Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (11 page)

That was not how the uniform military was viewing these countries, as I discovered when I asked for a briefing from officers on the North Africa desk. We were, they informed me, “pleased with the relationship” with the Moroccan government. We only hoped its long-term defense planning would “focus on counterterrorism.” In Algeria, too, our objective was to “improve counterterrorism relations”; our main worry was that “Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb might find a haven” there.

Indeed it might, but no one seemed to be wondering why.

As for Tunisia—which had just made history by overthrowing an autocrat in a swift, broad-based, nonviolent upheaval, similar to the
loudly applauded anti-Soviet revolutions in Eastern Europe two decades before—we had no intention of showing “favoritism” to its nascent democracy by providing any extra support.

Terrorism, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was as though nothing had just happened.

I thought the Arab revolutions changed everything. I thought they should upend U.S. strategic posture, which for so long had been framed in reaction to radical Islam. For decades, I wrote Mullen, extremism had been the only outlet for people to express their legitimate grievances. Autocratic governments liked it that way, because the extremist alternatives to their rule were frightening—to the United States and other international donors, but often to their own citizens as well. “We would prefer thieves to murderers,” an Algerian shopkeeper later put it to me, when I asked her about corruption. There was evidence that several of these governments had deliberately targeted their repression against the most thoughtful, reasoned, and moderate leadership over the years, while covertly facilitating militant groups to serve as ogres to scare people.

But now, by way of the cascading revolutions, populations across the Arab world had opened a different outlet for their grievances. Instead of supporting Al Qaeda, or sneaking off to join the ranks of a violent local offshoot, they had rebuffed religious extremism and ignited a popular uprising, focusing on dignity, social justice, and the substance, not just the empty form, of democracy. That was a reaction Americans should admire, since it so resembled our own founding revolt against autocracy.

There was a chance, I argued in those early 2011 days, that radical Islam might be losing relevance in the wake of the Arab Spring. It was a fragile moment of opportunity. The United States should do whatever it could to promote that outcome.

A
FTER ASKING FOR
a memo detailing what might go wrong, Mullen authorized the trip.

I began it in familiar Morocco. I had lived there in the 1980s and spoke its peculiar dialect of Arabic. In the capital, Rabat, I found an old hotel with a terrace, opposite the tasteful yellow parliament building.

Knots of demonstrators clustered almost every day under the palm trees that lined the boulevard. They were often led by people who had obtained a Ph.D., yet found no job in the public sector. The “overqualified unemployed,” they were called. An engineer I met the first day on the fringe of one animated group angrily accused the government of “pillaging public resources.”

“It’s not just that people are poor,” interjected another man. “It’s the shanty-towns in this country, while others live in palaces and drive cars costing millions.”

I was visualizing the Sharpoor neighborhood in Kabul: dirt roads and million-dollar wedding-cake mansions, garish and lit with hundreds of light bulbs, while Kabul groped its way without electricity. I was thinking about the $80,000 SUV a kid who used to work for me drove around Kandahar. He had taken a job with a security company linked to Ahmed Wali Karzai.

The standard Western explanations for the Arab uprisings highlighted grand macroeconomic or demographic phenomena, such as a “youth bulge.” But on the streets of Rabat, I was hearing something else. Moroccans told me that what was pushing people over the edge wasn’t just poverty or misfortune in general—it was poverty in combination with acute injustice: the visible, daily contrast between ordinary people’s privations and the ostentatious display of lavish wealth corruptly siphoned off by ruling cliques from what was broadly understood to be public resources.

In his
Education of a Christian Prince
, Machiavelli’s Dutch contemporary Erasmus warned against just such elite extravagance in the midst of want:

When he is thinking of increasing his revenue, when he is anxious to make a brilliant marriage for his grand-daughter or sister, or to raise all his sons to his own status . . . or to display his substance to other countries while on foreign tours, then the conscientious ruler must continually remind himself how cruel it is that on these accounts so many thousands of men with their wives and children should be starving to death at home, getting into debt, and being driven to complete desperation.

