Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (9 page)

Pacing hard, my blood oddly cold, phone welded to the side of my head, I quested for facts. What I got back was more stunning and perturbing even than the event itself. This had been no roadside explosion, no Taliban suicide bombing. Afghan soldiers had gunned the police chief down. The Kandahar Strike Force had done it, a special unit that worked for and lived with the CIA. The circumstances of the shooting were almost unbelievable: a full-blown commando raid on the chief prosecutor’s office, snipers on the roof. The strike force was purportedly trying to spring a friend out of jail. The beleaguered provincial prosecutor had called Police Chief Matiullah, who had driven over and walked into the ambush.

The details did not compute. The jailed man wasn’t even being held at that location. The phone call seemed like a setup. All Kandahar put the shooting down to the CIA. Command responsibility.

Then another call refreshed a detail that lay stored somewhere in the folds of my memory: Ahmed Wali Karzai had provided every member of the Kandahar Strike Force to the CIA, personally guaranteeing them all. The shooters had been his men. The potential implications—the move this murder might represent on one of several chessboards—outpaced the ability of dull-witted international officials, myself included, to keep up.

Command responsibility, indeed. But who was in command?

A team was dispatched from Kandahar Airfield to the governor’s palace downtown, and I had flinched at the thought of driving through what amounted to my hometown in a U.S. Army Humvee. I looked around, and Sayfullah, local chief of the Afghan Border Police, offered me room in his green pickup truck. He was a nobody in this drama, a
placid sort of figurehead from out of town, unconnected with Ahmed Wali Karzai and his coterie. Gratefully, I accepted.

F
LICKING MY HEAD
to scatter the memory, I looked back across the brown wooden table at Steve Foster and studied a response to his project of going after Sayfullah. “Are you sure?” I ruminated, skeptical. “I know the guy. He actually doesn’t amount to much.” In the complex pattern of Afghan politics, Sayfullah didn’t matter, despite his rank. “He’s kind of a front man. I’m wondering if getting him will send the right message.”

Foster did not disagree with my analysis. Still, his fledgling investigators
had
the evidence. They had worked so hard, and it was good evidence. It seemed hardly fair to ask them to abandon it now and start afresh on some new quarry. I could see his point. “Besides,” I offered. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to start small. We can stress the system, see how it responds, and be better prepared for the next one.”

Plans for the Sayfullah arrest went ahead.

Interior Minister Atmar’s immediate reflex, upon being informed some days after that meeting in the garden, was to “kick the issue into the long grass,” as Foster put it. He demanded a detailed review of the evidence—though the attorney general had already sworn out an arrest warrant. At our request, ISAF’s intelligence chief, the frenetically energetic General Mike Flynn, visited Atmar one evening and spelled out why it would not be a good idea to stand in the way. Atmar got the message—and began bargaining. Sayfullah’s arrest, he insisted, should be a dignified affair, no handcuffs.

It took place on October 19, 2009. Sayfullah was invited to Kabul to attend an official ceremony, and as it concluded, he was quietly led out a side door. I noted the success with complacent satisfaction. One down—now we could get on to serious business.

A few evenings later I got a call—from quite a different kind of Afghan police official, my friend Hakim Angar, whose career I had followed for years. He was phoning from a plane on a runway; it was hard to make out what he was saying.

Slowly, I pieced it together. Angar was aboard a flight to Kandahar.
He had an official paper in his pocket. Beside him on the seat were bouquets of plastic flowers, congratulations gifts from dozens of visitors to his office the previous day. He had been appointed to replace Sayfullah—a stunning departure from the Karzai government’s habit of exchanging one corrupt official for a more corrupt one.

But as the plane began revving its engines, Angar’s phone had rung. It was Atmar’s deputy. “Get off the flight,” he had ordered. Angar’s appointment had been suspended. He should stand by for further instructions.

For the next three months, I worked that aborted appointment. ISAF intelligence chief Flynn told me he raised the issue with Atmar. The three-star operational commander confronted the chief of the Afghan Border Police. In January 2010 Angar’s appointment was on General McChrystal’s list of talking points for a meeting with President Karzai. But nothing moved. Angar remained in limbo.

