Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (3 page)

P
REFIGURING A
M
ODERN
judicial notion known as “command responsibility,” Nizam al-Mulk emphasized rulers’ ultimate accountability for the doings of their subordinates. He repeatedly warned Sultan Malik Shah that his reckoning would come: “May the king—God render his reign eternal—understand that when on Judgment Day he is examined about all the creatures that were placed in his power, should he try to point out another to answer in his place, that person’s testimony will not be heard.”
¹⁴

This strong emphasis on the accountability of those who wield power for the actions of their underlings—“because the good and the bad that they do reflects on the prince and his government”—is equally explicit in today’s Kandahar.
¹⁵

As Afghans, beginning around 2005, found the international presence in their country increasingly offensive, it was not because of their purported age-old hatred of foreigners. Nor did puritanical horror at the presence of unbelievers in their land enter our conversations, or outrage about Afghan sovereignty trod underfoot. My neighbors pointed to the abusive behavior of the Afghan government. Given the U.S. role in ushering its officials to power and financing and protecting them, Afghans held the international community, and the United States in particular, responsible. My neighbors wanted the international community to be stricter with Afghan government officials, not more respectful. “You brought our donkeys back,” one man put it in 2009. “You brought these dogs back here. You should bring them to heel.”

“The government is your face,” Nurallah told me a year later. “If it’s pretty or ugly, it’s your face.”
¹⁶

Rereading Nizam al-Mulk’s nearly thousand-year-old political treatise, I was struck by how specific and detailed its relevance was. The point, for me, was not so much that corruption has always existed—as many who aim to downplay the problem helpfully point out. Remarkable to me was the clarity with which a great statesman of the Islamic Middle Ages linked the problems of corruption and injustice, and perceived the danger they posed to organized government.

And I found myself wondering as I finished his book: Did other writers
of manuals of advice for monarchs see it the same way? Did they too pinpoint corruption as a critical threat to the stability and security of the realm?

M
IRRORS FOR
P
RINCES
stud the literature of the Western Middle Ages. In the Carolingian period, for example, several were addressed to Emperor Charlemagne’s turbulent offspring. Around the year 831, one Jonas, bishop in the graceful Loire Valley town of Orléans, addressed
Of the Royal Institution
to the emperor’s grandson, Pepin I. High among the recommended virtues that fill the book’s pages is, once again, justice: “He, who is the Judge of Judges, must introduce into his audience the cause of the poor, and diligently inform himself, so it does not come about that those whom he has delegated to take care of the people in his stead allow . . . the poor to be victims of oppression.”
¹⁷

As in the Islamic text, accountability for iniquitous officials lies with the king: “When dishonest judges are placed over the people of God, the fault lies with him who appointed them.” Across the religious divide, Jonas depicted a God who will be just as terrible as the later Nizam al-Mulk’s in calling the king to answer for the “ministry that he has received.”
¹⁸

Jonas was even more explicit about the likelihood that injustice perpetrated by governing officials would lead to rebellion, or “rupture of the peace between peoples.” The title of his sixth chapter spells it out: “The Equity of Judgment is the Consolidation of Royalty, and Injustice its Ruin.”
¹⁹

During a later chapter in the epic European struggle between church and state, one that rocked England to its foundations in the twelfth century, another churchman, John of Salisbury, wrote a mirror for King Henry II. The book, called
Policraticus
(an invented word), is full of keenly observed and bitingly rendered anecdotes about various categories of official misbehavior. John displayed an equal talent for theorizing. He suggested a broad category—and a loaded one—within which the forms of misconduct he portrayed might fall: tyranny.

In Kandahar today, the same word is used to describe the same type of deeds—an Arabic loan-word into the local Pashtu:
zilm
, “tyranny” or “oppression.” I heard that word every day.

