Afghanistan's Karzai says donor countries to blame for widespread corruption

   
Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, accused on Saturday the countries that fund his government and military with enabling the widespread corruption that undermines his efforts to establish rule of law in the war-wracked country.              


In a nationally televised speech, Karzai said the Afghan government had been making strides in cleaning up corruption within its own ranks.                           

He said there was still plenty of work to be done, but argued that internal graft is negligible compared with hundreds of millions of dollars spent by foreign governments.          

Karzai argued that foreign donors give contracts to high-ranking Afghan officials or to their relatives in an effort to gain influence over the government, thereby sowing the seeds for corruption.                            


International donors have long argued that they are trying to help Karzai's administration clean up the endemic corruption but are stymied by his unwillingness to prosecute political allies.          

Karzai in turn has repeatedly said that he has not been given the ability to control the billions of dollars flowing in to Afghanistan from foreign countries and so has not been able to police the funding.                       

Graft and payoffs are widely recognized as a major problem facing Afghanistan as the government works to establish authority over a volatile country and win the trust of the people over from the Taliban insurgency.                      

The country regularly ranks among the most corrupt in the world in indexes and nearly every Afghan has stories of having to pay a bribe to a police officer or a government official.


APTN