Nor was this the only interference that plagued the Sayfullah case. A search warrant had been signed out for Sayfullah’s office. Who knew what would be revealed about the doings of the border police? But at the last minute, the interior ministry called the search operation off, Foster, the MCTF, and ISAF reluctantly acquiescing.

Atmar, the story went, had consulted President Karzai about the advisability of this search; Karzai had called Ahmed Wali in Kandahar to get his view. And Ahmed Wali had warned of potential “tribal unrest,” should the warrant be executed. Karzai had told Atmar to call off the search. With the safety of officers potentially at stake, international officials had opted not to fight the cancellation order.

I closed my eyes to quiet the boiling in my ears as I listened to this fairy tale. There was no threat of tribal unrest. Sayfullah had no tribal allies in Kandahar; he wasn’t even from Kandahar. And Karzai, a Kandahar native, didn’t need to make any calls to get the picture. The Afghan officials had shrewdly selected a pretext they knew would strike a chord with their untutored international counterparts.

The Sayfullah case, in other words, had proved to be a more instructive test than I had imagined. It had stressed the system, all right. And the system had responded with a lightning sequence of calibrated blocking maneuvers.

The question was, why deploy all that skill and effort on behalf of a mere Sayfullah? Why would Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, a man who basked in considerable international credibility, risk his luster by throwing himself across the tracks for some two-bit border police boffo like Sayfullah? Why not sacrifice a Sayfullah and retrench around people who mattered? It did not add up.

CHAPTER FIVE

Vertically Integrated Criminal Syndicates

Kabul, Garmisch, 2009–2010

“S
arah, do you have a minute?” It was Colonel Chris Kolenda aiming toward me on a gravel path that simmered in the reflected heat from the prefab metal buildings around it. A former reconstruction team commander tangentially interested in corruption, Kolenda was one of McChrystal’s phalanx of colonels. “I want to show you something we’ve been working on.” I followed him up to his office, on the second floor of one of the steel boxes that posed as work space. Three factory-fresh black desks on spindly metal legs and some tables shoved together in the middle of the room did not yet convey an inhabited feel.

Kolenda clumped over to a whiteboard in a corner. He sketched a rough triangle in black marker, a circle at the top. “So here’s how traditional Afghan government used to work,” he launched. “Patronage flowed downward.” He drew an arrow pointing down from the circle.

“Wait a second, wait a second,” I cut in, already irritated. This was romantic bunk, constantly regurgitated by Westerners discussing Afghanistan. It discounted the sophistication achieved by the 1960s and 1970s. The country was a constitutional monarchy then—a national assembly and local elders gathered in traditional structures affording a further check on executive power. Citizens expected a decent education from their government, health care, even employment in state-owned industries. Afghanistan had been a favored tourist destination and the
envy of its neighbors. The Afghan government had
not
been a patronage system.

“Stop,” Kolenda interrupted in turn. “Let me just finish.” I clamped my teeth together. “Here’s how
this
Afghan government is operating.” He started on a new triangle, a new circle at its summit. “Here’s GIRoA,” he said, the Afghan government. An array of smaller circles formed the triangle’s midsection. They represented subordinate officials—governors or provincial chiefs of police. At the bottom of the triangle was a row of stick figures: the people. Kolenda drew an arrow between the levels of officials again, indicating the flow of money.

But this time, rather than pointing downward to signal a distribution of resources from patron to client, the arrow was pointing upward, from the subordinate official to the superior. Money, Kolenda argued, was moving up the chain of command in today’s Afghanistan, in the form of gifts, kickbacks, levies paid to superiors, and the purchase of positions.

