Afghans now pay double the bribes of two years ago and Hamid Karzai has gone out of his way to curb anti-corruption initiatives

Corruption has permeated every layer of Afghan society in the past 10 years, affecting everyday lives and sullying the highest levels of government.

In an Asia Foundation report last year, 55% of Afghan respondents said corruption was a major problem in their daily lives, up from 42% in 2006.

Despite funding to tackle corruption, efforts by Afghan and international officials are thwarted at every turn. Ordinary Afghans now pay on average $158 (£98) per bribe, double the level of two years ago, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Transparency International named Afghanistan as the world's second most corrupt country, along with Burma and after Somalia.

"Corruption is not a technical issue," said one senior law official in Kabul. "If it were, we would have made some progress. It is a political issue and we have no partner to work with."

The president, Hamid Karzai, has gone out of his way not only to curb anti-corruption initiatives but also to blame his western backers. He has at various times claimed they are responsible for the collapse of Kabul Bank, for the fraud marring the 2009 presidential elections, and indeed for the vast bulk of corruption in the country.

"Our international partners provided the groundwork for some people in Afghanistan to become unbelievably rich. Some people [have] become an economic mafia in Afghanistan," the presidential spokesman Wahid Omar said in August last year.

International officials started trying to get serious about corruption in late 2007, partly out of concern that graft among the elite was encouraging the insurgency. Karzai duly set up the High Office of Oversight and Anti Corruption (HOOAC) in June 2008.

Eighteen months later, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction issued a damning report highlighting the office's flaws. It was understaffed, lacked independence and had insufficient power to pursue cases, the report said. It added that employees lacked the basic skills to do their job.

Deeming the HOOAC a failure, the international community pressed Karzai to set up a corruption commission. Instead, what emerged was the monitoring and evaluation committee (MEC), partly funded by the UK's Department for International Development.

Karzai immediately doomed the MEC by appointing Professor Mohammed Yasin Osmani as its head. He had been the chairman of the HOOAC, which under his tenure had got nowhere. "It was a real kick in the teeth for internationals and signalled Karzai had no intention of going after those who were corrupt," the rule of law official said.

To add insult to injury, Karzai appointed Azizullah Lodin, the former head of the international election committee who had been fired over the 2009 election fraud, as the new head of the HOOAC.

Karzai is reluctant to go after corrupt warlords and officials close to him because, having become president without a power base, he has had to cut deals with them to shore up his position.

At the Kabul conference in July last year, Karzai agree to set up an anti-corruption tribunal and a major crimes task force. The MCTF, dubbed the Afghan FBI, was intended to tackle serious crimes, focusing on corruption, organised crime and kidnapping. British and US law enforcement agents mentored the taskforce's staff. The UK's Department for International Development helped to fund both organisations.

It was another blow, then, when one of the tribunal's first cases was the prosecution of Bill Shaw, a former British solider and the commercial manager of G4S, a UK security firm charged with protecting the British embassy in Kabul. He was accused of paying a $25,000 bribe to a government official for the release of bombproof cars that had been impounded. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years in a Kabul jail. His defence argued that he thought he was paying a legitimate fine for a licensing irregularity. He was freed after an appeal.

At the same time, internationals applied pressure on MCTF officials to put together a test case. In June last year, the attorney general's office arrested Mohammad Zia Salehi, another Karzai aide, on bribery charges. Karzai intervened and he was released. Similarly, in March this year, the presidential aide Noorullah Delawari was arrested on corruption changes, and then released after Karzai intervened.

"Unfortunately when it comes to high-ranking government officials, we can't do anything," an official at the attorney general's office lamented at the time of Delawari's release.

The Kabul Bank fiasco remains the country's most notorious corruption scandal. To date, no one has been arrested over the disappearance of $900m of depositors' money. Last month Abdul Qadir Fitrat, the former head of the Afghan central bank, fled to the US, saying he did not want to be a scapegoat.

"We may never know exactly what went on," said Hamid Khan, a rule of law expert at the United States Institute of Peace in Kabul. "Karzai may not have stepped up to the plate to go after corrupt warlords but it is worse when major banks are teetering on the brink of collapse. The ripples are felt across the entire economy.

"Development is dependent on the banking system and affects the livelihoods of ordinary Afghans who are trying to get loans to start a business. It also affects how the rule of law is conducted. If businesses have no confidence in the system in place they won't invest, and without investment there are less incentives for sustaining the rule of law."