corruption - Tag Search

The Jordanian government on Thursday arrested two former executives of the only petroleum refinery in the country -- one of them a former finance minister -- as well as a current economic adviser to the prime minister and a wealthy businessman, levying bribery and abuse of public office charges against the four men.

Adel Qudah, the ex-finance minister and former chairman of the Jordan Petroleum Refinery Company, is the first former minister to face corruption charges in Jordan's history. The arrests represent the first real push by new Prime Minister Samir Rifai, who promised after being appointed in December that he would tackle corruption, wrote Naseem Tarawnah of the Black Iris of Jordan blog.

Frederick Kagan is such a firm believer in counterinsurgency doctrine that he wants the United States to get involved in fighting pre-existing insurgencies. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed this morning, which Kagan co-authored with Christopher Harnisch, urging the U.S. to get involved in Yemen's intractable Huthi insurgency.

Iraq's commerce minister, Safaldin al-Safi, told reporters today that his country will file lawsuits against foreign companies for their alleged fraud under the United Nations oil-for-food program.

Safi didn't name the companies, or say how much money the Iraqi government is seeking, but the French newspaper Liberation reported today that the government wants $10 billion from 93 companies. The list of companies includes Renault, the French automaker, and BNP Paribas.

Iraqi security forces were once again involved in a deadly bombing in Baghdad, according to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Maliki called a press conference today to discuss last week's massive bombings in Baghdad. He said at least 45 people from three branches of the security forces aided the attack, though he wouldn't name which parts of the ISF were involved. The prime minister offered a reward of more than $80,000 for information about future bombings. Previous mass-casualty bombings in Iraq have also been linked to corruption.

He also said the bombings would not delay the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

One of McClatchy's Iraqi bloggers posted a slightly more personal take on the press conference. Maliki apparently described the bombing as a "security breach," not a breakdown in security -- a trivialization of an attack that killed more than 100 people.

The Australian ran a heavily sympathetic 3,200-word profile of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert over the weekend. (It's truly one of the most lopsided articles I've ever read.)

Olmert's positions are fairly predictable. He defends the 2006 war in Lebanon and the 2009 war in Gaza; he calls the Goldstone Report a "moral indignity"; he speaks highly of both Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.

I'm not sure what to make of Gordon Brown's big foreign policy speech yesterday. On the one hand, as Steve Hynd notes, he's clearly calling for a timetable in Afghanistan. Brown suggested a NATO summit in London next year to establish a timetable for transferring districts in Afghanistan to the Afghan government's control. But it's a loose timetable, and one that could still leave NATO troops in Afghanistan for years to come.

David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru who advised Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, gave an hour-long talk tonight at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The talk was broadly about counterinsurgency in U.S. foreign policy, but Kilcullen spent a good deal of time on the big story of the day: Afghanistan.

Kilcullen told The Guardian last week that Obama should either go big or go home to avoid a "Suez-like" disaster in Afghanistan. He elaborated on those comments tonight, explaining why he felt the middle ground was so dangerous. And he argued -- perhaps inadvertently -- that the strategies reportedly being considered by the Obama administration move too slowly, and give the Taliban time to adapt.

A little follow up on our earlier post about Afghanistan's potential special corruption courts: The Christian Science Monitor interviewed Mohammed Yusin Osmani, President Hamid Karzai's anti-corruption czar, and found that progress is still slow, nearly a year after Osmani's office was created.

Finally finished reading Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. I'm working on a longer post about it, but I had to highlight this quote, from Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari (emphasis mine):

His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. "Money is the best incentive," he said.

If anyone would know that, it's Zardari!

There's some speculation in Washington that Obama might stop in Afghanistan on his way home from Asia to deliver an ultimatum to Hamid Karzai: Clean up your government, or else.

I would emphasize the word "speculation." It's clear that Karzai's corruption and the lack of a U.S. exit strategy have become two of the most divisive issues in the Afghanistan debate. But it's not clear where Obama stands on those issues: Will he commit more troops to Afghanistan without a clear plan for getting out?

