Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (6 page)

An hour later my cell phone rang. Not even Atif could keep the frustration from his voice. The bank clerk wanted a bribe.

I wheeled and strode over to our battered red pickup truck, clambered aboard, and roared off to the bank.

Atif and I joined forces outside and then went to find the impediment. The man had to sign five different receipts out of his little book, didn’t I see? He paged through them. He would be needing twenty afghanis each to do that, or a total of about two dollars.

“Fine,” I replied, with a sunny grimace. “I’d be happy to give you the money.” I extracted a crumpled bill from my pocket. “The only thing is, I need a receipt. We have a board of directors. They look at our books. They demand amounts and accounts.”

The clerk snorted at the idea of a receipt for his baksheesh. I suggested we talk it over with his manager. The three of us trooped into an office, and I explained the case: delighted to give the man a hundred
afghanis, but I needed a piece of paper to justify it to my board. The manager conceded it was a fair point, and we trooped back out.

“Come back tomorrow,” the clerk commanded sullenly.

The scene could have been plucked directly out of
Policraticus
, John of Salisbury’s twelfth-century mirror for Henry II. “See how Cossus completes your documents,” John wrote.

If you are permitted to pay a visit to him, consider this great luck. If you have not brought your transit papers, you approach him in vain. Yet if you have brought them, it is still of no use, for he will not acquiesce to dishonour noble hands with your vile parchment. What more? It is necessary to buy his efforts, since neither work nor pen nor the various inks come without price. If you do not make him favorable to you, he will so twist the very syllables and strokes of the letters as to write war for peace and quarrel for quiet. If perhaps a handsome belt is yours, or a suitable knife, or anything else in the way of attractive small possessions, count it among his goods, if you do not wish to lose all your trouble and expense. For it will be wrung from you by direct requests if you do not forestall these by your own generosity.
⁷

I’m not sure I can reconstruct the physics of what happened next. Suddenly I was seated cross-legged atop the man’s desk, amid the file folders and the stray papers, severe faces stapled passport-sized to some of their corners. “Okay,” I declared. “I’ll just sit here till you sign for our money.” I folded my arms across my chest. “As long as it takes.”

After a stunned second, a bustle commenced. The man got up from his chair. Ten minutes later another clerk delivered our booklets, duly signed and stamped. Atif and I thanked him and descended the stairway, trying not to exult too openly. We had won. We had obtained an administrative service without giving in to corruption.

But something about that encounter has bothered me ever since. Another man had been waiting with us most of that morning. He was a weathered old graybeard, in a turban and tunic, perched on one of the black vinyl chairs with a heel tucked under him, out of long habit of sitting cross-legged on mats on the floor. Like us, he was trying to
accomplish some formality. He had paid his bribe—ten afghanis, I think he told us—but he was still waiting.

And I hadn’t done a thing to help him. As a foreigner, I could afford to bluster and bluff. A lowly bank employee was unlikely to take the risk of dragging an American to jail or smacking her in the face. That creased old Afghan farmer had no such standing.

On this and later occasions, I let officials treat me as an exception. I’d get my problem solved—the concern of most businesses operating in acutely corrupt environments—and then go away, leaving the system unbolstered by a bribe, but also unchecked. What impression must it have made on Afghans, as they waited through a blistering afternoon in the dusty customs yard, to see an American get preferential treatment at the hands of venal administrators?

I
N 2007,
my friend Paula Loyd,
⁸
a former U.S. Army staff sergeant and civil affairs officer, asked me to share such perspectives with incoming Dutch, British, Canadian, and other officers who traded off command of RC-South every nine months. She recommended me, as a civilian subject-matter expert, for NATO training exercises.

To speak effectively to these officers, I had to learn yet another new language. I ingested a lot of specialized vocabulary and acronyms, which seemed to change from one year to the next. But I never managed to gain control of my style. Epiphanies, once they hit, seem so
obvious
. I forgot what the fog was like. I lost patience, because time was passing and the grace period Afghans had accorded us was running out. I couldn’t contain my shrill frustration as I watched successive Western officials make precisely the mistakes I had made, and their predecessors had made. Corruption networks were solidifying and growing more brazen by the day. There was no more time to give them the benefit of the doubt, or to prioritize some short-term security imperative, like moving matériel up a road, over a tough-minded approach to the Afghan police officer whose men patrolled it.

I must have sounded as repetitive as William of Pagula, railing at Edward III in the 1330s.

But my NATO training audiences could not, or would not, see how
self-defeating the conventional approach was. If the very Afghan officials by whose side they planned to combat extremists were generating those extremists themselves—by having their men shake down travelers and taking a cut, or leaving bills unpaid, or by providing judiciously selected “intelligence” to engineer a night-raid against a rival trafficking network—it was too big a paradox to take in. NATO officers did not want to know.

O
NE INTERNATIONAL OFFICIAL
who did seem to get it was deputy NATO senior civilian representative Nicholas Williams, whom I had met when he held a different job in Kandahar. In 2008 he invited me to ISAF headquarters to meet some senior officers. “Sally the Soap-maker Gives an Ops Brief” was how I jokingly came to refer to my main presentation.

It was received with interest. So I began a routine that took me to the Afghan capital once every couple of months, to do the rounds. In early 2009, I requested a meeting with the ISAF commander, General David McKiernan. Steeling myself for a hedgerow of star-studded officers and guarded interest at best, I found it was just the two of us—bound, I realized with a start, by an inconvenient love for this impossible place. McKiernan asked me to join his staff. I accepted on the spot. From that perch, I might at last be in a position to help force some change.

The inauguration of a new U.S. administration in Washington infused me with hope. It would be led by a constitutional lawyer, no less, who could be expected to understand the importance of good governance. It might even launch a wholesale policy revision.

