| THIEVES OF STATE Why Corruption Threatens Global Security Sarah Chayes New York: W. W. Norton & Co., March 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-393-35228-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-393-35228-5 | 262pp. | SC/GSI | $16.95 | |
Corruption is a persistent fact of life in many nations, and it goes by many names. In the Arab world, the term for it is baksheesh. In Mexico, they call it mordida — "bite". And in English, in addition to corruption, the terms include bribery, crime, dishonesty, extortion, fraud, graft, greed, kickbacks, malfeasance, nepotism, payoffs, payola, rackets, ripoffs, shady deals, skimming, squeeze, venality, and being on the take.
Knowledge of how to combat corruption threads back through centuries and millennia of human history. Sarah Chayes knows those threads, has read the "mirrors" — manuals written as guides to good governance for rulers who wish to stamp out corruption, or at least resist its unbridled growth. Such manuals were common in the medieval Muslim world, and one of the wisest of their authors was Nizam al-Malik.1 In his A Treatise on Government, he wrote:
"Only what is just should be exacted from God's creatures, and it should be requested with gentleness and consideration. . . If an official assesses a farmer more than is due to the authorities, the sum he unjustly raised should be demanded of him and returned to the farmer, and if the official has any property, it should be confiscated as an example to other agents, so they refrain from tyrannical acts." – quoted on page 11 |
And in lands where corruption has become endemic, a routine part of the structure of society, there is almost invariably a local insurgency. In Afghanistan, this took the form of the Taliban: a group imposing a harshly doctrinaire version of Islam on the people it controlled. This was almost all of Afghanistan from 1996 until NATO forces drove them out following the attacks on the World Trade Center and other facilities in September 2001, when their leadership refused to turn over the mastermind of those attacks, Osama bin Laden, to the U.S.
In Morocco, she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She reported on the bloody revolt in Algeria and the 2001 fall of the Taliban for National Public Radio. With her older sister and others, she established a sister-school program, a radio station, and study groups in Kandahar. And by dint of her long involvement with the culture of Afghanistan, she was asked to advise various American military officers working on winning the "hearts and minds" of the populace.
To my way of thinking, this adds up to an impressive set of qualifications. In addition, she possesses intelligence, determination, and insight. Her conclusions are worth listening to, and I hope she finds a hearing.
The Taliban returned to power in segments of Afghanistan circa 2006, owing to the corrupt and divisive nature of the Karzai government.
Sarah Chayes has a good deal to say about Hamid Karzai and his younger half-brother Ahmed Wali, "who pulled the strings to most of southern Afghanistan, who stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias, and wielded ISAF2 like a weapon against people who stood up to him." She describes a land where corruption was endemic, entrenched, institutionalized. Having lived in Afghanistan for many years, fluent in Arabic, and a participant in American intervention there, she is able to provide firsthand knowledge.
By virtue of missions to Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Nigeria, she is also able to give us insights in to the corruption prevalent in those countries — corruption of differing forms, but equally entrenched. It adds up to a depressing picture.
But the more depressing aspect of her narrative has to do with the U.S. response. There were anti-corruption efforts mounted by the U.S. and allied nations in Afghanistan, to be sure; and she was often involved in organizing them. And they had some success. But the more common outcome was for arrests of corrupt officials to be countermanded by Karzai or some lower-ranking official. Honest Afghanis who stuck their necks out, by contrast, were punished by the Karzai regime and ofttimes defended only weakly by America.
"To date, the U.S. tendency has been to turn its back on financial or legal professionals who have taken a stand and suffered for it." – Page 191 |
American leadership, both military and civilian, generally took the position that fighting corruption had to play second fiddle to fighting the Taliban. This was unfortunate because, as she demonstrates in the book, the chief reason the Taliban resorted to violence as a means of gaining a foothold in Afghanistan was the widespread corruption of its government, entrenched beyond their ability to dislodge it by nonviolent means.
"By then, data was piling up—for the Afghanistan case, at least. Officers who interviewed Taliban detainees corroborated 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 concerns 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." – Page 152 |
On 17 December 2010, Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a municipal office in Tunisia. He was, almost literally, the spark that set off the uprisings in several countries that are now called the Arab Spring.
