Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (7 page)

It was military officers, moreover, who carried on the bulk of interactions with Afghan officials—and who were seen by those officials to constitute the international community that mattered. The logic holds in other countries, too, where the military-to-military relationship constitutes the backbone of U.S. ties. In Afghanistan, forty-year-old battalion commanders were closeted with provincial governors every week. Troops were training the Afghan army and police. Special operations officers were often the only foreigners far-flung district officials encountered. If those officials were engaged in flagrant political corruption and their ISAF interlocutors ignored it, they—and ordinary Afghans—took the silence as approval.

“Wherefore one who does this is guilty,” the strident fourteenth-century William of Pagula would have concluded. “For, one who permits anything to take place that he is able to impede, even though he has not done it himself, has virtually done the act if he allows it.”
¹
In contemporary American jurisprudence, the principle is called “conscious
disregard” or “willful blindness.” And it is considered a sign of criminal intent.
²

In the end, none of our election recommendations was implemented. Afterward I asked ISAF’s intelligence chief, General Michael Flynn—among the most sympathetic officers to the anticorruption agenda—if any surveillance satellites had been assigned to monitor turnout. He seemed startled, as though we had never discussed the idea. Oh no, came his answer. They were too busy tracking insurgents.

The fraud perpetrated in the 2009 Afghan election was so egregious and widespread as to stun even seasoned election monitors, several of whom declared it the most pervasive they had ever seen. Later, U.S. officers who spoke to Taliban detainees found that the election had generated a spurt in support for the insurgency, as Afghans lost faith in a “political process that only seemed to strengthen power brokers and maintain the status quo,” as one put it.

And the sin of that is on his head
.

O
NE GROUP
at ISAF headquarters was receptive to the premise that systematic corruption was discrediting the Afghan government in the eyes of the people and tainting the international community by association. It was the civilian assessors who had been called in from universities and Washington think tanks to analyze the Afghanistan campaign. The strategic assessment that resulted from their work—whose leak to the
Washington Post
irrevocably poisoned the relationship between the Obama White House and the military—was the only major document to pinpoint poor governance as a key driver of the conflict in Afghanistan.
³

Boering and I hosted a governance brainstorming session for those outside experts, with participants from several embassies, the UN, the European police-training mission, and key Afghan agencies. Fragile bubbles of enthusiasm pearled the mood that day, as these disparate professionals, devoted to the rule of law, came together for perhaps the first time, daring to hope that the issue they thought mattered most was finally commanding attention.

By the end of June 2009, with the help of such discussions, ISAF’s
budding anticorruption team had elaborated both a conceptual argument and practical recommendations for why and how to tackle corruption.

Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.”

Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon.

In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy.

“This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.

The great eleventh-century thinker Ghazali made just such a link between poor governance and insecurity—in that order and not the reverse—in his
Book of Counsel for Kings
: “Whenever Sultans rule oppressively, insecurity appears. And however much prosperity there may be, this will not suit the subjects if accompanied by insecurity.”
⁴

But Western officials, military and civilian alike, habitually flipped the sequence: first let’s establish security, then we can worry about governance.
⁵
Like Ghazali, the anticorruption team saw the vector the other way around: poor governance
caused
the insecurity, so it was fruitless to try to reduce violence without addressing corruption.

Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditions
fueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.”

But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over.
⁶

I had observed a more systemic problem with the way aid was delivered. Afghanistan is a country made smaller, in human terms, by its convivial and relationship-based culture. In a town like Kandahar, everyone knew who was securing the juicy development contracts and who their patrons were. Everyone discussed the quality of the work, who benefited, or the new cars the chief implementers were driving. In other words, development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency.

Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum.
⁷

These experiments apply almost directly to development work. I frequently heard the very same numbers come up in the arguments of Western officials. ‘Let’s say 80 percent of the humanitarian aid money is skimmed off,’ they would postulate. ‘At least the people are getting
something
. More than they would if we weren’t funding the projects at all.’ But ultimatum game experiments show that many recipients would in fact prefer to walk away empty-handed than accept such an unfair deal.

