Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (21 page)

A magazine article had detonated like a rocket-propelled grenade in Washington. It depicted the command climate in the headquarters of my former boss, General Stanley McChrystal. The very first page was strewn with juvenile behavior and remarks attributed to his cocky young aides, dissing a who’s who of civilian dignitaries.

Events were cascading. McChrystal had tendered his resignation—a second four-star general to be shattered on the anvil of Afghanistan. Scanning the latest, I let out a shout. General David Petraeus was being asked to step down from his position running U.S. Central Command, which had authority over the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters and most of the Middle East and Central Asia. He was being sent to Kabul to run the war.

I knew Petraeus. I had been corresponding with him about corruption and the insurgency in Afghanistan for nearly two years. He had referred to the Karzai government as a “criminal syndicate” during the White House policy debate on Afghanistan the previous fall.

When I had left McChrystal’s headquarters five months before, I had given up hope that the United States would seriously address Afghan governance. But maybe there was a chance for a change of policy after all. I could feel my engines start revving again. I had just been appointed special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen. With his approval, I stayed on in Afghanistan to help Petraeus transition in. I fell in with a handful of civilians from Washington think tanks he invited to join him in Kabul.

I remembered a couple of them from the swarm that had descended on the McChrystal headquarters a year earlier to conduct his strategic review. Upon their arrival, they had immediately been struck by the lack of progress addressing the “crisis in confidence” in the Afghan government they had identified then.

Petraeus dubbed us his “Directed Telescopes.” The group included the rotund and amicable Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, a powerful framer of arguments, and his tiny, bespectacled, secrecy-obsessed wife Kim, who ran her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War. There was intense Catherine Dale, with her riot of red hair, who had worked as special adviser to McChrystal’s long-limbed, Afghanistan-savvy operational commander. And for the first couple of weeks, the Brookings Institution’s Steve Biddle, and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, were there too. Four “Junior ’Scopes,” as we called them, were brought in later, research assistants in their twenties—perhaps the most productive members of the team.

The gaggle of us set up newsroom style in one of those tin-can buildings and, in an atmosphere of ebullient intellectual energy, plunged in to designing a comprehensive governance strategy. Much of our work built on the foundations that had been laid by the Anti-Corruption Task Force. But the improved understanding of the real nature of the problem that had developed since then prompted some changes.

If corruption in Afghanistan was the work not of individual bad apples, for example, but of structured networks, then they had to be studied as such. “Malign Actor Networks,” we called them at first, so we could have fun dreaming up slide titles like “How to Fight the MAN.” The same tools that ISAF used to map and understand insurgent networks, or that police investigators had perfected in the battle against
organized crime, must be applied to corruption. Who had what roles and responsibilities? What were the criteria for membership? How did a given network intersect with others? How did it overlay with other social groupings, such as tribes? What was the preferred revenue stream? Did the network go after customs and tariffs? Smuggle natural resources? Monopolize logistics or security contracts? Construction? Land? How did the network transfer money? What logistics did it require? What means of coercion did it use? How did the leadership cover its tracks? What were key members’ “patterns of life”—daily habits that might be exploited? What were the network’s vulnerabilities? How did it adapt to pressure?

The Junior ’Scopes were assigned to compile a detailed list of intelligence collection and assessment requirements on the basis of questions like these.

We made clear that painful trade-offs would be necessary to gain the required knowledge. We called, explicitly, for the transfer of intelligence resources away from the task of tracking insurgents—such as the emplacers of roadside bombs that killed soldiers—and their assignment to the effort to understand the MAN.

We rearticulated many of the ideas for countering corrupt practices that had first been developed by the Anti-Corruption Task Force. Where the strategy broke new ground, however, was in its prescription for how best to prioritize targets. Rather than the bottom-up process the Anti-Corruption Task Force had initiated, with regional commands nominating and arguing for individual corrupt leaders against whom action should be taken, our group advocated a top-down, knowledge-based approach. A detailed understanding of the major corrupt networks and the interplay among them would permit a strategized, carefully sequenced plan of attack.