Such yawning income gaps, Erasmus implied, are rarely fortuitous. They result from a deliberate twisting of laws and prerogatives to benefit the powerful. “To reduce poor people to hunger and servitude” this way “is both very cruel and very risky.” At some point, “the last straw breaks the camel’s back, and revolution eventually flares up when the people’s patience is exhausted.”
¹

That revolution had just flared up in North Africa.

One afternoon in Rabat, I sat in an outdoor café at one of those miniature tables, crowded next to a neighbor who proved to be a former finance ministry inspector. Here was a man whose very job should have been to ferret out the corruption the demonstrators were protesting.

“If I stopped every violation,” he dodged, “everything would grind to a halt. Sometimes I had to look with half an eye.” He winked. Candid, he admitted that few corruption cases ever made it to court. “If it’s a case with just one party, the state against an accused offender, then it’s easy to buy off the judge.”

Early in the conversation, the former civil servant had criticized the “overqualified unemployed,” in terms I had heard other Moroccans use. “They don’t want to work in the private sector, because they don’t get the same benefits as they do in a government job.” But before long—emboldened, perhaps, by his years outside the system, unwilling to keep up the charade—he conceded that most of them would have a hard time finding a good private sector position if they tried. “People have to be from the big families to get those jobs. Those companies and the families that run them plan on breaking the law—participating in rigged tenders, handing out kickbacks. They can’t have outsiders witnessing.”

Nationwide demonstrations were set for March 19. In Rabat the marchers lined up in ranks beneath banners proclaiming their various grievances, policed by elected delegates in yellow armbands. Not a café table was knocked over the whole day.

My last taste of Morocco dated from the 1980s, under the harshly repressive regime of Muhammad VI’s father, Hassan II—when the mere use of the word “king” in folktales I was transcribing violated a dangerous taboo, for some disrespect might be coded in the language of an age-old fable. In the context of that memory, the language and imagery on display were almost inconceivably shocking. Protesters weren’t just
calling for an independent judiciary in the abstract. Names of ministers from “big families” festooned banners next to demands that they be put on trial: Abbas el-Fassi, for example, the prime minister, or Interior Minister Chakib Benmoussa. I almost gasped to see the words spelled out.

Toward the back of the cortege, I saw a man holding one end of a rope that separated two delegations. W
E WANT A DEFENSE MINISTRY
, his sign proclaimed. That seemed an odd demand. I fell in beside him to ask what he meant. He was a soldier. Or he had been, until he and a dozen comrades had disobeyed an order to do a construction job on a general’s house. They were promptly drummed out of the army, he told me. “A soldier’s job is to defend this country’s borders, or to help in times of natural disaster. Not to build mansions for generals.” Now, with his dishonorable discharge, he said he was unemployable. “We want the generals to be subject to civilian accountability. We want a defense minister.”

This was the army whose counterterrorism cooperation so pleased the U.S. Joint Staff.

M
OROCCO
and its neighbor, Algeria, maintain frigid relations. But at the cost of disapproving frowns from immigration officers at each airport, I was able to fly from one country to the other without incident.

Algeria grasped my heart and twisted it, just as it had in the 1990s. The capital city, tumbling down its steep hillside into the Mediterranean, is like a once-bright sapphire, its surface pocked and corroded by some sulfurous poison. The people seemed to thirst for contact, that tumultuous spring. You could strike up a conversation just by remarking that you were reading the same newspaper a passerby was carrying.

Overwhelmingly, even a decade or more after the last of the violence that had traumatized the nation in the 1990s, the sentiment people expressed was relief. “We’ve been through so much,” one woman put it, when asked whether she wished for a revolution like Tunisia’s. “We’re happy just to be at peace.”

“There is democracy here now,” said a resident of Blida, an area that had suffered the rack—slaughter after slaughter—in 1997 and 1998. “If you want to drink alcohol, you can drink. If you want to pray, you can pray.”

It was this still-welcome respite from a nightmare of violence that kept Algerians, mostly, off the streets during the Arab Spring.

