Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes Read Free Book Online

team was still up against a widespread and debilitating presumption. ‘Corruption is part of the culture in a place like Afghanistan,’ we kept hearing. ‘What can really be done about it?’ I have always been perplexed at the sham regret, and authentic eagerness, with which so many embraced helplessness as a rationale for inaction.
    What can be done? Lots, it turns out. But a serious anticorruption campaign has to make use of the plentiful leverage carefully—craftily, even—and with foresight and stubborn fortitude.
    The first recommendation we put forward that summer was to repair a startling deficiency: knowledge. Despite the thousands of intelligence professionals spread throughout the country, not to speak of the hundreds of diplomats and development practitioners, the international community knew almost nothing useful about the government officials or local contractors we were dealing with.
    Any battalion- or brigade-level intelligence shop could produce a sophisticated “network diagram” for the main local Taliban group, featuring a photo of the commander—or a baleful black silhouette complete with turban—and lines spiking out to other known members. The eager but respectful twenty-something officer who would brief such a slide would be legitimately proud of the detective work.
    But where were the network diagrams for the district governor or the provincial police chief? What tribe was he? Who were his associates? Who did he pay kickbacks to? Which construction companies belonged to his family members? How was he facilitating the traffic in chromite or timber or opium? Did he have Karzai on speed dial? Who had he fought with during the last war?
    No one knew.
    A similar ignorance reigns in other regions where the United States and like-minded governments operate. In a dozen years of obsessive focus on terrorism, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have mushroomed. Data collection has exploded. Yet new blood, talented veterans, and most of the focus have been aimed at identifying and targeting individual terrorist suspects. 8 Those individuals’ environments, the social structures of their communities, and the grievances or aspirations that might animate them or their neighbors, have excited less interest. 9
    The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus instructed the future Holy Roman Emperor to gain an intimate knowledge of just such details: “It seems necessary to the prince to . . .get to know his kingdom, and this achievement will be most effectively brought about by three things: the study of geography, the study of history, and frequent tours of towns and territories.” 10
    On the Afghan battlefield, we recommended adding questions about local governance to the cards that soldiers consulted when chatting with villagers, and sending the information up the line, assigning intelligence officers to study government officials, and setting up tip lines or drop boxes for Afghans to use anonymously. And we called for officers to meet regularly, no officials present, with ordinary Afghans.
    The sovereign must listen himself, without intermediary, to what his subjects have to say to him .
    Next we listed concrete actions that officers in the field could take at their own level to deter corrupt behavior. Cease actively contributing to it, for starters. Avoid meeting with corrupt officials in ways that raise their status: Don’t visit their offices, for example, because in Afghan culture, it is the social superior who hosts, and the inferior who visits. Don’t renew contracts with businesses owned by their cronies. Stop paying Western-level salaries to their personal staff, or letting them control the distribution of humanitarian aid. In extreme cases, halt development projects altogether, while explaining the reason to the local population.
    Where an official was just too disruptive or too powerful, or his misdeeds too egregious, we recommended that his case be passed up the chain of command to ISAF