Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (22 page)

Nothing of the sort had happened. What Karzai neglected to share with
This Week
was that he had authorized the arrest himself. I went over the sequence of events several times with Meyer, with the embassy legal attaché who had participated in meetings with Afghan officials, and with the FBI officer who was now mentoring Steve Foster’s Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF). Officers from that unit, which had developed
the 2009 case against Border Police Chief Sayfullah, had carried out Salehi’s arrest.

According to all those participants in the events, what had happened was this. Karzai, informed of his aide’s corruption, had demanded to see the evidence. Deputy U.S. Ambassador Anthony Wayne had played the tape of a judicially authorized wiretap for Afghan national security adviser Rangin Spanta. Salehi could be heard demanding the payoff. Meyer told me Spanta began to cry, exclaiming he would tell Karzai that not only should Salehi be dismissed, he should be arrested and prosecuted. With Karzai’s approval, the attorney general signed out an arrest warrant, and Atmar’s successor as interior minister—after double-checking with the palace—directed the MCTF to carry out the arrest.

When the officers arrived at Salehi’s house, they did not storm it or break down his door. They called his cell phone number, identified themselves, and asked him to come out. Irate, Salehi phoned a different security agency, whose men rushed to the scene and exchanged shots with the MCTF but eventually retreated. Next, Salehi dialed up the interior minister, who explained to him that Karzai in person had approved the arrest, and that he had better surrender.

But U.S. officials ignored these facts. As a way to allow President Karzai to “save face,” one of them later explained to me, they volunteered that the arrest had perhaps been a bit heavy-handed. U.S. law enforcement personnel who had been working the case, not to mention their Afghan protégés, were stung by the betrayal. “I have seen many a U.S. arrest that was far less polite than this one,” commented the FBI officer. Karzai began moving to shut down the two investigation units.

Petraeus swung into action, mobilizing a broad-based international coalition in support of the police units, their funding, and independence. It was masterful. Karzai backed off.

And whirled around to attack the judicial branch instead. On “sovereignty” grounds, Britain was forbidden to provide top-up salaries to the vetted prosecutors who made up the attorney general’s anticorruption unit, cutting their take-home pay from $800 a month to $200. The two prosecutors on the Salehi case—one of them a woman standing about five foot four—were demoted and reassigned, amid insulting rumors. “When we really needed help,” she told me later, “no one came. We were
treated as if we were dispensable.” The deputy attorney general, who had bravely signed several anticorruption search and arrest warrants, was fired, accused of espionage, and had to flee briefly to Iran.

In the face of this onslaught, the U.S. government took no meaningful action. Federal prosecutors assigned to mentor Afghan counterparts lodged protests and maintained hesitant contacts with their anticorruption protégés, but they had no top-cover. No American official with clout stepped in to protect the exposed Afghan professionals the U.S. government had coaxed to the dangerous forefront of the battle against corruption. Members of the U.S. National Security Staff in charge of the Afghanistan file “were the worst of the cockroaches,” Meyer growled later. “They just scuttled for the dark corners.”

Mirror writers like William of Pagula foresaw whom Afghans would blame in such an event. “To neglect to act,” he wrote in his diatribe to King Edward III, “when one can deflect perverse people is nothing else than to favor them. The king would seem to agree to the wrongdoers [when] he does not hasten to correct what ought to be corrected.”
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For many Afghans, the passivity of U.S. officials could only add up to complicity. “People think you want the corruption,” a Kandahar friend remarked.

In the following months, the Salehi case file was seized by palace officials, and the charges were dropped. Anticorruption prosecutors were deluged with inconsequential cases, while significant prosecutions stalled. “What Karzai can do to me is ten times worse than anything the United States can do,” the U.S. legal attaché recalled the chief of the Anti-Corruption Unit telling him. “If I go against Karzai, what can you do to support me?” The Afghan interior ministry refused to authorize further SIU or MCTF investigations. “The investigators are trying to lower the bar, but it’s hard to get it low enough,” the MCTF’s FBI mentor told Admiral Mullen later that year. “We can’t find a fish little enough to go after.”

