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U.S. tax dollars fund Sharia courts, corruption and belligerent Afghan government
by Sam Rolley

The best and the brightest from U.S. government agencies have spent more than a decade and a billion taxpayer dollars attempting to establish rule of law and a basic legal system in Afghanistan. Despite the massive spending and man-hours, a new government audit describes the U.S. Afghanistan effort as “impaired.”

The audit, out from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, blames the failure of more than 60 U.S.-sponsored programs to encourage stability in Afghanistan on four major problems: a lack of a clear strategy, U.S. bureaucrats’ failure to track how tax dollars are being spent, a lack of a clear way to measure success and a near total lack of interest in cooperating from the Afghan government.

“We recognize the difficulties and barriers to achieving ideal or perfect program performance measurement in Afghanistan where security, mobility, illiteracy and other challenges persist,” said the SIGAR report. “Nevertheless, spending over $1 billion dollars without having a credible level of planning and measuring for results leaves the U.S. uninformed on what its investments are accomplishing in developing the rule of law in Afghanistan.”

The primary U.S. goals for Afghanistan as a lengthy military occupation has drawn down have included various rule of law objectives such as reducing corruption and increasing t***sparency, establishing a fair legal system, ensuring that fundamental rights are acknowledged and establishing a functioning government.

A significant portion of U.S. taxpayer money has been used to bolster separate judicial systems in Afghanistan — a formal and an informal system, both of which incorporate Sharia law.

“Experts we consulted describe a complex legal system in Afghanistan that incorporates hundreds of years of informal traditions, Islamic Sharia law, former Soviet judicial practices during the 1980s, and modern Western influence since the fall of the Taliban in 2001,” John Sopko, SIGAR’s inspector general, said.

The IG explained in the report that the nation’s formal system is “practiced by state authorities relying on a mixture between the civil law and elements of Islamic Sharia law,” while the informal system “based on customary tribal law and local interpretations of Islamic Sharia law.”

The complexity of the system makes it difficult to gauge whether it is functioning properly.

The IG report notes that even when U.S. officials are able to implement successful rule of law programs in the nation, there’s no promise that Afghan officials will continue them.

“Without sustainability assessments and subsequent reconsideration of program direction as a result of such reviews, U.S. agencies risk investing taxpayer funds in ill-advised or misaligned programs that the Afghan government cannot or will not continue after U.S. taxpayer funds are no longer available,” SIGAR said.