During those months, indeed, I had also been traveling to Washington to try to put some imprint on the still-wet cement there. One meeting led astonishingly to another, and on a January day, I found myself ushered in to see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

I was a long way from Kandahar, on the oak-paneled “E Ring” of the Pentagon. But just the look of his inner office set Mullen apart. Instead of the standard-issue dark furniture, the framed mementos and photos of handshakes jostling for space on the walls, it was blond wood everywhere:
a sweep of curved desk standing light on its legs, a matching table with webbed ergonomic chairs, and a bookshelf against the opposite wall cut so it tilted—a glint of silent humor on the part of a navy guy presiding over two land wars.

Mullen listened intently, head cocked. He took notes in a spiral book with misshapen fingers. But it wasn’t that meeting that lodged in my memory. It was something that happened afterward, when we crossed paths in a paneled hall. He called me over, almost trapping me against a wall, and launched into a lecture about my security. I tried to wave his concerns away. This was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I know you have more important things—”

“This is important,” he cut me off. “I call mothers. I don’t want to have to call your mother.”

That brought me up sharply. I looked at him. “If you’re serious . . .”

“I am.”

“Then there are two things you can do that would really help.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Next time you see President Karzai, and next time you’re in Pakistan to visit the chief of the army staff, General Kayani, let it slip that I’m a friend of yours. That will reduce the threat to me by about seventy percent.”

I’m not sure Mullen entirely followed my logic, but he promised he would do it. My point was this: as feckless as both countries’ governments might look, they operated as networks, with a lot of vertical reach. Many of the bad things that happened at ground level could be traced to the top.

N
OT THREE MONTHS
after I moved to ISAF Headquarters from Kandahar, in late spring of 2009, my boss General McKiernan was recalled and replaced by the emaciated bundle of torqued nerves that was General Stanley McChrystal—a different man entirely.

CHAPTER FOUR

Nonkinetic Targeting

Kabul, 2009

T
he team of General Stanley McChrystal tore into the international military headquarters in Kabul in June 2009 like a summer twister, knocking down trees, pulling tiles off roofs, scrubbing clouds of dust out of back corners. I had gotten to know most of the tight-knit group during my D.C. visits and had loved their incandescent energy and sense of purpose. But I had underestimated the accompanying arrogance.

The day after McChrystal formally took command, I sent him a first e-mail: “drafting an anti-corruption strategy.” I was intent on using my position to design policies I had been mulling over for years and to see them tried out in practice. The effort to do so, over the next seven months—and the resistance it encountered from both Afghan and international officials—taught me a great deal about systemic corruption and all the reasons that can be dreamed up for ignoring it.

McChrystal’s reply to my e-mail came back a seemingly eternal four days later: “Concur we need to get on the anti-corruption policy—let’s do it.”

A phalanx of colonels bustled from office to office, during those heady first weeks, with the latest version of some PowerPoint diagram they were building, determined to encapsulate everything in one visual blow. Civilians from Washington think tanks descended to conduct an assessment of the campaign. In meetings with these groups, in whirlwind
trips to the regional commands, around conference tables in windowless plywood rooms, earnest conversations were had about how the force was explaining the war to itself, the true nature of the threat. Brigade and battalion commanders felt empowered to reframe the problems they were facing in ways they hadn’t dared to before. And corruption kept coming up.

“I believe we could do all the things we need to do in a counterinsurgency strategy, but we won’t succeed if we don’t change the political environment.”

“What would be a game changer? We have to show we are willing to tackle corruption. We have to drop GIRoA and focus on the people.”

Drop the government and focus on the people. The prospect still raises anxiety inside many embassies and international organizations. The World Bank recently began formulating the radical notion that its end user might perhaps not be developing-nation governments, as previous policy had it, but rather their people.

At ISAF headquarters in 2009, the very concept was revolutionary. Implementing it would have required a rupture with years of mission statements framed around such objectives as “building and reinforcing GIRoA” or “connecting the people to the government.” It would have called upon sophisticated political judgment at every echelon. It would have required strategic direction from Washington, and explanations to allied governments, many of which had sold the Afghanistan mission to voters by arguing that their troops would be supporting a democratically elected government against religious fanatics. A new narrative, with the Afghan government sharing the role of villain, would have made for some complicated talking points.

But a growing number of us were convinced that any hope for success in Afghanistan depended on just such a transformation.

The first occupant of a newly minted anticorruption post—a jointed-at-the-waist, stubborn, benevolent giant of a Dutch lieutenant colonel named Piet Boering—became an inseparable partner. The two of us, together with Nick Williams and others, started from earlier recommendations on how to enhance the credibility of the upcoming Afghan presidential election. Karzai was visibly working to rig it. Vietnam and Algeria provided examples of insurgencies that had triumphed in the
wake of blatantly stolen elections. With such a clear rationale for action, we gambled, approaches might be tested in the electoral context that could later be used against corruption more generally.

Officers, however, balked at the prospect of reducing their “distance from local and international politics,” as one brigadier general put it in an e-mail to the command group. Surely managing elections was the United Nations’ role, many argued, not the military’s. Our security mandate was understood to mean protecting Afghans from violence perpetrated by insurgents only—not from violence perpetrated by the government.

The problem with this logic was that Afghans were threatened by both—as are so many populations, caught between the abuses of a predatory government and the violence of extremists claiming to combat it. Soldiers, moreover, had more contact with the Afghan population than did their civilian counterparts—they stopped to speak to villagers or drink tea with elders during patrols. Why not add a few queries about electoral intimidation to their standard questionnaires? What about allocating some of the flight time of all those satellites and drones and blimps floating above military installations to observing polling places? Even a general picture of voter density, provided to oversight bodies for comparison to reported turnout numbers, might help.