Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (10 page)

The presumption was that the Afghan government just couldn’t reach those uncharted tracts. Americans (and other international observers) presumed that GIRoA
aimed
to govern, but was failing, due to its lack of human capital and the monumental physical and institutional challenges facing a country that had suffered more than two decades of war. Secondarily, they presumed that this feeble government was also plagued by corruption—almost a side issue.

But what if the Afghan government wasn’t really trying to govern? What if it was focused on another objective altogether? What if corruption was central to that objective and therefore to the government’s mode of operation?

Perhaps GIRoA could best be understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organization—or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily—whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting resources for personal gain.

If GIRoA’s main objective was siphoning riches, then why should it waste manpower on the impoverished east? It did well to leave that forbidding terrain alone and deploy its personnel, effort, and force in places like Kandahar, a city situated in the heart of opium country, near important deposits of marble and alabaster, the principal entry point to southern Afghanistan, and a major node at the intersection of transcontinental land routes.

No executive decree would be required—no edict penned by President Karzai—to enforce these personnel policies. The system’s internal economy would weight the distribution. Officeholders who had to recoup the money they’d spent buying their jobs would request assignments in zones where cash flowed. And senior officials, anticipating the sums to be collected from subordinates, would not try too hard to fill billets in impoverished rural districts.

I was often asked, moreover, why it was so hard to find honest people to serve in government. If that government was actually a crime syndicate in disguise, the dearth of good people was no surprise. Mafias select for criminality, by turning violation of the law into a rite of passage, by rewarding it, by hurting high-minded individuals who might make trouble. An absence of integrity within this system did not mean
Afghans as a people were intrinsically or culturally corrupt. This late in the game, constructive men and women had been stripped out—and by now might prefer to stay clear. “No one would dirty his clothes getting near this government,” a Kandahar-area farmer exclaimed to me once.
⁴

Twelfth-century John of Salisbury recognized this tendency of corrupt systems to distill and purify their own criminality. Acts of corruption, he wrote in his mirror
Policraticus
,

are done publicly, and neither governors nor proconsuls check them, because . . . the raven rejoices in the works of the wolf, and the unjust judge applauds the minister of injustice . . . in lands whose princes are infidels and companions of thieves; they hasten to embrace those whose misdeeds they observe, thus adding their own share of iniquity in the hope that they may gain for themselves some portion of the spoil.

The resulting entity is almost unassailable, John continues, quoting Job:

Their “body is like a shield made of cast and tightly packed scales which have been joined together; one is connected to the other, and not even a breathing space comes between them; one has been glued to another and, holding fast, they will not be separated from each other.”
⁵

That was the Afghan government. It was not incapable. It was performing its core function with admirable efficiency—bringing power to bear where it counted. And it was assiduously protecting its own. Governing—the exercise that attracted so much international attention—was really just a front activity.

Such an analysis might well be applied to other “failed” or “failing” states. They are failing at being states. That is because the business model their leadership has developed has nothing to do with governing a country. But it is remarkably effective in achieving its objective: enriching the ruling clique.

In Afghanistan, faced with such moral and material depravity, a
brutal and tenacious insurgency was serving up its idea of an antidote: a narrow reading of religious devotion. Many Afghans were swayed by the argument that government integrity could be achieved only through religious rectitude. Some appreciated the outlet that militancy provided for their anger. Still others just laid low, unwilling to take risks on behalf of a government that treated them almost as badly as the Taliban did. And it was all U.S. troops could do to keep that insurgency at bay.

I
N THE WINTER
of 2009, the ISAF Anti-Corruption Task Force—with its evolving procedures for prioritizing “malign actors” and its still-tentative back channels for sharing information and planning joint action—was something like that airplane Hakim Angar had boarded, anticipating his new duties in the border police. The machine was on the runway. Its engines were turning. But it was not off the ground.

Even the simple notion that the international community should refrain from actively showering the most egregiously corrupt Afghans with honors was proving hard to implement.

One day I got a call from the U.S. embassy’s creative and determined anticorruption officer, Sarah Peck. “You’ll never believe it.” Her voice seethed with exasperation. “Guess who they’ve invited to Germany—to a counternarcotics conference. Daoud Daoud!”

Daoud Daoud was Afghanistan’s young and, to many, appealing minister of counternarcotics. He was also, according to multiple, separate strands of information, one of the biggest drug traffickers in the country. At ISAF we would soon be digging through indications that he had influenced the dispatch of an Afghan National Army unit into a pointless skirmish in order to protect his control of a major smuggling route on the border with Tajikistan.

“Oh, you’re kidding.” The ironies kept exceeding even our jaded expectations. “Who’s inviting him?”

“The Marshall Center.”

Attached to the U.S. European Command, situated among the trapezoidal Alps of Garmisch, Germany, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies holds courses and seminars for members of
Eurasian and other foreign defense establishments. And a good friend of mine, who had left Kabul only months earlier, now worked there.

“The Marshall Center?” Grinning, a bone in my teeth. “I might just be able to get this turned off.”

Thanks to some bureaucratic moves by my friend, the invitation was canceled, a victory of sorts—though ad hoc, achieved by means of our own network of personal contacts, not the impartial application of an across-the-board rule.

A few days after the change was finalized, I got a call from Germany. My friend just had one problem. The Marshall Center’s counternarcotics conference was now out a speaker on Afghanistan. Did I have any ideas for someone to plug the hole?