A prince, John of Salisbury explained, differs from a tyrant in that a prince “obeys the law, and rules his people by its dictates, placing himself at their service, and administers rewards and burdens within the republic under the guidance of law.” And law, John construed, is the instrument of equity, “which compares all things rationally and seeks to apply like rules of right and wrong to like cases.”
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As for a tyrant, John hazarded a revolutionary doctrine: “That by the authority of the divine book, it is lawful and glorious to slay public tyrants, so long as the killer is not bound to the tyrant by [an oath of] fealty.”
²¹

It is not clear that a later English text, the
Mirror of King Edward III
, written around 1330 by a country vicar named William of Pagula, ever made it into the hands of the prince to whom it was addressed. Less taken with offering instruction than with leveling criticism, the book would have tried the king’s patience.

Fueling William’s rage was King Edward’s resuscitation of an ancient royal right to requisition goods and services from his subjects, in order to help fund his wars.

And men of your court—not men, precursors of the Antichrist—seize many goods by violence from the owners of those goods, namely, they seize bread, beer, fowls, cocks, beans, oats, and many other things, for which practically nothing is paid.
²²

Woven as he was into the daily lives of his parishioners, William was painfully acquainted with the spiraling consequences of such shakedowns:

A poor man comes to the market with one ox [which he plans to sell to discharge a debt.] He has to pay one mark on a certain day or lose his own land. His ox is seized by your ministers and nothing is paid to him, because of which he loses his land [and] incurs perjury, excommunication, and a reputation as a dishonest person.
²³

Like other mirror writers, William of Pagula held the king responsible for his men’s conduct and warned of the national security consequences
should the corruption continue: “And for you, Lord King, unless you ordain otherwise, the loss of your kingdom must be feared.”
²⁴

In 1332 William sat down and wrote another whole book, whose language echoes the spluttering frustration of the first. Four chapters in, right there on the page, he dissolves into what can only be described as a howl:

O woe! O shame! O disgrace! O infamy! O affliction! O ambition! O struggle! O compassion! O outcry! O damnation! O sadness! O error! O falsehood! O fraud! O theft! O plunder! O infidelity! O ingratitude! O instability! O labor! O tears! O lamentation! O martyrdom! O lying! O perjury! O danger! O fear! O scandal to you, King!
²⁵

‘The man,’ I thought when I read this, ‘is screaming.’

And his screams sounded like those of Afghans I knew. “How can we work with this government?” one elder from Shah Wali Kot district challenged me in May 2009. “The government doesn’t hear our voices. The government doesn’t do anything. It’s just there to fill its own pockets. Oppressors! Tyrants! Liars! Bribe-takers! If the government administration in this country isn’t reformed, it doesn’t matter how many soldiers the Americans bring, the situation will never improve.”

Afghans were screaming. And like fourteenth-century William of Pagula, they were going unheard.

The Renaissance saw a spate of mirror writing. One author whose fame almost rivals that of his contemporary, Machiavelli, was the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. Just three years after
The Prince
was completed, Erasmus dedicated his own
Education of a Christian Prince
to the future, enormously powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.

Though Erasmus supported monarchy and would oppose the heretical wildfire of religious reform that shortly exploded across Europe, his conception of the people—bound in an organic relationship to their prince—is strewn with the radical seeds of modern democratic arguments. “Nature created all men free,” he opened one section, which admonishes against reducing “free citizens into slaves.”
²⁶
In another, he argued not only that laws should not favor the mighty, but that their application should actively help redress power imbalances:

The whole purpose of the law should be to protect everyone, rich or poor, noble or humble, serf or free man, public official or private citizen. But it should incline more towards helping the weaker elements, because the position of humble men exposes them more easily to danger. The law’s indulgence should compensate for the privileges denied them by their station in life.
²⁷

Erasmus warned of acute economic inequality, seeing in it a potent danger to the health of the empire—a concern that led him to the brink of advocating a redistributive income tax.
²⁸

