Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (23 page)

So powerful and so consistent has the hostility been that it has prompted me to reconsider. Perhaps corruption is not, in fact, a boring topic to think about, but rather a threatening one. Perhaps this issue, in some profound way, challenges people’s worldviews.

Turning the problem over in my mind, I have discerned the contours of a hypothesis.

In light of their views on the organization of society and political economy, Westerners, especially Americans, can be separated into two basic groups. One camp believes in the necessity, and the virtue, of government. People in this category tend to see governments, in whatever country, as essentially devoted to the common good—staffed by public servants, in the full sense of the term. Of course there are lapses; of course some officials are venal; but such cases are seen as exceptions. For this group of Westerners, the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate.

The other camp is characterized by suspicion of government. For people in this category, many of society’s problems can be blamed on an excess of government interference and regulation. Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state-run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks—and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it—conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process.

For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.

A
T THE END
of that September Principals’ Committee meeting, the State Department was tasked to draw up an anticorruption plan based on the analysis contained in its memo. But Mullen argued for a second, tougher approach to the Karzai kleptocracy, to be rolled out when the State Department’s prescriptions (inevitably) failed. Mullen discussed the idea with the politically cautious secretary of defense Robert Gates.

“It’s not because we’ve pushed on corruption that our ties with Karzai are strained,” Mullen pointed out to his personal staff. “Because we haven’t pushed on corruption. I’m looking for a way to get serious.”

The principals ultimately agreed on the need for some sort of tougher backup plan. The National Security Staff was tasked with drafting it. Mullen suggested we work on our own version in parallel.

So a few of us set about imagining what a more robust approach to Karzai might look like. The effort amounted to translating the work of Petraeus’s Directed Telescopes up a level, to match the scope and the levers available to the U.S. government as a whole.

We arranged meetings with sometimes-bemused kindred spirits at the Departments of Treasury and Justice, and we called on a few top private-sector anticorruption specialists to review our ideas. A veteran of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act litigations pointed out that U.S. anticorruption efforts traditionally punished the bribe payer, not the official extorting the money. “Every time I tried to prosecute officials, I got pushback from State,” he said.

One tack was to place more conditions on the financial assistance the United States provides to Afghanistan. Or, to personalize the pain, why not take a leaf out of Karzai’s book and cancel the top-up salaries of select members of his personal staff? Tourist or student visas could be denied. Members of corrupt Afghan networks who were dual nationals could be pursued under U.S. law—for example, for business dealings with Iran.

One sophisticated legal device we discovered was
in rem
forfeiture. Under that provision of U.S. law, no convicted criminal is needed, not even a suspect, to target the proceeds of a crime. If a link can be demonstrated between assets residing in the United States and a crime committed
anywhere, then those assets can be seized. Afghan corruption booty—kickbacks from development contracts or fraudulent Kabul Bank loans—that was held in dollars or had been converted to property in the United States was fair game.

Another possibility we explored, though Treasury officials thought it politically difficult to achieve, was to develop a new sanctions regime—like the Narcotics Kingpin designation, or the Terrorism Sanctions Regulations—aimed at high-level corruption. Such designations prevent any U.S. citizen or entity from conducting financial transactions with certain individuals, organizations, or governments that fit the criteria. We played with potential language for a new “Egregious Corruption” designation and recommended some such regime be promulgated.

Expanding on the first conversation in Mullen’s office, my colleagues and I sketched out several different courses of action, keyed to upcoming events on the calendar of U.S.-Afghan relations, that would make use of specific elements on our long list of tools, applied to the Afghan context in a strategized way. Although none of these courses of action was ultimately implemented, the effort serves as a model for how the leverage at the disposal of the U.S. government can be combined in precise ways to fit the real-world situation of a country at a specific point in time—and the careful planning that should go into the design of such a campaign.

One course of action, for example, was to assign a single administration “case-officer” to Karzai, to reduce the number of mixed messages he was receiving and his ability to play one U.S. official off against another.

Another, which might incorporate the first, was to deliberately push Karzai toward a binary junction at which his actions would irrefutably identify him as either part of the solution or part of the problem—in which case, a dramatic U.S. response might ensue. We suggested a two-month evaluation period and a list of concrete steps Karzai could take that would indicate he was truly intent on improving governance. He might authorize an independent audit of Kabul Bank, for example, or cease directly interfering in judicial affairs, or sign a memorandum of understanding requiring the removal of senior army or police officers known to engage in predatory corruption.

During the evaluation period, under this proposed course of action,
U.S. anticorruption activities would be redoubled as part of the test, with new investigations, and case-by-case U.S. interagency justifications, before continuing to pay abusively corrupt officials as intelligence assets. Karzai’s reactions to these steps would be noted.

We examined his likely countermoves, such as scapegoating constructive Afghans, or denying visas to relevant U.S. officials. To parry such blows, the United States could reduce financial support to the ministries that those banned U.S. officials were scheduled to work with, or protect constructive Afghan officials by hiring them into international positions.

For each course of action, we considered the likely outcomes. Karzai might, after a brief struggle, improve governance, thus reducing the insurgency’s draw and helping end the conflict. Or he might put up sustained resistance, employing the countermoves we predicted (or others). Or the Afghan government might implode altogether, as corrupt ministers, their impunity evaporating, fled the country. The plan suggested policy responses for each of these potential consequences.