E
VENTS MOVED
so quickly in the first weeks after Salehi’s arrest, there was no way to put all the pieces together. Looking back, I recognize that wishful thinking must have bleared my eyes to the obvious—to
the fundamental weakness of U.S. resolve. Decision makers, including civilians, still saw corruption as secondary to the immediate task of fighting insurgents. The basic equation had not penetrated: that corruption was in fact driving the insecurity we were struggling to quell.

The Directed Telescopes were preparing for a major event we had advised Petraeus to host, what was called a “commander’s conference.” It would be his first chance since assuming command to meet his key subordinates and share with them his vision for the campaign. It was the moment, we believed, for him to spell out his revolutionary new governance strategy. All the division commanders and their relevant senior staff were summoned to Kabul on August 14. The Directed Telescopes were hard at work designing slides for Petraeus’s presentation.

As the helicopters began to touch down on the eve of the meeting, grumbling about the governance strategy grew audible. We heard of conversations at the operational command headquarters lasting late into the night. The division commanders needed some clarity, confirmation from Petraeus that his odd-looking collection of civilian advisers had indeed been speaking for him.

They got the opposite. To our appalled shock, as Petraeus worked through his presentation the next day, he dwelled not on our slides—which signaled a new approach that was countercultural in the military and would require patient explanation—but rather on slides telling the officers to do what they already knew how to do best: kill the enemy. Pausing to expand on the contents, Petraeus even argued
against
some of our slides.

We had no idea what had happened.
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B
Y LATE
A
UGUST
, I had the growing sense that nothing significant could be accomplished from Kabul anyway. The corruption networks were just too vertically integrated: any move against any official, no matter how lowly, would reverberate all the way up the chain to Karzai. And direct involvement by a chief of state catapults foreign policy problems beyond the purview of locally based U.S. officials—even officials as powerful as an ISAF commander—to the level of the U.S. secretary of state or even the president. Anticorruption policy would have to be
decided in Washington. I left Kabul on September 3, sure I could serve Mullen better now in his office than on informal loan to Petraeus.

Within days of taking up quarters in the Pentagon, and receiving my badges and the combination to the barrel lock on my office door, I was summoned to join a febrile conversation in Mullen’s light-filled office. The cabinet was at last taking up the issue of corruption in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had submitted a memo at that day’s Principals’ Committee meeting. These periodic gatherings of the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head of the CIA, and a few other top officials were where all the final national security decisions were made. Briefing a half-dozen members of his personal staff on what had transpired, Mullen praised Clinton’s memo as first time the U.S. government, at his level, had even attempted an analysis of the corruption problem.

As the conversation swirled around, my voice emerged as—unbelievably—one of the more moderate in the room. I had been struggling over the years to tone down my off-putting stridency. It was electrifying to hear raw common sense in such a high-level setting. One of Mullen’s eclectic and irreverent special assistants wondered whether success in Afghanistan was even possible so long as Hamid Karzai remained in office.

If this conversation was happening in this room, I thought, maybe there was still a chance to influence U.S. policy.

Like my colleagues, I disagreed with my boss as to the quality of the memo Clinton had presented to her peers. Where his innate optimism perceived a great first step, I saw an attempted end run around the whole issue.

The memo developed the argument I had first heard the previous year in those early anticorruption meetings at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. There were three different types of corruption, went the reasoning, of differing gravity. “Functional corruption,” or small-scale palm greasing, was of no great concern, since it did not jeopardize near-term efforts to fight the insurgency. High-level corruption was worrisome but largely because of its impact on U.S.—not Afghan—public opinion. Such criminality at the top of government was typical of that part of the world, the analysis judged, and could only be addressed carefully, by appealing to Karzai to take appropriate steps.

