Ramazan Bashardost (right), a former Afghan planning minister and law professor, quit the cabinet of Afghan president Hamid Karzai citing widespread corruption and is running for president in the Aug. 20 election. Beside him is Scott Taylor, publisher of Canadian defense magazine Esprit de Corps. Photo by Sasha Uzunov.
Alex Roslin
The Montreal
The man they call the Ralph Nader of Afghanistan
While many other candidates travel in convoys with squads of bodyguards and are said to be systematically bribing voters, Bashardost has a modest election budget of $20,000 and only a smattering of campaign posters up around Kabul
Yet a poll released yesterday ahead of Afghanistan’s election, which takes place Thursday, puts Bashardost in third place with 10 per cent of the vote—a potential spoiler position and enough to possibly cost president Hamid Karzai, the front-runner, an outright majority and force a run-off poll. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s former foreign minister, is in second place—polling at 26 per cent to Karzai’s 44 per cent.
Bashardost—a former Afghan planning minister who quit Karzai’s cabinet citing widespread corruption—condemns the Karzai regime as hopelessly sleazy. During a phone interview this week, he said he has a special message for Canadians: “It’s time for Canadian taxpayers to say, ‘Enough. We won’t give our tax dollars to people who steal money.’”
Bashardost’s message is increasingly resonating with Afghans and Western officials irked at Karzai’s inclusion of several prominent warlords and drug traffickers in his re-election campaign.
The U.S. Afghanistan
Obama rebuffed the Afghan leader’s request for a bilateral visit this spring, and put an end to the friendly bi-weekly videoconference chats Karzai had enjoyed with president George W. Bush, the Washington Post reported in May.
“Karzai is not our man in this upcoming election,” said a U.S.
In contrast, Canadian officials have refused to take Karzai to task publicly about corruption. Asked in June about Karzai’s choice of a well-known warlord as a vice-presidential candidate, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day, who chairs the cabinet committee on Afghanistan
“There are times when we will look at certain candidates who are running and we will say, if I was involved in that election, if I was running against that candidate, I’d be making his or her past history very clear,” Day told a House of Commons committee.
“But we have made a commitment that we’re not going to interject ourselves into the election process.”
These concerns centre around corruption related to Afghanistan
About $70 million U.S. CIA and U.S. Defense Department estimates.
But the bulk of the opium revenues go not to the Taliban, but to Afghan warlords and corrupt political figures who are allied with the West, says Jorrit Kamminga, director of policy research at the London-based International Council on Security and Development, a think tank that focuses on Afghanistan
“Opium is a third of the Afghan economy. It means everybody is involved either directly or indirectly. It’s really everywhere. You could argue it’s a narco-state,” he said.
When the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, their ban on opium growing went with them. One of the most conspicuous manifestations of opium’s prominent role is the Kabul
Some of the most candid public criticism of Karzai has come from the former U.S. Afghanistan Kabul
“Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade,” he wrote. “Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S.
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Thomas Ruttig, a former UN diplomat now working as co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said Western nations are also to blame for the drug-fuelled corruption.
“The West has to be partly blamed. Many of our Afghan allies are involved in the drug trade. We are effectively turning a blind eye,” he said in an interview from his Kabul
The corruption is now so rife, he said, it is pushing angry Afghans to support the Taliban.
“One of the major reasons people turn away from the government is what I would call bad governance, including corruption. It has created a lot of disillusionment,” he said.
The anger is also being turned against Canadian soldiers, who are increasingly seen as “bullyboys of a corrupt regime,” said Scott Taylor, publisher of Ottawa-based defense magazine Esprit de Corps.
“We are turning a willful blind eye (to the corruption). We have de facto become what the Soviets were—trying to prop up a hated regime,” he said.
Speaking by phone from his tent in Kabul
“When people go before a judge, they are asked for bribes. People say it is better to resolve their problems through (judicial councils organized by) the Taliban or tribal leaders.”
A case in point, he said, is Kandahar Canada Kandahar
A sign of how bad things are came in 2008 when UN inspectors headed out to audit the Afghan government’s opium-eradication efforts in Kandahar
It was one of the lowest rates of any province in the country, according to a 2008 UN report. Local officials often take bribes from farmers in order not to destroy crops.
Ruttig and Kamminga both advocate a radical solution they say would undermine the opium traffickers and warlords and eliminate much of the corruption—buying the opium crop directly from farmers and destroying it. Alternatively, Kamminga says, the opium could also be sold to drug companies to turn into medicine such as morphone.
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Today, Kandahar
A 2006 Newsweek investigation reported that well-placed sources said Karzai’s brother was a “major figure” in the opium trade; one Afghan Interior Ministry official said he “leads the whole trafficking structure” in the country’s south.
“There were numerous diplomatic reports that (Karzai’s) brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar
“Our primary mission is to stay alive, so we basically want to anger as few people as possible.”
But that policy is backfiring, said Bashardost, because it fuels the Taliban insurgents who are killing Canadian soldiers.
“I’m sorry to say Western powers are wasting their money and (soldiers’) lives in Afghanistan
Bashardost, a French-educated former law professor, shot to prominence as planning minister in 2005 when he produced a report that said 80 per cent of the 2,400 non-governmental organizations involved in foreign-aid projects in Afghanistan
He recommended the expulsion of all the corrupt NGOs, but lost Karzai’s support and ended up resigning. He then set up his tent outside parliament and ran for office, winning the third-highest number of votes out of 400 parliamentary candidates.
Bashardost says Canada Afghanistan Afghanistan
“The Canadian government must absolutely demand that it won’t spend one dollar or give one (soldier’s) life if the Afghan government is full of warlords, corrupt people, drug traffickers and war criminals,” he said.
“Your soldiers and money are very useful—on condition that the regime is clean, which is not the case right now.”
