Culture of corruption

Since all the news of the day is going to be focused on the Massachusetts election and the ritual suicide pact that Democrats seem intent on enacting, it's time to focus on some good news. Unfortunately there isn't any. So...........

/twiddles thumbs
//whistles to self
///resists urge to self harm

Hey, did you hear the one about how 25% of Afghanistan's GDP is corruption related?

Half of all Afghan adults paid at least one bribe to a public official over the course of a year to cut through red tape or get help with poor service, the U.N. said Tuesday in a report that documents the extraordinary depth of corruption in Afghanistan.

Afghans paid nearly $2.5 billion (euro1.7 billion) in bribes -- worth almost a quarter of the country's GDP -- in the 12-month period ending last autumn.
...
Bribes were requested and taken by politicians, prosecutors, tax officers -- anyone with even the most modest level of power to yield, from the humblest clerk at the office in charge of driver's licenses to, by many accounts, the highest levels of government.

Most of the payments went to police, judges and other local officials, but Afghans were also asked to bribe teachers in public schools and doctors and nurses in government hospitals.

The average bribe comes out to around $160... in a country where the average yearly income is $500. I guess it all works out. You might have paid a Franklin and a Grant to get the really good penicillin from the doctor or to get the prosecutor to prosecute the man who stole your goats a little harder than usual, but you make it up on the back end by taking a few extra bucks to make sure you teach the kids all the letters of the alphabet and stop withholding information about fractions.

Only 9% of corruption gets reported, mostly because the officials charged with rooting out corruption are corrupt. But... I hear if you slip them a few bucks they'll look into those bribery charges. Hamid Karzai has pledged to combat this state of affairs (you know, before he tried to fix the election) but someone gave him an envelope that was a little light and thus various corruption bills have languished. On the bright side, Afghanistan ranks behind Haiti, Iraq, Myanmar, and Somalia on international corruption ranking. Then again, that's just because they paid a guy at the UN to move them down in the rankings.

So no, you don't get any good news today. All I can offer you is the fact that amongst the many problems in the country we just escalated and committed hundreds of additional billions and tens of thousands more troops in, one of them is the problem of corruption. And if you only focus on that, it seems like a comparatively minor problem that can be addressed. But only if you don't widen your focus or look at other things. I SAID DON'T WIDEN YOUR FOCUS!! Ah hell, you see what you did? You thought about all the other problems in Afghanistan and are now despairing. I warned you.