“We have come to conclude that unless Afghans take the lead in combating corruption, efforts are doomed,” State Department officials insisted. The memo, in fact, called for
avoiding
large-scale reforms. What really mattered, it opined, was what bothered ordinary Afghans the most: “predatory corruption” on the local level—in particular, shakedowns at the hands of the police.

I saw in this analysis an effort to define the matter down to relative inconsequence, to dodge the glaring reality that the Afghan government at its highest level was the source of the corruption that was plaguing the people and would never voluntarily reform. “A fish rots from the head,” my Afghan friends’ voices echoed in my ears. “A stream is muddied from the source.”

Most significantly, the memo entirely ignored the structured, vertically integrated nature of the corruption networks that had taken over the Afghan government. Predatory local officials enjoyed Kabul-based protection, I argued to Mullen, so efforts to address their behavior would inevitably lead to confrontations with Karzai. There was no way to isolate measures to confront “predatory corruption” from Kabul politics.

Any plan based on such a faulty analysis would never work.

Ironically, the memo placed most of the anticorruption burden on the military—through such initiatives as contracting reform and improvements in police mentoring. At a time when I had heard countless diplomats complain of being bulldozed by an overweening military, when the trope of military hubris dominated the pages of best-selling books about the war,
⁵
it was odd to see the State Department hand off to the military a problem that so obviously fell in its own lane. The U.S. civilian leadership was shirking its responsibility to develop a high-level strategic approach to the most significant political and diplomatic challenge of this conflict. It was yet another example of America’s almost instinctive reflex to lead with the military in moments of international crisis. Civilian officials, as much as they may mistrust the Pentagon, are often the first to succumb. They seem remarkably adverse to exploring the panoply of tools they could bring to bear—let alone to putting in the work to develop a comprehensive strategic framework within which military action would be
a
component, interlocking with others.

What is it, I found myself wondering, that keeps a country as powerful
as the United States from employing the vast and varied nonmilitary leverage at its disposal? Why is it so easily cowed by the tantrums of weaker and often dependent allies? Why won’t it ever posture effectively itself? Bluff? Deny visas? Slow down deliveries of spare parts? Choose
not
to build a bridge or a hospital? Why is nuance so irretrievably beyond American officials’ grasp, leaving them a binary choice between all and nothing—between writing officials a blank check and breaking off relations?

If the obstacle preventing more meaningful action against abusive corruption
wasn’t
active U.S. complicity, it sure looked like it.

The U.S. approach to a complex world had been voluntarily constrained this way for decades. Robert W. Komer dissected it brilliantly in a 1972 analysis of U.S. failings in Vietnam, titled
Bureaucracy Does Its Thing
. The monograph spells out how the weak and discredited and not independently viable government of South Vietnam had deftly brought superior leverage to bear over its U.S. patron.

For many reasons, we did not use vigorously the leverage over the Vietnamese leaders that our contributions gave us. We became their prisoners rather than they ours; the GVN used its weakness far more effectively as leverage on us than we used our strength to lever it.
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Substitute the Afghan government’s acronym, GIRoA, for GVN, and Komer could have been describing the relationship between Washington and Kabul.

This almost instinctive reluctance to apply U.S. government leverage may be due in part to a “realist”—or legitimist—reflex, or else to a reasonable concern about the United States acting with the arrogance of past colonizers, or appearing to give lessons in domains where its own behavior may be far from perfect.

But tactics aside, a deeper aversion seems to be conjured by the specific question of corruption. I long thought the topic just wasn’t sufficiently sexy to grasp people’s attention. Yet over the years that I have worked on the issue—in Afghanistan, where the equation seemed so obvious and the stakes so high, and as corruption-related revolts spread
across the world—I have watched decision makers and implementers, expert analysts, and even newspaper or magazine editors recoil from the subject, often aggressively. They have been unwilling even to ask the questions that might reveal an important driver of conflict worldwide.
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