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.
“If you read Taliban propaganda, which we study very carefully, they never mention the issue of women, girls in school, because that was their most losing issue,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “What they talk about is corruption, which is why we’re here. That’s their No. 1 recruiting tool.”
Fears about the misuse of aid led the chairwoman of the subcommittee, Representative Nita M. Lowey, to hold up $3.9 billion in financing until the administration puts in place adequate safeguards to ensure that the money was not being squandered. The decision will not affect existing programs, she said, since there is money in the pipeline for this year and next.