Within this context, he defined corruption. Corrupt princes

pick out from the mass of their subjects a wicked few who use cunningly chosen pretexts and constantly changing excuses to drain off both the strength and the wealth of the people and then convert it to their own account. . . . It is as if the prince were the enemy of his people, not the father, and the prince’s best minister the man who most effectively thwarts the well-being of the people.
²⁹

And people so thwarted, as Erasmus’s pragmatic Italian contemporary warned, would bear violent grudges. “He who is threatened, and sees himself constrained by necessity either to act or to suffer, becomes a most dangerous man for the Prince,” wrote Machiavelli (not in
The Prince
but in reflections on the writings of the ancient Roman author Livy). “Those injuries of possession and honor are matters that harm men more than any other offense, and against which the Prince ought to guard himself, for he can never despoil one so much that he does not leave a mind obstinate to vengeance.”
³⁰

Thus did these two great, but very different, sixteenth-century political thinkers come together on one point: not just the moral evil, but the danger to the realm—and to the stability of the region around it—of acute public corruption.

Indeed, nearly all the mirror writers, Christian and Muslim alike, divided by the centuries and by different systems of government, seem to have shared a consensus that eludes many of today’s policy makers:
that acute, abusive government corruption prompts extreme responses and thus represents a mortal threat to security.

T
HERE IS
just a slight problem with this whole body of literature, reiterating down the ages thoughtful, often detailed, and colorfully phrased warnings against corrupt practices. Other than threats of divine punishment in the afterlife, these manuals fail to suggest any systematic means of redress against corrupt governance. What if their royal readers were to ignore their advice? What would happen then? Disaster—collapse of the state through tyrannicide or revolt—hangs behind their words like a dark thunderhead. For what other options remain for the aggrieved people? To whom should they appeal?

CHAPTER THREE

Hearing the People’s Complaints

Kandahar to Kabul, 2001–2009

I
n Afghanistan, my neighbors—barred as they were from U.S. bases that grew more fortified with every passing year, with taller walls, more loops of barbed wire, increasingly complex screening procedures—were on a similarly fruitless search for appeal. Often they came to vent their frustrations to me—the only American within reach.

My presence in their midst had not resulted from any preexisting logic. I had no family roots or professional background in Afghanistan. I first came to consider the place half a continent away in the legendary but painfully dilapidated blue and white Mediterranean port city of Algiers.

It was 1998. Algeria was in flames. A decade earlier massive popular protests (much like the 2011 “Arab Spring” that erupted in neighboring Tunisia) had forced the autocratic and self-serving government to open the political process and allow multiparty elections. A religious movement with a burning sense of purpose, grassroots organization due to its access to neighborhood mosques, and a reputation for honesty conferred by the presumptions of a devout population was the chief beneficiary of the pent-up protest vote.
¹
During Algeria’s first-ever free parliamentary elections, in 1991, this Islamic Salvation Front trounced the ruling party in the initial round of voting.

Then the army stepped in, canceled the election, pushed the prime minister from office, and seized direct rule.

What resulted was a protracted civil war, whose death toll is still uncertain but is believed to top 100,000. Massacres were visited on sleeping villages at night. Hundreds were slaughtered, knife to throat, in hours-long orgies of killing. Infants’ brains were dashed out against walls. And through it all, a horrifying doubt persisted about the role of the government itself. Algerians I met suspected then, and more believe today, that the security forces facilitated some of the butchery, to scare the population away from Islamist movements, back into the fold of the single party. Neither the army nor the militants seemed concerned with giving the people a stake in their future.

As the violence reached its paroxysm, in 1997 and 1998, I covered Algeria for National Public Radio. Visas to the police state were hard to obtain and were delivered arbitrarily and on very short notice. Trips to the countryside, where survivors stood stupefied amid the wreckage of their ordeal, were orchestrated by Algerian gendarmes. Most of the local journalists we were permitted to meet were ferociously anti-Islamist. My idiomatic Arabic helped break the ice, but I had the nagging sensation I was missing the crux.