Asif Ali Zardari, the famously (allegedly) corrupt President of Pakistan, took $4.3 million worth of bribes for helping the French sell three submarines to his country in the mid-1990s, according to a report in the Pakistani press.

The three Agosta 90 submarines were worth roughly $1.24 billion (€825 million), according to the Nation, which cites the Pakistani French daily newspaper Liberation (Français).

It's a little hard to make out the details of how this bit of news surfaced, but it appears that there is an ongoing legal investigation by a French magistrate into a 2002 terrorist attack that killed 11 employees of the French defense company DCN, who were in Karachi working on the subs.

The gang over at McClatchy reports that Obama is leaning towards sending 34,000 new troops to Afghanistan. The official announcement will probably come after the president returns from Asia on Nov. 19. (That means Obama will announce his decision around the Thanksgiving holiday, when Congress and much of official Washington is on vacation and the country's attention is focused on turkey and the Detroit Lions.)

From AFP: "Iraq surge could be model for Afghan war: US admiral."

I'm sure you're all sick of hearing me explain why the surge is not yet a success story (most recently here) and why it's a faulty model for Afghanistan, so I won't repeat myself.

Hamid Karzai vows to fight corruption in Afghanistan and create an inclusive government. The Guardian, analyzing Karzai's sudden fondness for transparency, dryly notes:

Karzai echoed the commitments that his western backers had pushed him to accept, including appointing a clean government and making progress in peace negotiations with the Taliban.

Standing next to Karzai as he made this announcement was Muhammad Qasim Fahim, one of his vice presidents -- and a notorious Afghan drug lord. (No word on whether Rashid Dostum was in the audience, too.)

Iraqi MPs tell the BBC they're still not ready to vote on an election law. A vote could be held in several days, they say, but "several sticking points remain."

The issue of voter registration rolls in Kirkuk is the biggest one. MPs are still trying to reach a consensus between several competing proposals (2004 voter rolls, 2009 voter rolls, some mix of the two), according to Aswat al-Iraq.

11 Iraqi officers, and 50 policemen, have been arrested in connection with this weekend's ministry bombings in Baghdad.

The detainees include four senior army officers, including the chief of police in Salhiyah, the Baghdad neighborhood which includes the justice ministry (one of Sunday's targets). Also arrested were the commanders of 15 security checkpoints in Salhiyah.

The New York Times reports that Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, gets regular payments from the CIA to -- among other things -- rent them a house in Kandahar.

This story went online last night, so I'm sure many of our readers have seen it by now. Your normally talkative blogger found himself too frustrated to post about this last night, so I let it sit until this morning.

Why is this story so important?

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, says his country may ship at least part of its uranium stockpile to Russia for further enrichment.

That would mean the Iranian government is willing to at least partially accept the draft IAEA deal announced last week. But Mottaki said Iran will also continue to enrich its own uranium. The IAEA deal is designed to buy time for further negotiations by temporarily taking away Iran's capacity to enrich uranium.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said as much today during an interview with the Daily Telegraph. Kouchner said Israel "will not accept" an Iranian bomb, and said the IAEA deal is designed to head off a potential Israeli attack.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants to increase the size of the Afghan police force from 93,000 to 160,000 over the next two years. But the Times of London reports (h/t Steve Hynd) that only 1,000 new recruits signed up in August -- and none in the last six weeks.

Gen. Khudadad Agha, the officer in charge of police training, tells the Times that hundreds of recruits simply ran away and fled across the border into Iran.

Another recruit, Ahmad Shah, says he joined the Taliban -- after he finished police training -- because they offered him five times as much money.

The Electoral Complaints Commission in Kabul says it will make its big announcement today, presumably within the next couple of hours.

Iran has blamed the U.S., U.K. and Pakistan for yesterday's deadly bombing in Sistan-Baluchistan province, and vowed a "crushing response."