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

corruption. The special investigator general for Afghan reconstruction was, diffidently, attempting to track misspent U.S. dollars. The anticorruption lead at the headquarters in charge of Afghan army and police development told us international trainers were instructed to pass reports of police corruption to the Afghan interior ministry. “The issue,” he conceded wryly, “is what happens once the report is turned over.”
    Those picnic baskets were well stocked, in other words. But what did it all add up to? “We’re supplying things,” one participant summed up. “But are we achieving things?”
    Not everyone around the table was enthusiastic about a more energetic anticorruption effort. One civilian who worked outside Kabul feared attacks by disgruntled Afghan officials. Another urged a careful cost-benefit analysis before doing anything at all. “Just collecting information sends a political signal,” he worried.
    And we heard a notion that would shape the State Department’s approach to corruption in the years ahead. There should be a triage among different varieties, argued one embassy official. Anticorruption efforts should be focused on those that were most “meaningful to the people.”
    This thinking segmented the corruption phenomenon, shaving off “high-level” misdeeds (corruption that was so politically sensitive, and presumably so removed from the people and their concerns, that it was best ignored) and “petty corruption” (the daily palm greasing that many Westerners thought was the only way to get things done in a place like Afghanistan and should therefore also be left alone). Such a formulation profoundly misunderstood the character, impact, and structure of acute corruption.
    It took us quite some time to understand what our collective capacity was. Until then, for example, the two mentored Afghan police teams had been autonomous and self-directed. Their mentors aimed mostly to improve the officers’ technical proficiency. The complex investigations,requiring locally unfamiliar techniques, like judicial wiretaps and seized bank records, ate up the young units’ bandwidth. They could handle only one case each, it turned out: a crushing bottleneck. Afghan criminal prosecution could not be counted on as a significant element of an anticorruption campaign.
    “We have got to think harder about nonjudicial approaches.” Sarah Peck led the charge. She was the U.S. embassy’s anticorruption officer—a former prosecutor, sparkling, determined, invariably elegant, with her short copper hair and long black skirts. “We have to make the ground burn under their feet. Let’s find other ways.”
    We considered the absolute minimum: symbolic gestures against Afghan officials whose behavior was off-the-charts unacceptable. We came up with three. No accepting gifts from them. No inviting them on fancy visits overseas. No publicized high-level meetings with them. We envisioned a flagging system that would allow for a concerted international approach.
    The point was not to end all interactions with these officials. It was to break with the prevailing binary thinking. “Working with” corrupt officials seemed always to mean writing them a blank check. And the only alternative seemed to be cutting all ties—a move that was rarely possible. We thought there was room for nuance, some specificity in the manner, degree, and purpose of “working with” these complex and ultimately counterproductive men.
    We did think through stronger options, as well, like steering development funding away from businesses connected to corrupt officials, refusing them or their children visas to visit Western countries, raising the priority level of their insurgent friends on the list of Taliban to be killed or captured.
    But we needed an objective system for ranking priorities—for choosing which provincial governor to ask President Karzai to remove first, or which Afghan National Army officer ISAF should cease supplying