I thought about it. The last thing I needed right then was to drop everything and run the teeth-gritting gauntlet of the Kabul airport on my way to Dubai, then Germany, just to give a talk. But my friend was in a jam. And I did know a bit about narcotics. I lived in the middle of the opium economy in Kandahar; my cooperative was designed to compete with it. I would watch baskets appear in the bazaar each spring, filled with the specialized tools used in the harvest—the wooden rods with tiny needles at the end for scoring the pods, and the snub, triangular, trowellike scoops for collecting the thick sap. Arghand couldn’t hire laborers to pick the wildflowers we needed in May and June, because the manpower of two provinces was drained off to the poppy fields in buses and taxis that left from the outskirts of town. I knew a dozen people who had planted, or had taken a job harvesting, opium. We had discussed their reasons. At trainings, I had briefed incoming NATO commands on the Afghan opium economy.

“I could probably do it,” I offered.

S
O ON A
J
ANUARY
day in 2010, I found myself in the pit of an auditorium-style classroom, looking up curving ranks of seats at about two hundred military and police officers from forty-plus countries. I had put together a few slides depicting general trends in Afghan opium trafficking. I explained how it was largely the inaccessibility of credit that was driving people to poppy—not Taliban coercion or even the high
price (which was not all that competitive against the sums the region’s legendary pomegranates or lush apricots could fetch). I discussed the role of the late-1990s drought.
^†

But there were two slides I could not resist slipping into the back end of my presentation: the ones depicting the Afghan government as a vertically integrated criminal syndicate. My objective was really just to indicate that opium wasn’t the whole story. Opium was a piece of a much larger problem.

I talked the audience through the slides, explaining how money was defying gravity to travel upward within the corrupt system, and pointing out the strength of the protection guarantee subordinate officials received in return for that money.

To my surprise, those two wonky slides electrified the group. Attendees crowded down afterward to talk.

“You just described my country,” said one officer. He pronounced it something like “cohn-try.” He was from Nigeria. Nigeria, I mused . . . didn’t they have an insurgency too? Boko Haram? Others joined us: from neighboring African countries, from Colombia, from Central Asia, from the Balkans. The correlation was uncanny. Almost every officer who told me my diagram hit home came from a place that was also confronting an extremist insurgency.

A roaring sound began to fill my ears. The link between kleptocracy and violent religious extremism wasn’t just an Afghanistan thing. It was a global phenomenon.

*
Please see the
Appendix
for versions of these sketches, as they have now evolved.

†
Poppy’s value—to the farmers—is lower than that of pomegranates or other fruit. Structural factors make it attractive to grow anyway: One of those is access to credit. Opium buyers provide loans, otherwise unavailable. And they require repayment in opium, not cash. If a farmer wants to marry his son off, for example, he will have to count about $10,000—in bride-price, in building an extra room for the new couple, in throwing a huge party. If he has already tapped out his relatives for loans over the past few years, the only person to whom he can turn is often the opium dealer. But then he has to plant poppy to pay the loan back. Another factor is speed of return. A fruit tree takes five years to mature and begin producing. There was a drought in the late 1990s, so many trees died. To replace them, a farmer would have to be able to withstand years of no income from that patch of land, before his first harvest. Opium, on the other hand, is harvested (and so brings in revenue) the year it is put in the ground. And if an opium crop is lost due to weather or other vagaries, only that year’s investment is gone. Loss of fruit trees usually means the loss of decades of work.

CHAPTER SIX

Revolt Against Kleptocracy

The Arab Spring: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, 2011

A
year later, in mid-January 2011, I was returning to Washington from a trip to Afghanistan. By then I was working as a special assistant to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who two years before had confronted me in a Pentagon hallway, worried about having to call my mother with condolences. I stopped for a few days’ layover in Paris, my home base since 1993. I treasured the moments to catch my breath there, as I shuttled between Kandahar and the Pentagon—alien worlds, both.

But Paris, that January, was hardly becalmed. The unimaginable was transpiring in former colonies across the Mediterranean—countries with which France has retained intense human and political ties. A wildfire of protest was ripping through North Africa, against the rule of long-standing despots. The myth of Arab servility, some genetic proclivity to autocratic rule, was dissolving. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had run tiny Tunisia for nearly twenty-five years, had just come crashing down. France was reverberating with the shock. W
HO’S
N
EXT?
blared giant letters across the top of the newspaper I picked up as I boarded my flight to D.C. Mug shots of half a dozen Arab leaders, from King Muhammad VI of Morocco to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, hung in a row across the page.

In Washington, I was still throbbing with the jolt. “What do you
make of
Tunisia
?” I fired at colleagues. What I got back, largely, were shrugs. Not until Egyptians poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square a few days later, demanding Mubarak’s head—forcing their urgent demands into the consciousness of U.S. officials who had long found him convenient—did Washington begin to grasp the significance of the hurtling events in the Middle East.

For me, it seemed the most important upheaval in the international political order since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Within days I was begging Mullen to send me. I spoke Arabic. I had lived in Morocco as a Peace Corps volunteer, had reported on the grisly Algerian civil war in the 1990s. I could provide a perspective that differed from what his system was telling him—just as I did for Afghanistan. I asked to cross the continent, comparing countries whose regimes had fallen with those where they hung on. I promised him I’d skip Libya, already a hot war.

The contrast between my sense of the unfolding events and what Mullen was hearing from his Joint Staff was stark. By then, Moroccan demonstrators were in the streets, sometimes clashing with police in gritty Casablanca—not trying to unseat their king but, almost bookishly, requesting detailed constitutional changes. They wanted to vote for their prime minister; they wanted an independent judiciary, a reduction in the king’s powers. They cited the English model as a constitutional monarchy that made sense.

Algeria, I knew, remained an asphyxiated place, run behind the scenes by decrepit generals, its population still too shattered by the 1990s carnage to contemplate change.