The uprising in Tunisia led to the defeat of its autocratic leader Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in a 2011 election. However, the victorious moderate Islamist party Ennahda soon became authoritarian in its turn. Similar results obtained in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak was overthrown by an Islamist coalition in which the Muslim Brotherhood held the majority position. Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected president, but he was deposed by a military coup in 2013. In Libya, violent civil war brought the downfall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The nation subsequently dissolved into anarchy.
There were protests in many other nations, some outside the Middle East, and in the Palestinian territory of Israel. Wikipedia notes that "The early hopes that these popular movements would end corruption, increase political participation, and bring about greater economic equity quickly collapsed in the wake of the counterrevolutionary moves of the deep state in Egypt, the regional and international interventions in Bahrain and Yemen, and the destructive civil wars in Syria and Libya."
That indeed is her reason for writing the book. She hopes to convince our government of the link between corruption and violent extremism. I judge that she proves her contention. However, she has formidable forces arrayed against her: not only most of the military (with the notable exception of Admiral Mike Mullen), but State Department officials including then-Secretary Hillary Clinton.3, 4
"Short-term, crisis-driven decision making, of the type that prevails in Washington as in other capitals, favors work with whoever the current foreign partner happens to be and encourages focus on leaders in general, not on populations. It also reinforces risk aversion. And employing most of the leverage listed here entails political risks." – Page 203 |
It is germane to ask whether this pervasive high-level corruption, this moral turpitude, is confined to nations in the Middle East, or whether it is yet more widespread. Sarah Chayes provides an answer in her Epilogue Self-Reflection — and that answer is "No." She mentions the specific cases of Ireland and Iceland: Ireland, whose growth rate of 7 percent earned it the sobriquet of "Celtic Tiger" until its economy imploded in 2008; and Iceland, where lax regulations and cronyism led to absurd levels of lending (900 percent of GDP at one point), the collapse of its top three banks, and the ouster of its prime minister Gier Haarde.
But she saves the best for last.
"Too many excellent books have been written about the failings of U.S. governance that prompted the global financial meltdown of 2008 for me to hazard a summary of that tale here. But a few quotes make the key points. In 13 Bankers, Simon Johnson and James Kwak suggest that the kleptocratic capture of U.S. institutions may even have been more significant or insidious than it was in the type of countries this book covered— partly because it was nearly invisible." – Page 209 |
I've omitted her quotes, excellent though they are.
When I write "the best," I do so ironically. Yet there is a serious side to my wording. For if we, America, seek to mend the corrupt nations of the Middle East, and we must in order to bring stability and security to that beleaguered region, then we must first weed out the corruption of our own house. Never underestimate how deeply that rot infests our culture. Consider:5
The challenges of achieving these reforms are formidable. Yet Sarah Chayes reminds us that, because the alternative is so dire, we must press ahead with vigor.
"And yet the stakes are just too high not to try to intervene otherwise, and upstream of a visible white-water crisis. If Western countries wish to reduce the likelihood of extremist or revolutionary violence abroad, if they want to curtail their use of military force when emergencies erupt—with the staggering financial and human costs and uneven chance of success such use of force entails—they must be willing to take political risks ahead of time. They must work to create redress for legitimate grievances. They must show as much courage in deploying leverage as they have, to date, in deploying soldiers. "These tools should be thought of as prevention, worth the proverbial pound of cure. By helping damp down one key driver of dangerous insecurity, they represent alternatives to military action at some later date. They reduce the 'command responsibility' of Western countries in enabling abusive corruption. And most important, these products of a constitutional order offer aggrieved citizens of captured states at least somewhere, on earth, to turn. They provide a measure of appeal." – Page 204 |
She writes convincingly and colorfully, as only someone with deep experience of the cultures she describes can. Her information is well-cited in extensive endnotes, and fully indexed. I rank this book at the top and rate it a must-read for anyone who seeks the unvarnished truth about our involvement in the Middle East.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.