As foreign troops trickle out of Afghanistan, Kabul is increasingly controlled by local police or private security contractors. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Richard Sale
WASHINGTON, Mar 14 2013 (IPS)

Next year’s drawdown of U.S. forces and decline in U.S. aid will leave in its wake an Afghan political system lacking legitimacy and stability, according to interviews with Afghanistan experts, news reports and congressional studies.

Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. funding, Afghanistan’s government has failed to sustain Washington-built development projects, experts here are warning, including the training and equipping of Afghan police and security forces. Much of this is due to corruption on the part of U.S. private contractors, lax U.S. and Afghan government controls, and the innate weakness of Hamid Karzai’s government.Without adequate security, reconstruction either comes to a halt or continues without the necessary oversight.

“How are we going to pay for this?” asked Andrew Wilder, an Afghan expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace. “This is the key question. How do we pay for these police and infrastructure programmes when the fiscal resources are going to shrink next year?”

According to Vanda Felbab-Brown, an Afghanistan specialist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, the U.S. aid that has flooded into Helmand and Kandahar provinces, instead of bringing sustainable development, has distorted local economies and triggered “contests over the spoils”

She added that she believes that turning off the U.S. spigot will produce “a massive economic constriction” inside the country that could increase political instability.

News about the corruption of U.S. private contractors has brought further dismay. After more than a dozen quarterly reports to Congress, 40 percent of the 56 billion dollars allocated to civilian projects in Afghanistan cannot be accounted for by SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.

In fact, corruption on the part of both Afghan and U.S. private contractors consumes much of U.S. aid to Afghanistan, according to studies, U.S. officials and analysts. More than 100 cases of corruption, by both U.S. contractors and Afghan subcontractors, have gone officially ignored, and when U.S. Government Accountability Office auditors looked at the programmes, they were not shown the uncompleted projects SIGAR found in 2011.

Claire McCaskill, a U.S. senator, said in a widely reported statement that the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan security forces have been identified “as central to our success in Afghanistan and to help secure Afghanistan’s public under the rule by law, maintain order and to prepare for the U.S. exit.”

Yet the failure to adequately develop the Afghan police has startled many. The contract for training the Afghan police has cost U.S. taxpayers over nine billion dollars but has displayed worse than disappointing results, McCaskill told Congress.

Overall, the United States has spent more than 29 billion dollars on the Afghan national security forces, with one third going to the ANP.

Ghost employees

The most acute problem lies with the fact that the Afghan government has no adequate structures by which to track the development it oversees. According to an April 2011 SIGAR audit, the Ministry of Interior Affairs cannot accurately determine the number of personnel that work for the Afghan police, and the ministry’s record-keeping is said to invite massive fraud.

The report makes clear there is no way to guarantee where payroll money is going. It also reported that there are likely to be “ghost employees” who simply don’t show up or others who collect paycheques under multiple names.

The audit also said there are significant doubts about the Afghan government’s ability to maintain the more than 800 facilities meant for the Afghan Army and the ANP currently being built with 11.4 billion dollars of U.S. aid.

For instance, a 2012 inspection report on a 7.3-million-dollar border police facility in Kunduz province, meant to house 173 people, found only 12 Afghan personnel on site. The facilities were locked, the police there had no keys with which to open the doors, and no one was sure whether it would be used in the future.

Just last month, SIGAR audits disclosed that although 30,000 vehicles were given to the ANP for eight provinces, the Afghans lack the capacity to perform maintenance on them. Further, the U.S. contract did not take into account vehicles that had not been in service for over a year or had been destroyed.

SIGAR reported that 63 million dollars’ worth of funds designated for the ANP for the repair of police cars had been misused between April 2011 and September 2012, even as the Interior Ministry asked that the responsibility for repairs be switched from foreign to Afghan oversight.

According to news reports and confirmed by interviews, the Afghan police were using the U.S.-provided vehicles for personal use. The audit found deficiencies in spare parts inventories, and the Defence Contract Management Agency did not always conduct monthly oversights of the facilities, among numerous other failures.

Security bubble

Meanwhile, as the number of U.S. personnel shrinks, security has deteriorated.

One of SIGAR’s inspection teams was told that a location in northern Afghanistan was beyond the security “bubble” and “therefore deemed too unsafe to visit,” according John Sopko, who now heads SIGAR. In a November interview at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, he said that a lack of safety resulted in an inability to inspect 38 facilities, worth approximately 72 million dollars.

“We’re finding that we cannot always get the protection we need to conduct our work,” he said, even though Kabul is within the security “bubble”. He added: “Without adequate security, reconstruction either comes to a halt or continues without the necessary oversight.

Billions of additional dollars move into the numbered accounts of Afghan politicians who leave the country on official trips to Dubai never to return, former U.S. intelligence officials told IPS.

In November, Sopko touted his agency’s “innovative ways of conducting oversight”. He claimed that SIGAR has made “aggressive recommendations for suspension and debarment” of 206 contractors accused of fraud, with 43 of these cases involving companies that actively supported the insurgency.

Many of those referrals were not acted upon, however, which is why Sopko is currently seeking his own authority to suspend and debar contractors.

But whatever the result of the coming reforms, the message is still startlingly clear: when the United States draws down its forces next year, the Afghan security forces will not be ready to create a stable Afghan state on their own.

Last weekend’s disclosure that Iranian cyber warriors had disabled some 30,000 computers owned by the Saudi oil giant Aramco is attracting considerable attention here, particularly in light of a warning last week by Pentagon chief Leon Panetta that Washington could face a “cyber-Pearl Harbor”.

