WASHINGTON Burned by going after President Hamid Karzai, the United States is taking its anti-corruption fight in Afghanistan to a lower level in hopes of rooting out the scourge at base.

The United States and its allies are stepping up training, enforcement and incentives to eliminate corruption among Afghanistan's rank-and-file authorities - particularly the police, who are notorious for seeking bribes.

President Barack Obama's administration put a renewed focus on corruption when taking office last year, believing that the problem had grown so severe it was sapping Afghans' support for the West and its anti-Taliban campaign.

“I honestly will tell this Congress that I don't believe that in advance of year 2009 that we paid very much attention to an anti-corruption programme,” Arnold Fields, the special inspector general looking into reconstruction in Afghanistan, told a recent congressional hearing.

“I'm very disappointed... that after we have spent essentially 50 billion dollars, we still have a country that's almost at the bottom of the list in terms of corruption,” said Fields, a retired Marine major general who was appointed under former president George W. Bush.

Graft watchdog Transparency International in its last annual report found that Afghanistan had the worst corruption of any country except Somalia, which has no functional government.

The Obama administration has made no secret of its concerns about Karzai, who was installed after US-led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001. Obama flew to Kabul in March to deliver him a strong message on corruption.

Karzai responded with a series of strident public criticisms of the West, leading the administration to change tactics. Obama on May 12 offered Karzai a red-carpet welcome and the administration - at least in public - has been reticent about corruption.

But with 80 per cent of US money to Afghanistan bypassing the central government, US authorities believe they can make progress on the ground by eliminating opportunities for corruption.

Ninety-five per cent of soldiers and 70 per cent of police are now paid electronically thanks to an improved banking system, sidelining local chiefs who would previously dole out salaries, said Army Colonel Thomas Umberg, chief of anti-corruption efforts in the Nato training mission.

Umberg said the average monthly salaries for police officers have been raised to up to 240 dollars a month, hopefully reducing incentives to seek bribes - or to accept better offers with the Taliban.

Forces have also put blue dye in security forces' fuel so it is identifiable if someone tries to resell it, he said.

Umberg acknowledged that such steps would not eliminate corruption completely, saying there was a need for enforcement of the law “both at the highest levels as well as the patrolman level”. “But if we continue to focus here and limit opportunities for corruption... we're going to see some pretty dramatic improvements over the next couple of years,” he said in a conference call with bloggers.

A United Nations study in January found that corruption was the top concern for Afghans - more even than security - and that the impoverished nation paid the equivalent of nearly one-quarter of its Gross Domestic Product in bribes.

Cheryl Benard, who helped lead a study on corruption in Afghanistan for the Rand Corp., found that many Afghans blamed the United States, believing its money fuelled the problem and that it should be powerful enough to stop it.

Karzai on his visit to Washington pledged to tackle corruption. In March, he signed a decree giving new authority to an anti-corruption chief, Mohammad Yasin Osmani.

But Benard said it was unrealistic to expect Osmani to fight corruption among top leaders and that Western powers should instead encourage efforts at the “middle-to-lower level”. “If Osmani decides that he's going to take on these big shots, Osmani is dead meat,” Benard said.

“My thinking is, why not let him do something where he has a chance of being effective. Why not start improving things at the level where people actually spend their daily lives.”—AFP