If a command decision were made to go after the Ahmed Wali Karzai network, for example, then potential repercussions throughout the system had to be thought through in advance. How would the rival Shirzai network react? Would it simply move in on the vacated territory? How could Gul Agha Shirzai be persuaded not to do that? Would it be politically useful to move against a different ethnic group’s network at the same time as Ahmad Wali’s, to fend off accusations of discrimination?

Actions to identify, reinforce, and physically protect constructive leaders, and to help empower truly independent local representative bodies, were also part of the plan. There had to be ways to help decent, upstanding, patriotic Afghans gain a foothold and thrive within institutions once they were cleared of the most corrupt operators.

We did not expect the MAN to take the assault we prescribed lying down. We predicted backlash ranging from withholding intelligence about Taliban to retaliation in kind against ISAF officials, including visa hassles or legal proceedings, or deft use of local and international media. Doubtless, Karzai would throw some of his famous tantrums. We warned of nastier reactions too, such as blockades of ISAF convoys at the border, or physical attacks on constructive Afghan officials or ISAF personnel.

Not every such blow could be parried. Still, we suggested some ways to mitigate the risks, such as preceding each move with a public information campaign, to prepare Afghans and Western voters alike and to undermine Karzai’s ability to play on their sensitivities. Or deploying ISAF’s own personnel to protect its flanks, instead of relying on local private security companies that belonged to corrupt officials. Or reducing the international troops’ consumption of heavy luxury goods that had to be trucked in via long, vulnerable convoys.

By mid-July we had compiled our thinking into an enormous Power Point presentation—fully forty-eight slides. We put in for a meeting with Petraeus and started whittling it down. We were expecting an office call: the four remaining Directed Telescopes clustered around the stout wooden table that abutted his desk. We selected about a dozen slides we thought he truly needed to see.

To our surprise, Petraeus scheduled the briefing for the main conference room in the headquarters’ stately Yellow Building. And he required the entire command group to attend. Petraeus himself walked the assembled brass through every slide in our deck, marking a check on each page with a flourish. In the pantomime of command, it was the highest form of official endorsement. We were elated.

As we discussed some minor revisions in his office a few days later, I heard Petraeus murmur something under his breath: “
This
is the revision of the Field Manual.”

He was referring to an exposition of military doctrine that was selling in bookstores across the United States like a mass-market paperback: Field Manual 3-24, which laid out the tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine. Written in 2006 under the guidance of Petraeus and Marine General James Mattis, it had served as the theoretical underpinning for the troop surge into Iraq in 2007 and the altered approach that turned an impending debacle into what then, anyway, was viewed as a victory. Petraeus had led the turnaround and was a national hero.

FM 3-24 had seemed revolutionary when it first appeared, in the context of an Iraq conflagration that U.S. leadership was still stubbornly refusing even to call an “insurgency.” But as students of asymmetric warfare soon began pointing out, Field Manual 3-24 only got U.S. military thinking back to where it had been at the end of the Vietnam War.

In the early 1970s the Marines were dispersing small “combined action platoons” into the Vietnamese countryside, embedding them in villages, in tandem with daring young aid workers, who were implementing small projects side by side with locals. It was a sharp contrast with the massive bombing campaigns against North Vietnam in the 1960s and Cambodia into the early 1970s. The U.S. military, by the end of the war, had more or less mastered the art of tactical-level counterinsurgency.

But that counterinsurgency approach remained close to the ground. It never addressed the South Vietnamese disgust with the elitist and corrupt government the United States had been backing. And that failure explains, in part, the loss of the war. Three decades later Field Manual 3-24 repeated the same error. As its title suggests, it was focused almost exclusively on how maneuver elements of U.S. forces should interact with residents and community leaders in the field.