Finally, we listed arguments for and against each course of action. We developed a total of five such scenarios, accompanied by similarly tailored contextual analyses.

Communicating with colleagues at ISAF, I also started culling through names of the worst offenders, men whose activities had placed them at the top of one or more prioritization lists for “nonkinetic targeting,” according to the procedures currently being followed in different headquarters. My guidance was to come up with a top-twenty list.

The objective of that maneuver, I gathered, was to use it to confront the CIA on its approach to Afghan officials. By now it was a matter of public record that Karzai’s land-grabbing, vote-stealing, drug-dealing younger brother, among others, was on the Agency payroll.
⁸
President Barack Obama had reportedly not appreciated learning about that in the pages of the
New York Times
. The “top twenty” list was designed for Obama and the principals to compare with the CIA’s personnel records, to see how many of the most corrupt Afghan officials were also paid retainers of the U.S. government.

Mullen was simultaneously pushing the intelligence community to think through the interaction between corruption and violent insurgency more broadly—to see what evidence existed to support the
equation that he was finding increasingly convincing: that outrage at a government’s corrupt practices often provided fuel for insurgencies.

By then, data was piling up—for the Afghanistan case, at least. Officers who interviewed Taliban detainees were corroborating what I had been hearing from my neighbors in Kandahar for years. At the top of the list of reasons cited by prisoners for joining the Taliban was not ethnic bias, or disrespect of Islam, or concern that U.S. forces might stay in their country forever, or even civilian casualties. At the top of the list was the perception that the Afghan government was “irrevocably” corrupt. Taliban detainees reportedly judged that the corruption had grown institutionalized and was therefore unchangeable. They were running out of nonviolent options for altering what they saw as a fundamental flaw in their government.

Yet that autumn of 2010, I caught members of Mullen’s own AfPak intelligence task force manipulating information like this to support conclusions
downplaying
the role of corruption in the Afghan conflict. The CIA put out a product purporting to examine the role of corruption in the outcomes of ten different insurgencies. The conclusion was that it had mattered in the success of only one. I pounced on the pages dealing with Vietnam, wondering how the authors were going to get around that example. Vietnam, they professed, was excluded because the insurgency had not succeeded; the war had ended in a national unity government.

One morning toward the end of September, I was stunned to discover details of the ongoing interagency debate on the anticorruption plan the State Department was still drafting plastered across the pages of several national newspapers.

“The U.S. is planning a concerted campaign against lower-level corruption in Afghanistan thought to be directly feeding the insurgency, and ceding more control to Afghans of the higher-level investigations that soured relations with President Hamid Karzai,” read the
Wall Street Journal
, referring to a “shift” in policy.
⁹

But no such decision had been made. The most recent version of the State Department’s classified effort was sitting on my desk, the word
DRAFT
printed across the top. I was in the process of entering tracked changes. The plan had not yet been raised to the level of the Principals
Committee for discussion, let alone been seen or approved by the president.

And it never would be.

What was playing out across the front pages of leading newspapers was a classic example of a patented Washington tactic: offensive leaking—providing confidential information to the press as a way to gain leverage in an interagency struggle.

The National Security Staff never would draft that robust plan for addressing the Afghan kleptocracy, which Mullen and Gates had convinced the principals to request. The Joint Staff’s list of leverage and potential courses of action was ignored. The task was simply left to languish. Apparently, in government, you can fail to turn in your homework but still get a passing grade.

The question of pursuing a serious anticorruption policy was finally put to rest in January 2011. The battle was waged in the margins of an interagency document called “Objective 2015.” It had occurred to someone that the U.S. government really ought to have a picture of what it was trying to achieve in Afghanistan—what that country would need to look like by the end of 2014 if it were to weather the withdrawal of international troops without imploding.

The document was an embarrassment. Just the grammatical errors in the first paragraph made me flinch. Rather than identify true minimal requirements for Afghanistan to survive without international troops, it cut down ambitions to fit what was deemed “achievable”—whether or not such goals were sufficient to ensure Afghanistan could continue to exist.

It seemed to me, for example, that for the Afghan government to last, motivations for joining the insurgency had to diminish. Afghans had better think more highly of their government by 2015 than they did in 2011. Yet in the document, the very modest goal of an upward trend in Afghans’ confidence in their government was not listed as essential to mission success. It was considered only a “nice-to-have.”

The real anticorruption fight, however, was not over such fundamentals. It played out in the fine print of the document’s “implementation guidelines.” Over the furious dissent of mid-level Justice Department (DoJ) officials, seconded by the Joint Staff—but not by their own chief,
Attorney General Eric Holder—the document barred DoJ attorneys from mentoring anticorruption cases. They could do generalized capacity building, but they could not help shepherd specific cases against specific Afghan government officials. The investigations units, even if they were able to continue functioning, would never be able to bring a case to court. The courageous anticorruption prosecutors could never hope for backup from U.S. officials if they were intimidated, harassed, or demoted.

The gavel had come down. By way of an apparently insignificant detail buried deep in an interagency document—a few words of guidance to DoJ attorneys—the U.S. decision to turn a blind eye to Afghan corruption was finally spelled out.