Anyone who’s followed any news about Afghanistan over the past 10 years knows that a huge part of the world’s opium crop grows in that blighted country. Last weekend we got a long article in the New York Times Magazine (written by a counter-narcotics operator) on how the government, the Taliban insurrectionists, the Western powers – all -- have been in some way responsible for the big annual crop.
Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.
Just days before this article, the head of the World Bank warned that anti-corruption talk from the Afghan government was not going to be enough:
“The government makes the right statements, but the truth will be in the telling over time and that is one area where we ... are making it quite clear that the record has to be improved,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick told Reuters in an interview in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Thirty years of war has left Afghanistan with extremely weak institutions and a complex web of informal relationships that override loyalty to the state. Ongoing insecurity and billions of dollars of drug money in the economy also add to the temptations for poorly paid civil servants struggling with rising prices. Afghanistan was 172nd out of 180 countries on Transparency International's corruption perception index last year.
Donors pledged some $20 billion in aid to Afghanistan at a conference in Paris last month, but made it clear President Hamid Karzai's government had to do more to fight corruption in return.
Twenty billion dollars to one of the most corrupt governments on earth – a government that’s involved in the opium trade. Super.
Berlusconi wins immunity
It’s official: Italy’s parliament approved a bill that protects top officials from prosecution while they are in office.
The bill – forwarded by the government of trial-prone Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – passed 178 to 121 last week. Critics say that the bill was made to order by the prime minister, who is facing a corruption trial in a local court. Berlusconi, 71, has also been charged in the past for corruption, tax fraud and illegal party funding, but maintains his innocence.
Also in Italy, it would appear that the Naples-based Camorra is keen to branch out from its heroin and garbage businesses and go into football: The mob’s Casalesi clan tried to buy the football club Lazio through third parties recently with money acquired through violence and intimidation.
And also in Italian Camorra news, the head of one of the Camorra’s clans was arrested at the weekend while coming out of a designer clothing shop in Rome. Adriano “The Teacher” Graziano, who heads the clan of the same name, had avoided arrest in May when Italian police arrested 23 alleged mobsters. He’s wanted for allegedly giving the orders for a 2002 ambush that killed a sister, a wife and a daughter of mob bosses in the Naples-based mafia group’s Cava clan. (Here is an article that talks about the doings of the Camorra’s fairer sex.)
No major news out of the Sicilian mafia this week, but there’s this society-column item: The 28-year-old daughter of La Cosa Nostra boss Salvatore Riina got married last Wednesday in Corleone. The bride was given away by a brother who was released from jail in February. Another brother, an uncle, and her father are all still serving time for Mafia-related crimes.