Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (5 page)

But what obstacles U.S. embassy and military officials threw up in their scramble to derail that encounter! The State Department “control officer” shepherding the delegation warned Harman against it. The elders could be anyone; it might not be safe. Jane Harman is a tenacious woman. The embassy must have laid it on thick, because she wrote to ask if I was
sure
this meeting was well advised.

Next it was Regional Command South (RC-South), the international military headquarters in charge of Afghanistan’s four southern provinces. This wasn’t going to work, a major on the deputy commander’s staff e-mailed me. It was too big a group; the logistics were impractical. I replied that we were talking about a dozen men. I could ask them to arrive early. The major countered with an insoluble security problem. Whenever the command had tried to bring elders on base, they had objected to being searched at entry.

“They can strip us naked if they want,” laughed Hajji Bacha, when I called to ask him if his cohorts might demur. I soon discovered that this RC-South command had not invited any delegations of Afghan elders on base yet, let alone tried to wand them. The search issue was a sham, a last desperate salvo to try to torpedo the meeting.

Representative Harman insisted. And those two hours were among the most memorable of my years in Afghanistan. U.S. senators and representatives, awkward in their store-fresh cargo pants and stiff boots, connected with the weathered Afghan graybeards, whose turbans and shawls and well-worn prayer beads were like superficial props that merely embellished a worldliness and experience the American politicians could recognize. A precious, friable aura of mutual trust settled over the exchange, for which I acted as interpreter, to assuage any fears the elders might have that their words would get back to people in power.

“You want the truth?” one of them burst out toward the end of the session, after a moment’s pause to gather his courage. “There
is
no government here. They don’t even control their official buildings.”

The occasion lodged in the minds of its congressional participants for years, altering their perspectives and in many cases their votes. Never had they glimpsed such a raw, unfiltered take on the impact of U.S. action in Afghanistan.

A few months later I tried it again—and failed. General Stanley McChrystal had been appointed to command the international troops in Afghanistan, known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), where I now worked as an adviser. He was planning a trip to Kandahar. I submitted a list of elders I thought he should meet, including several who had been at the Harman-Kyl session.

At seven in the morning on the day we were to depart, McChrystal’s “executive officer” ordered me to the general’s office, where I found the assembled command staff waiting. And upon crossing the threshold, was seared to ash by McChrystal’s molten rage.

How could I have exposed him to conflict with the governor? he blazed. How could I have been so unconscious?

McChrystal’s team, it transpired, had shared my list of elders with the command of RC-South, which had vetted it with the governor—a close Karzai confidant, a key node of precisely the corrupt and abusive network the elders were likely to criticize. I had somehow failed to learn from the Harman saga to plan for this eventuality. And just as Abdullah had done when I had tried to have lunch with the junior staff, the governor had thrown a tantrum to prevent McChrystal from meeting other Afghans alone.

The event was canceled—with the effect of undermining, instead of buttressing, the elders who dared take a stand. Like so many before him, including myself, McChrystal got captured by corrupt intermediaries, whose abuse was driving Afghans into the arms of the very extremist insurgents his soldiers were fighting. He had refused to “listen himself, without intermediary,” to what the elders wanted to say to him.

R
EALIZING THAT
the terms of this equation were still unclear to the new general and his command staff, I resolved to try repackaging it in a form they might understand: a PowerPoint presentation, the military’s favorite mode of ingesting and transmitting information.

According to the counterinsurgency theory that McChrystal espoused—and that had the merit of recognizing the existence and relevance of an Afghan population—our efforts were supposed to be directed toward what we called “the 80 percent.” That is, the vast bulk of Afghans who supported neither the government nor the Taliban. “Fence-sitters,” as some put it. In my experience, few were neutral or undecided—they viewed both government and Taliban insurgents with equal disgust. Both treated them abusively, as sources of money or goods or services or obedience but not as citizens. Our aim, according to the recently articulated counterinsurgency approach, should be to win this 80 percent over to the government.

The problem, as the image I devised sought to depict, was that we were badly positioned to do that, because an explicit part of our mandate was also to “work with” the Afghan government.

We—represented by the horizontal bar at the top of the diagram—had situated ourselves off-center from the swing Afghans we were supposedly trying to attract. We had aligned ourselves with our partners in “GIRoA” (our shorthand for the Government of the Islamic Republic
of Afghanistan). We communicated almost exclusively with government officials, delivered development resources through their agents, hired their relatives and cronies, bought gravel and T-walls and gasoline and intelligence from them, and often used their armed thugs—known as private security companies—to protect our convoys.

And we provided our GIRoA partners, in turn, with the real or implicit shield of our presence by their side. We even let them use us as their enforcers. For, by frequently acting on their intelligence—killing or capturing Taliban suspects they pointed out to us—we allowed them to credibly threaten to punish dissenters with a U.S. Special Forces night raid. We were affording venal officials near-perfect impunity.