But it rarely took long to penetrate this still surface and touch grievances that echoed Moroccans’. Public resources—which in Algeria’s case include oil and gas—were being scooped up for the private benefit of a criminal elite. One man invited me inside his house in the historic old city, or kasbah, which had been far too dangerous to visit when I was last there. He was trying to keep the place from falling apart like neighboring buildings, whose crumbled walls were grass-tufted stumps. Homemade girders spanned a hole in a floor. From his balcony we could see the hazy shapes of oil tankers waiting to enter the port. “Look at the money they have.” The man jutted his chin toward the water. But no public resources were set aside for restoring a disintegrating World Heritage Site.

The Algerian government was financing some construction. On the road to Blida, fat blocks of unfinished high-rises squatted ponderously: public housing projects, thrown up fast, as populist giveaways to keep Algerians from joining the Arab Spring protests. “The Chinese are building them,” a journalist commented. “The government isn’t even using these projects to reduce unemployment. All the laborers are Chinese; they live in special camps. And the work is shoddy. The materials are substandard, and officials get kickbacks on the difference.”

In Blida, a woman who had lost thirty-two members of her family to the 1990s extremist violence (her sparky young daughter was sure the regime had colluded) confessed to being transfixed by news of the unfolding revolts in neighboring countries on the Al-Jazeera cable television network. “We didn’t realize all these Arab rulers were thieves,” the woman said.

At the port, fishermen pointed out the police watching us from a stone balustrade above our heads. “They’re terrified of Tunisia happening here.” Two brothers who imported consumer goods acknowledged paying bribes to get their cargo through customs. But, one of them noted, “it would take an earthquake and a tsunami for change to come to Algeria.”

An earthquake, I thought, or maybe just time—till the young, whose minds were less seared by the violence of the past, came of age.

“T
HIS ISN’T
about unemployment. It’s about a mafia running this country.” That was my introduction to Tunisia, courtesy of Hazem Ben Gacem, one of the dynamic young professionals who were flocking to the service of their country in the weeks after Ben Ali’s fall. “It’s about bullying, extortion, public sector bribery. Everyone knew about the corruption, the sick practices. It got to be too much.”

Tunisia in March 2011 was still high on euphoria over what it had wrought. Avenue Bourguiba, the broad boulevard with its treelined median that leads from the port to the base of the Roman-era bazaar, was still serving as a kind of outdoor political forum. Knots of people stood in feverish discussion, under the rows of palms and the eyes of soldiers who manned a few tanks behind lazy loops of barbed wire.

Stunned, Tunisians were still discovering the extent of the robbery that the deposed Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali and the family of his wife, Leila, had perpetrated. “It was like Ali Baba’s cave,” recalled Imed Ennouri, one of several accountants appointed to inventory the ill-gotten gains. “The jewelry, mounds of it. The stacks and stacks of fine carpets.”

The Sea of Precious Virtues,
an anonymous twelfth-century mirror in Persian, describes how “a king who is envious ruins” his subjects, “desiring that everything belonging to the people should be in his treasury.”
²
The acquisition of wealth becomes addictive, wrote its author.

“A tyrant,” agreed Erasmus four hundred years later, “acts in such a way as to get the wealth of his subjects into the hands of a few. . . . For avarice is boundless, continually goading and putting pressure on what it has set afoot.”
³

Taxi drivers would swerve to point out the businesses, the luxurious BMW or Mercedes showrooms, built on public land, that belonged to Ben Ali’s son-in-law.

And they represented only the fraction of Ben Ali’s riches that Tunisians could see. One young activist criticized the loan already provided to postrevolutionary Tunisia by the government of Qatar. “They let Sakhr el-Materi in,” he said, referring to Ben Ali’s detested son-in-law. “His money is in their banks. They could just give that back to us and forget the loan.”

Tunisia is a tiny chip of a country, its society as tightly knit by personal relationships as Afghanistan’s. One contact, a Ben Gacem, for example, opened doors everywhere. Within two days, I was sitting in on the executive bureau meeting of a newly birthed political party, Afek Tounes. The heated conversation veered among topics as diverse as whether international observers should be invited to monitor upcoming elections, or what sort of people the party should accept money from.