This pervasive human reflex might help explain why development
projects kept getting attacked in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was not just the projects’ association with non-Muslim foreigners that angered the attackers. Perhaps it was also the unjust distribution of resources—especially when the benefits to ordinary people were indirect, as in the case of a road or a school, while the much greater payoffs to corrupt officials and their cronies came in the form of cash in hand. Perhaps Afghans, in line with subjects of experiments conducted in the United States or Indonesia or the Slovak Republic, would rather foul a well so no one could use it than watch most of its water irrigate a corrupt village elder’s land.

So much for the argument. Next came recommendations. The anticorruption team was still up against a widespread and debilitating presumption. ‘Corruption is part of the culture in a place like Afghanistan,’ we kept hearing. ‘What can really be done about it?’ I have always been perplexed at the sham regret, and authentic eagerness, with which so many embraced helplessness as a rationale for inaction.

What can be done? Lots, it turns out. But a serious anticorruption campaign has to make use of the plentiful leverage carefully—craftily, even—and with foresight and stubborn fortitude.

The first recommendation we put forward that summer was to repair a startling deficiency: knowledge. Despite the thousands of intelligence professionals spread throughout the country, not to speak of the hundreds of diplomats and development practitioners, the international community knew almost nothing useful about the government officials or local contractors we were dealing with.

Any battalion- or brigade-level intelligence shop could produce a sophisticated “network diagram” for the main local Taliban group, featuring a photo of the commander—or a baleful black silhouette complete with turban—and lines spiking out to other known members. The eager but respectful twenty-something officer who would brief such a slide would be legitimately proud of the detective work.

But where were the network diagrams for the district governor or the provincial police chief? What tribe was he? Who were his associates? Who did he pay kickbacks to? Which construction companies belonged to his family members? How was he facilitating the traffic in chromite or timber or opium? Did he have Karzai on speed dial? Who had he fought with during the last war?

No one knew.

A similar ignorance reigns in other regions where the United States and like-minded governments operate. In a dozen years of obsessive focus on terrorism, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have mushroomed. Data collection has exploded. Yet new blood, talented veterans, and most of the focus have been aimed at identifying and targeting individual terrorist suspects.
⁸
Those individuals’ environments, the social structures of their communities, and the grievances or aspirations that might animate them or their neighbors, have excited less interest.
⁹

The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus instructed the future Holy Roman Emperor to gain an intimate knowledge of just such details: “It seems necessary to the prince to . . .get to know his kingdom, and this achievement will be most effectively brought about by three things: the study of geography, the study of history, and frequent tours of towns and territories.”
¹⁰

On the Afghan battlefield, we recommended adding questions about local governance to the cards that soldiers consulted when chatting with villagers, and sending the information up the line, assigning intelligence officers to study government officials, and setting up tip lines or drop boxes for Afghans to use anonymously. And we called for officers to meet regularly, no officials present, with ordinary Afghans.

The sovereign must listen himself, without intermediary, to what his subjects have to say to him
.

Next we listed concrete actions that officers in the field could take at their own level to deter corrupt behavior. Cease actively contributing to it, for starters. Avoid meeting with corrupt officials in ways that raise their status: Don’t visit their offices, for example, because in Afghan culture, it is the social superior who hosts, and the inferior who visits. Don’t renew contracts with businesses owned by their cronies. Stop paying Western-level salaries to their personal staff, or letting them control the distribution of humanitarian aid. In extreme cases, halt development projects altogether, while explaining the reason to the local population.

Where an official was just too disruptive or too powerful, or his misdeeds too egregious, we recommended that his case be passed up the chain of command to ISAF headquarters, where senior officials could take it up with President Karzai or launch law enforcement action.

Eventually these suggestions were drafted into the official military language of a FRAGO—a fragmentary operations order, spelling out what units were commanded to do in the field. After some fancy footwork by the oversized Boering, who proved remarkably nimble in dealing with military bureaucracy, the order was issued.

We illustrated the dry phraseology with a diagram based on an early ballpoint sketch by the command’s affable legal adviser, Rich Gross. “Soft COAs” were courses of action that could be implemented directly by subordinate commanders. “BN” stands for battalion, “TF” for a brigade-level task force, and “RC” for the five regional commands. At higher echelons, serious cases should be referred to the High Office of Oversight, for prosecution by the Anti-Corruption Unit in the attorney general’s office, or the ministry of interior.