afghans as corrupt and led to the rapid loss of trust between the Afghan population, the Afghan state and the international community.

(…) The international community decided not to provide the Afghan state with direct budget support, but to use trust funds and off-budgeting to manage reconstruction. All trust funds proved vulnerable to corruption (including salaries for ghost soldiers), which is why new control and monitoring instruments were repeatedly introduced to limit corruption. At the urging of international donors, the Afghan government has also gradually established a number of authorities and regulations since 2006 to contain KKP; however, the political will was lacking on the Afghan and international side. The Afghan judicial system was also characterized by inefficiency and was unable to initiate serious prosecution of KKP. As a result, it was difficult to bring about any change in behavior in the Afghan state and administrative apparatus. The German IOs used their standardized monitoring and control mechanisms primarily to combat “petty corruption”, which kept it within limits. Nevertheless, this report identified many gateways through which corruption remained a constant issue in everyday practice. Due to the political context (high time pressure; pressure to drain funds), many international and German IOs tolerated “small corruption” as long as it circumvented the prevailing control systems. There was a certain tolerance threshold for KKP, which is part of the unspoken knowledge of German and international IOs, and which is also used in other parts of the world. Reports of corruption or sanctions were relatively rare, as this would have caused incalculable additional effort. At this point, the IOs provided too few incentives for clarification. When dealing with KKP, the departments did not have a common line, but varied between ignoring the issue (MoI; MoD) and inconsistency in dealing with KKP (Foreign Office; BMZ).

(…) Almost every German project was confronted with patronage networks and served them – often with the best of knowledge. All IOs were able to keep “small corruption” to a certain extent, while “large corruption” was most likely to occur in the trust funds, into which the federal government also paid. However, the greatest losses by far were recorded in the area of ​​resource efficiency of the projects. This opens up a gray area in which it is difficult to determine which expenditure is justified and which is not, what is still legal and what already constitutes corruption. A major problem in the crisis operation in Afghanistan was that the amount of funds was linked to the ability to spend them, but not necessarily to the price-performance ratio or local expectations, etc. Administrative, security and implementation costs consumed a significant portion of the financial resources. Above all, poorly planned or poorly implemented projects, chains of subcontracting, paying excessive prices and money flowing back to donor countries resulted in systemic resource inefficiency. Resource inefficiency had a far greater impact on the finances available for reconstruction than, for example, “petty corruption”. If one takes the calculations of the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as a basis and applies them analogously to the amounts that the German government spent on the crisis mission in Afghanistan, one comes to the conclusion that around 77 million to 123 million euros were lost due to corruption, and 768 million to 1.2 billion euros due to resource inefficiency.