But as long as U.S. military interventions and stabilization campaigns ignore the broader framework within which soldiers and aid workers are operating—or worse, as long as those interventions inadvertently enable host government abuses—then all the efforts by all the brave soldiers on a tactical level will add up to nothing. The unravelling of Iraq in 2014 is just the latest demonstration. It was time, Petraeus’s musing implied, to take this reality into account. Soldiers, and not just those in Afghanistan, would have to begin considering governance. U.S. military doctrine had to embrace the issue.

That quiet remark rang like an oratorio in my ears.

The “Directed Telescopes” set off on a round of helicopter rides to brief subordinate commands on the new governance strategy. We’d arrive in a wash of dust thrown up by the chopper blades, weighted down by our regulation bulletproof vests. We’d dump our kit on bunk beds made of two-by-fours and troop off—round and short and flame-haired and mossy-eyed, trailed by our Junior ’Scopes—to some plywood conference room. Suspicious perplexity greeted us. Who were we anyway? On whose authority were we telling division commanders they’d have to upend their campaigns—reassign intelligence officers, overhaul procedures for partnering with Afghan military and police officers, expose their men to the risk of retaliation, wade into
politics
?

Fortified by that flourish that Petraeus had applied to his check marks, we stuck our chins in the air, imperious.

M
EANWHILE
an anticorruption operation was under way in Kabul. Just before dawn on July 25, 2010, an administrative assistant at the Afghan national security council named Muhammad Zia Salehi was led out of his home under arrest, on charges of selling his influence for the gift of a car valued around $20,000. Like income taxes in the Al Capone case, the bribery was just the crime that investigators could prove. In fact, Salehi appeared to be the bagman for a vast palace slush fund that President Karzai’s closest intimates controlled and used to buy alliances, votes, or silence.

These discoveries had come to light as part of a sprawling investigation led by an old friend from Anti-Corruption Task Force days: sleepless, theatrically grumpy, meticulous Kirk Meyer of the DEA, one of the most talented officers in the U.S. law enforcement arsenal. He had told us corruption was only the third priority of his Threat Finance Cell and the special Afghan police unit it mentored, the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), below terrorist funding and drug money.

True to its mandate, the SIU had dug into the workings of a major Kabul-based
hawala
, a traditional money-transfer operation, often used by extremists. Single threads soon lead to dense tangles. An unprecedented raid on the
hawala’
s offices in downtown Kabul reaped a huge trove of
data. And the team struck a torrent of cash pumping out of Afghanistan’s top private financial institution, the Kabul Bank. The resulting sinkhole was nearly a billion dollars deep—the result of $100,000 MasterCards handed out to select officials, directors’ fat expense accounts, bribes for government tenders, and the kind of “nonreimbursable loans” that were then so common in Tunisia.
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Salehi’s extortion of a set of flashy wheels was tangential to the Kabul Bank investigation. But the McChrystal headquarters and officials in Washington had asked Meyer to generate an anticorruption test case, so his team had compiled watertight evidence. The arrest was a coup. Watching from the sidelines, the Directed Telescopes crowed.

But before the sun set on that arrest, President Karzai had ordered Salehi’s release. The boss had protected his underling. The implicit promise that structured the kleptocratic system had held.

Karzai was not bashful about his interference in the judicial process. “Absolutely I intervened. . . . I intervened very, very strongly,” he boasted to ABC’s
This Week
a month later. He was broadcasting the fact to members of his network—just as he had broadcast his promise not to remove any corrupt officials at that press conference after the arrest of the minor border police official the previous year. Karzai was advertising the strength of his protection guarantee.

He cited the conditions of the operation against Salehi:

This man was taken out of his house in the middle of the night by thirty Kalashnikov-toting masked men in the name of Afghan law enforcement. This is exactly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union, where people were taken away from their homes by armed people in the name of the state and thrown into obscure prisons and in some kind of kangaroo courts.
²