The alleged Iranian hand behind the attack, first reported Saturday by the Wall Street Journal, was described as one of several forays by the increasingly sophisticated “Iran’s Cyber Army” whose existence first surfaced in 2009, according to experts here.

One key element of the Aramco attack, however, has not yet been reported. Two former senior CIA officials told IPS that it appears to have been carried out with the help of personnel inside Aramco. They said that the Saudi regime has been detaining and questioning staff with access to the affected work stations.

The fact that the work stations were not connected to the Internet lends credence to reports that the attack was facilitated by a Saudi Aramco employee.

“The attackers knew what they were doing, and it is clear they had inside knowledge. They had people inside that could move about,” according to one of the sources who asked not to be named.

Both said that one or more operators were involved.

Saudi Aramco has hired at least six firms with expertise in computer hacking, as well as outside experts, to repair the computers and to try and identify the perpetrators, according to the former CIA officials.

The virus is being called “Shamoon” after a word in its code, according to New York Times technology blogger Nicole Perlroth, who wrote in late August that key data on three-quarters of the company’s office computers were overwritten and replaced with the image of a burning U.S. flag, an account confirmed by U.S. officials here.

U.S. intelligence sources stressed that the damage was limited to those computers. Software used for the company’s massive technical operations, including pumping operations, remained untouched.

The attack is believed to have been fueled in part by sectarian, as well as political differences.

Richard Stiennon at IT-Harvest, a company that tracks evolving cyber threats, told IPS in an interview that Iranian-trained hackers probably launched the attack “in deep wrath” at the long-time mistreatment of the Shiites in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province where most of Aramco’s operations are based.

Unrest among the Shia Muslims in the region has increased sharply since Riyadh sent troops into Bahrain 18 months ago as part of a crackdown by that sheikhdom’s Sunni monarchy against the Shiite majority and other opposition forces.

Syria’s civil war – which pits the Iranian-backed Alawite-led government of President Bashar Al-Assad against a mainly Sunni insurgency supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – has also stoked sectarian tensions around the region. An offshoot of Shi’a Islam, Alawites are considered heretics by conservative Sunnis who dominate the Saudi kingdom.

Saudi Arabia also provided support to Sunni tribes in Iraq after a predominantly Shi’ite government took power there following the 2003 U.S. invasion.

The attack on Aramco, as well as an August attack against a Qatari natural gas company – now being attributed to Iran – are also seen as retaliation for the Stuxnet virus that was reportedly developed jointly by the U.S. and Israel as part of a larger effort designed to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme. Stuxnet destroyed up to 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility.

Recent cyber-attacks on major U.S. bank websites have also been blamed on Iran, whose economy has been sent into a tailspin in major part due to the effectiveness of far-reaching U.S. and European economic sanctions that are also designed to curb Iran’s nuclear programme.

A small group of hackers, numbering about 100 operatives and calling themselves “The Cutting Sword of Justice”, claimed responsibility for the attack. Reports of similar attacks on other oil and gas firms in the Middle East, including in neighbouring Qatar, suggest that Iran is positioning itself as a regional cyber power.

Iran’s Cyber Army (ICA) began as a group within the Iranian military, according to Paulo Shakarian, an expert at the West Point Military Academy and co-author with Andrew Ruef of a book called “Introduction to Cyber Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach”. Shakarian said the ICA uses equipment and tactics far less potent than more advanced cyber powers, including the U.S., Israel, Russia and China, but the group is fast learning more effective tactics.

If the alleged Iranian hackers used one or more insiders to launch the Shamoon virus, they might have been inspired by perhaps their most determined enemies.

The Stuxnet virus that damaged Iran’s nuclear programme was allegedly implanted by an Israeli proxy – an Iranian, who used a corrupt “memory stick.32″, former and serving U.S. intelligence officials said. They said using a person on the ground would greatly increase the probability of computer infection, as opposed to passively waiting for the software to spread through the computer facility.

“Iranian double agents” would have helped to target the most vulnerable spots in the system, one source said.

According to James Lewis, a cyber expert at the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), here, “The memory stick is the perfect tool. It can be left behind in a men’s room or left in a parking lot, and someone will at last plug it in and set the virus running. It’s human nature.”

“It’s basically a kind of low-grade cyber war,” said Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism office.

Israel has allegedly used cruder methods than Stuxnet to attack Iran’s nuclear programme, including the assassination of several scientists associated with it.

A senior State Department official said last month that such attacks were considered “terrorism” by Washington, which denounced the killing last January of a deputy director of the Natanz facility in unusually vehement terms. The same official insisted that the U.S. had no information as to who was behind the assassination, however.

Former and senior U.S. intelligence officials believe Israel has used recruits from the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) for the assassinations.

“The MEK is being used as the assassination arm of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service,” said Cannistraro. He said the MEK is in charge of executing “the motorcycle attacks on Iranian targets chosen by Israel. They go to Israel for training, and Israel pays them.”

In his remarks last week, Panetta did charge Iran with responsibility for the attacks on Aramco, but he described them as “probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date.”

After the existence of Stuxnet was disclosed in June 2010, many international legal and exports noted that it would likely set an unfortunate precedent that could blow back against its creators.

*Richard Sale is author of the 2009 book, ‘Clinton’s Secret Wars: The Evolution of a Commander in Chief”.