Much of the cash garnered this way didn’t even stay in country. It was being transferred offshore, to places like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

I didn’t snap a picture of that whiteboard sketch. I wish I had. It has structured my understanding of Afghan corruption, and of acute corruption in general, ever since. And incidentally, it pierced the mystery of Interior Minister Atmar and Border Police Chief Sayfullah. I’ve been perfecting that diagram for years, adapting it to fit different countries. I’ve confirmed the behaviors it predicts in hundreds of conversations with Afghans and people living under other kleptocracies. I’ve briefed it dozens of times.
^*

The critical feature is the directionality of the arrows indicating the money flow. Their upward motion contradicts a widely shared preconception about how the Karzai government operated. Karzai was not, as conventional wisdom had it, doling out patronage.
¹
He wasn’t distributing money downward to buy off potential political rivals.
²
If anything—with exceptions especially before elections—the reverse was true. Subordinate officials were paying off Karzai or his apparatus. What
the top of the system provided in return was, first, unfettered permission to extract resources for personal gain, and second, protection from repercussions.

And
that
explained the contortions Atmar had put himself through to shield Sayfullah. The whole system depended on faithful discharge, by senior officials, of their duty to protect their subordinates. The implicit contract held, much as it does within the Mafia, no matter how inconsequential the subordinate might be. Every level paid the level above, and the men at the top had to extend their protection right to the bottom. The Sayfullah arrest—like any legal challenge—represented a test case. How well the regime defended even its lowliest officials would broadcast a message throughout the system about the strength of the protection guarantee. If Karzai failed to uphold his end of the bargain, the whole edifice would collapse.

Thinking about the Afghan government this way abruptly solved other puzzles too. I could now decode two subsequent episodes in the Sayfullah saga, which many of my ISAF and rule of law colleagues found baffling.

The first was Interior Minister Atmar’s flat refusal to call a press conference to announce the arrest. “You do it,” he shot back at U.S. officials, who had expected him to leap at the chance to pose as a champion in the battle against corruption. They could not understand why a member of the sovereignty-conscious Afghan cabinet would let foreigners speak in his place.

But Atmar was contemplating the signal that would be transmitted to members of the network. The last thing he wanted them thinking was that he was behind Sayfullah’s arrest. That would violate the protection deal. He needed it known that he had opposed the move—that the foreigners had made him do it. And the best way to get that message across was to have an international official make the announcement.

The press conference never happened.

President Karzai did hold one, just two weeks later, his first speech as declared victor of the August presidential election. It was a virtuoso performance in conveying different cues to different audiences.

Karzai dwelled on corruption. “Afghanistan has been tarnished by the scourge” of it, he conceded. And he vowed, “I will launch a campaign
to clean the government.” Many international observers applauded his change of course.

Standing on either side of Karzai as he made this pronouncement, however, were his vice presidents, Karim Khalili and Muhammad Qasim Fahim, two of the most notorious war criminals in all Afghanistan. They symbolized, for most Afghans, the yawning justice deficit of the post-Taliban government.

That bit of stagecraft—putting them on display that way—was aimed at members of the Mafia system. So was Karzai’s answer to a reporter’s question: would he be removing any key officials as part of this new anticorruption campaign?

“These problems cannot be solved by changing high-ranking officials,” Karzai replied. “We’ll review the laws and see what problems are in the law, and we will draft some new laws.”
³
He was promising just the sort of busywork that would occupy earnest international officials. And simultaneously, he was signaling to members of the corrupt networks that they could relax—and to the Afghan people that they could swallow their frustration. No one was going to be held accountable.

So there were answers to one set of questions. The solution of more nagging riddles followed.

A perplexing discrepancy existed between my experience of the Afghan government and many other Americans’ characterizations of it. “Weak,” “incapable,” and “absent” were the words Americans typically used, evoking a void that the Taliban, according to the standard narrative, were filling. But that was not the government we lived with in Kandahar. Kandaharis were up against an arbitrarily powerful, abusive entity—as noxious to many of them as the Taliban themselves.

The differing depictions, I now understood, had to do with where the observer was located with respect to the country’s main revenue streams. Most Americans were stationed in zones where intelligence indicated Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leadership might be hiding. Terrorists on the lam were expected to cling to infertile, sparsely populated terrain, far from frequented road systems. And at least until late 2009, most U.S. troops were deployed along the eastern fringes of Afghanistan, where steep crags and a lack of water, soil, and roads kept economic activity to a minimum. Afghan government officials were sparse there too.