Transparency International's Defence and Security Programme meets with UK troops returning from Afghanistan for a formal debrief. This gives TI DSP the opportunity to hear their stories about the specific corruption issues they faced, how they addressed them, and suggestions they have for how to tackle corruption in conflict environments. The information gained through these debriefing sessions is invaluable to our work.

Troops have provided vital feedback in these sessions. In debriefing sessions in 2009, feedback included:

• The top issues for corruption were payroll, food and fuel.

• Resources regularly went ‘missing.’ Tracking delivery of goods and services from order to delivery locally, through an intensive supervision process, worked very well.

• Corruption is widely discussed and there is extensive perception of corruption on the streets, causing much resentment of those in positions of power.

• The Afghans are used to bribery, but it bothers them immensely.

• There needs to be more rotation: the longer one soldier does the same tour, the higher the chances that he will start taking bribes from people.

• Corruption impacts on security.

TI DSP believes that there needs to be systematic learning from these experiences. The knowledge and lessons learned from post-deployment debriefings are used to inform our pre-deployment briefings given to troops before they deploy.  We are currently working on writing doctrine for operations which will consolidate the information we have learned from returning troops into guidelines and specific recommendations for actions.

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