THIEVES OF STATE
Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
Sarah Chayes
W W Norton & Company; 262 pages; $26.95
Across much of the world, populations suffer daily shakedowns by the police. At roadblocks, market stalls and entrances to government buildings, thugs in uniform gather "like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows", as Sarah Chayes writes. But that isn't the half of it. Globally, the three most important desiderata of our age - security, resilience and poverty reduction - are consistently being hollowed out by structural theft on a much larger scale, operating across corporations, governments, military establishments and civil services.
One key reason the United States and its allies have struggled to establish sustainable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the governments of those countries are mired in graft, caught in a mafia-like system in which money flows upward. The same goes for parts of Africa and Asia, and most of the former Soviet Union.
Ms Chayes's Thieves of State makes a strong case that acute corruption causes not only social breakdown but also violent extremism.
In a limited sense, this is Ms Chayes's own story, too: a former reporter for NPR in Algeria and Afghanistan, she abandoned journalism to work for a non-governmental organisation in Kandahar, then was a social entrepreneur there on her own account, finally becoming an advisor on corruption to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Her personal narrative is even more complicated than any summary might suggest. In 2001, Ms Chayes helped found a charity "of unclear mission", run by president Hamid Karzai's Baltimore-based elder brother, Qayum, about whom she says: "Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds. Welded to his brother's interests, he behaved in ways that contradicted his language so starkly that for a long time I had difficulty processing the inconsistency."
Elsewhere "those brothers" (there are six besides Hamid Karzai himself) are characterised as "self-serving", with the younger half-brother Ahmed Wali singled out as someone "who stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias, and wielded ISAF like a weapon against people who stood up to him". This, mind you, was also someone at whose house Ms Chayes had dinner once in 2003, in the course of which she watched Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers "hand him a tinfoil-wrapped package of bills".
Her experience corroborates an October 27, 2009, report in The New York Times, which stated that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll.
Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated by a police official and long-time confidant on July 12, 2011. About six years earlier, Ms Chayes severed her own relations with the Karzais. After leaving for a few months, she returned to Kandahar in May 2005 with a project that, on the surface, could never smell of corruption and intrigue.
Armed with an oil press and $25,000 from Oprah Winfrey, she set up a cooperative producing scented soap and beauty products, taking advantage of Afghanistan's horticultural riches. But she soon found that even this innocuous activity put her on the sharp end of corruption, as she tried to do simple things like deposit money in a bank without paying a bribe. So she began, in an amateurish way, to develop ideas for limiting corruption in places like Afghanistan.
Very quickly, the amateur became professional. She was soon called upon by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the ISAF to give expert briefings with a focus on anti-corruption measures. This led to a job with the ISAF, and then another as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the United States laboriously and somewhat unwillingly developed an anti-corruption strategy for Afghanistan.
Any such strategy was bound to conflict with political and military exigencies. But Ms Chayes's Afghan interlocutors told her repeatedly that poor governance was what was perpetuating the conflict, with graft generating disenchantment and driving people toward the Taliban. "Western officials," she writes, "habitually flipped the sequence: First let's establish security, then we can worry about governance."
Ordinary Afghans, meanwhile, took Western inaction on corruption as approval. Aid just added to the problem, in Ms Chayes's view: "Development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency."
Many of the other countries Ms Chayes brings into this chatty study show similar patterns. In each case, there are slight "variations on a theme", as she has it, ranging from the militarykleptocratic complex (Egypt) to the bureaucratic kleptocracy (Tunisia), the post-Soviet kleptocratic autocracy (Uzbekistan) and the resource kleptocracy (Nigeria).
While I fully agree with what she says, I found her prose style raising my hackles on occasion, with its effortful interpolations of colour ("the legendary but painfully dilapidated blue and white Mediterranean port city of Algiers"), verbs on steroids ("I wheeled and strode over to our battered red pickup truck, clambered aboard, and roared off to the bank") and its chapters that begin with such sentences as "Wait a second". I did, but I wish she had.
Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
Sarah Chayes
W W Norton & Company; 262 pages; $26.95
Across much of the world, populations suffer daily shakedowns by the police. At roadblocks, market stalls and entrances to government buildings, thugs in uniform gather "like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows", as Sarah Chayes writes. But that isn't the half of it. Globally, the three most important desiderata of our age - security, resilience and poverty reduction - are consistently being hollowed out by structural theft on a much larger scale, operating across corporations, governments, military establishments and civil services.
One key reason the United States and its allies have struggled to establish sustainable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the governments of those countries are mired in graft, caught in a mafia-like system in which money flows upward. The same goes for parts of Africa and Asia, and most of the former Soviet Union.
Ms Chayes's Thieves of State makes a strong case that acute corruption causes not only social breakdown but also violent extremism.
In a limited sense, this is Ms Chayes's own story, too: a former reporter for NPR in Algeria and Afghanistan, she abandoned journalism to work for a non-governmental organisation in Kandahar, then was a social entrepreneur there on her own account, finally becoming an advisor on corruption to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Her personal narrative is even more complicated than any summary might suggest. In 2001, Ms Chayes helped found a charity "of unclear mission", run by president Hamid Karzai's Baltimore-based elder brother, Qayum, about whom she says: "Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds. Welded to his brother's interests, he behaved in ways that contradicted his language so starkly that for a long time I had difficulty processing the inconsistency."
Elsewhere "those brothers" (there are six besides Hamid Karzai himself) are characterised as "self-serving", with the younger half-brother Ahmed Wali singled out as someone "who stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias, and wielded ISAF like a weapon against people who stood up to him". This, mind you, was also someone at whose house Ms Chayes had dinner once in 2003, in the course of which she watched Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers "hand him a tinfoil-wrapped package of bills".
Her experience corroborates an October 27, 2009, report in The New York Times, which stated that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll.
Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated by a police official and long-time confidant on July 12, 2011. About six years earlier, Ms Chayes severed her own relations with the Karzais. After leaving for a few months, she returned to Kandahar in May 2005 with a project that, on the surface, could never smell of corruption and intrigue.
Armed with an oil press and $25,000 from Oprah Winfrey, she set up a cooperative producing scented soap and beauty products, taking advantage of Afghanistan's horticultural riches. But she soon found that even this innocuous activity put her on the sharp end of corruption, as she tried to do simple things like deposit money in a bank without paying a bribe. So she began, in an amateurish way, to develop ideas for limiting corruption in places like Afghanistan.
Very quickly, the amateur became professional. She was soon called upon by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the ISAF to give expert briefings with a focus on anti-corruption measures. This led to a job with the ISAF, and then another as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the United States laboriously and somewhat unwillingly developed an anti-corruption strategy for Afghanistan.
Any such strategy was bound to conflict with political and military exigencies. But Ms Chayes's Afghan interlocutors told her repeatedly that poor governance was what was perpetuating the conflict, with graft generating disenchantment and driving people toward the Taliban. "Western officials," she writes, "habitually flipped the sequence: First let's establish security, then we can worry about governance."
Ordinary Afghans, meanwhile, took Western inaction on corruption as approval. Aid just added to the problem, in Ms Chayes's view: "Development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency."
Many of the other countries Ms Chayes brings into this chatty study show similar patterns. In each case, there are slight "variations on a theme", as she has it, ranging from the militarykleptocratic complex (Egypt) to the bureaucratic kleptocracy (Tunisia), the post-Soviet kleptocratic autocracy (Uzbekistan) and the resource kleptocracy (Nigeria).
While I fully agree with what she says, I found her prose style raising my hackles on occasion, with its effortful interpolations of colour ("the legendary but painfully dilapidated blue and white Mediterranean port city of Algiers"), verbs on steroids ("I wheeled and strode over to our battered red pickup truck, clambered aboard, and roared off to the bank") and its chapters that begin with such sentences as "Wait a second". I did, but I wish she had.
© The New York Times News Service 2015