Author Archives: Sarah Grant

Improving Mutual Legal Assistance: Lessons from Asia

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Back in 2014, Rick called for further analysis of mutual legal assistance (MLA) processes and potential reforms that would promote responsiveness to MLA requests in anticorruption cases (and others). As a follow-up, I wanted to highlight the findings of a recent report from the Asian Development Bank (ADB)/Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific. The report, entitled “Mutual Legal Assistance in Asia and the Pacific: Experiences in 31 Jurisdictions,” provides examples of various obstacles to effective MLA, which I have sorted into two general categories: legal and practical. Continue reading →

Reforming the ANDSF Payroll Management System: The Limits of a Technological Solution

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In my last post, I discussed the how the problem of “ghost soldiers”—soldiers who are inaccurately listed as on active duty, for purposes of generating salary payments that are then stolen—adversely affects the capacity and readiness of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). To make things worse, not only is the government making salary payments to soldiers who don’t exist, but some ANDSF personnel who do exist are not receiving the full salaries they are due. Approximately 20% of Afghan National Police (ANP) and 5% of Afghan National Army (ANA) personnel are paid in cash through so-called “trusted agents,” who are supposed to facilitate salary payments to ANDSF personnel when electronic funds transfers (EFTs) are not possible, but according to reports, corruption in the system could take as much as half of an employee’s salary. And while most ANDSF personnel receive their salaries via EFT to their personal bank accounts, this only reduces the threat of pilfering in the final distribution stage; it does nothing to correct for errors, either intentional or inadvertent, generated earlier in the process.

What can be done about these problems? The U.S.-led multinational military organization working with the Afghan government to reform and strengthen the ANDSF, known as the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A), is applying a technological band-aid that focuses on implementing a set of computerized systems that track personnel and pay. While these measures are helpful, they do not fundamentally change the incentive structures that drive corruption, and so are unlikely to represent a long-term solution, particularly after direct U.S. involvement winds down.

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The Toll Corruption Takes on Afghan Security Force Capacity

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Corruption in Afghanistan and its role in the ongoing instability of the country has been discussed on this blog before (see, for example, here, here, and here), but for the most part in fairly general, strategic-level terms. In this post, I’m going to zoom in and explain in greater detail two particularly insidious types of corruption that plague the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF): 1) the problem of “ghost” soldiers, and 2) the pilfering of fuel, weapons, and other supplies intended for security force personnel. These forms of corruption leave Afghan security forces hollow and ill-equipped to accomplish the missions assigned to them. As long as pervasive corruption continues to undermine force capacity, readiness, and morale, the prospect of Afghan government forces gaining the upper hand on the Taliban and other insurgents remains slim.

“Ghost soldiers” are fictitious troops added to personnel rosters by corrupt officials who then collect the extra pay allocated for these (in some cases deceased, in some cases no longer active, and in some cases totally made-up) soldiers. To give a sense of the scale of the problem, consider the 215th Corps of the Afghan National Army. In 2015, local officials suggested that up to 40 percent of names on the books did not correspond to actively-serving soldiers. For the 215th Corps, with an authorized strength of 18,000, that would mean fewer than 11,000 soldiers were actually available to fight. Earlier this year, US Army Major General Richard Kaiser, commander of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CTSC-A), told the Wall Street Journal that the US had removed from the Afghan military payrolls more than 30,000 suspected ghost soldiers. That group of names amounted to over one-sixth of the Afghan army, significantly less than 40 percent but nevertheless a staggering figure. For reference, 30,000 is the same number of additional US troops President Obama sent to Afghanistan in December 2009 in a surge deemed necessary to turn the tide in the conflict.

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The US Navy’s “Fat Leonard” Scandal: How the Virtuous Fall

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Last March, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed the latest indictment in the so-called “Fat Leonard” corruption scandal that has haunted the Navy since 2014 and continues to grow. “Fat Leonard” is Leonard Glenn Francis, a Malaysian citizen and the owner of Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), which provided support to the Navy’s Seventh Fleet in Southeast Asia from 2006-2014. When Navy ships pull into foreign ports, local companies are contracted to provide marine husbanding, port security, refueling and waste management services, ground transportation for sailors and Marines in port, etc. GDMA offered these services, but also much more: for a number of senior Navy officials, Francis paid for prostitutes, extravagant meals, luxury hotel stays, and other travel expenses, and provided gifts of both cash and goods. All he asked for in return was assurances that Seventh Fleet ships would use ports Francis controlled, classified information about Navy operations (including ships’ schedules), sensitive information on the business practices of his competitors, and assistance in facilitating a price gouging scheme that yielded GMDA excess profits of $35 million over eight years. The total number of people charged in the “Fat Leonard” scandal now comes to 27, including two admirals, fifteen other senior active duty naval officers, an NCIS special agent, and two contracting supervisors; another 200 additional individuals remain under scrutiny by prosecutors. This was a full-fledged cultural problem, not just a case of a few bad apples.

The details of what these men got up to in port are quite salacious, but my focus in this post is instead on what this scandal exposes about how corruption can spread among decorated public servants and what can be done to prevent similar scandals in the future. Every single one of the senior officers charged had been trained to be self-disciplined and to put mission and country above self—it’s what those of us who serve in the military vow to do. Each officer had a long and distinguished career before becoming entangled with Francis and his lurid scheme. Yet each sold his integrity, and sold out his country, for immediate gratification. Why? Continue reading →