To protect its monopoly over these valuable relationships, GIRoA aimed a powerful loudspeaker in our direction. Not only did most officials, unlike the vast majority of Afghans, speak English, they picked up our vocabulary, our technical terms, our acronyms, the latest fashions in interagency jargon for whatever it was we were trying to accomplish. In the words of that Hungarian NATO official, speaking of a different people at a different time, “They figured out how to express just what the Westerners expected to hear.”

The Taliban, depicted in black (“TB” ) over to the right of the diagram, were also using loudspeakers, though most of their messages were directed at Afghan citizens and were spelled out not in words but in actions—attacks or scrawled warnings pinned to the clothes of a murdered schoolteacher.

Amid this clangor, the voice of that crucial 80 percent, the Afghan people who were caught in the middle, was nearly drowned out. In fact, it had grown increasingly dangerous for the 80 percent to speak out at all. The government could, and did, deride them as marginal, or unearth some indication of Taliban affiliation to spread fear of them—the way Abdullah got me to fear Kandaharis. Or it could intimidate them, or find a pretext to arrest them. Or get them killed.

Taliban violence, meanwhile, was also designed to sever Afghans’ contacts with international officials.

So that representative of the 80 percent, clutching his skinny loudspeaker, was caught in a withering crossfire. A civic-minded, outspoken, unaffiliated Afghan was perhaps the most vulnerable person in the country.
“The Taliban hit us on this cheek,” an elder once put it, striking himself in the face, “and the government hits us on that one,” another blow. As it stood, he—or she—enjoyed no cover, certainly not ours.

No wonder the mirror writers so insisted on the pains that a good prince should take to connect with the people. We should have been deploying the equivalent of witness protection measures just to ensure open and safe channels.

But a structural rigidity, not just in Afghanistan but in foreign affairs more generally, impedes that approach. Governments are set up to interact with governments. Officials present their credentials, spend much of their days in meetings and at functions and events with their counterparts—when they’re not locked in secure conference rooms with their own colleagues. They lack the time and energy to learn local languages. They let a concern not to impinge on host-nation sovereignty compound the difficulty of building authentic relationships with ordinary people. Too often they come to see the local environment through the eyes of their opposite numbers. This legitimist reflex distorts U.S. understanding and its conduct of foreign policy.

Take Egypt, for example. In mid-January 2011 Christopher Schroeder, an Internet entrepreneur and angel investor I know, was in Cairo for a competition for Egyptian start-up businesses that he had helped mentor. Afterward he was invited to dinner at the U.S. embassy. The room was abuzz with news of the overthrow, a day or two earlier, of Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

Popular dissatisfaction with the regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been smoldering for months by those first days of 2011. In fact, for half a decade, some Middle East watchers had been highlighting the acute need for political reform in the Arab world.
⁶
But U.S. ambassador Margaret Scobey seemed unaware of the gathering crisis. “It could
never
happen here,” Schroeder quotes her as insisting that night. “Egypt is not Tunisia. Mubarak is not Ben Ali.”

Schroeder then turned to two young Egyptian entrepreneurs among the dinner guests, for their view. “Egyptians are polite,” he later told me. “They defer to age and experience. Those kids cocked their heads and shrugged and said, ‘Maybe she knows something we don’t. But it’s hard to see why we’re so different.’” A week later Cairo erupted.

Time and again U.S. officials are blindsided by major developments in countries where they work. Too often they are insensible to the perspectives and aspirations of populations. Focused on levers to pull, on people who “get things done,” they overlook or help enable networks that are bent on power and private enrichment and are structured to maximize both, at the expense of the citizenry. And they formulate reasons why doing so is, unfortunately, necessary to the U.S. national interest.

As a U.S. embassy official in Kabul put it to me in January 2003, “We work with governments. And lots of them aren’t savory.”

S
LOWLY PROCESSING
what I was seeing and hearing those first years, I gradually learned how the system worked in Kandahar. During a week of heart-wrenching candor in August 2003, Abdullah himself explained how the Karzais had operated in the 1980s, when he had been the chief engineer of their “NGO” EAFA. “They were taking in a hundred thousand dollars a month,” he told me. “At least. I remember one project. They got a contract to build a hundred and seventy
kishmish khanas
,” fortlike mud-brick structures for drying grapes into the region’s prized raisins, whose yard-thick walls are pierced with slits to let the dry air circulate. “We built about twenty. And paid the workers fifty bags of wheat. The people spent their own money on that project. No one saw the cash that was meant for the builders’ wages.”

Even with such tutoring, it took me another year to truly catch on. But when at length I grasped who and what I was taken up with, I broke from the Karzais and set out on my own. I had finally learned, through the lacerations of shattered illusions—which by then I shared with millions of Afghans—how self-serving those brothers were.

In May 2005, after several months’ absence, I returned to Kandahar to try providing some economic opportunity, which Afghans kept calling on foreigners to generate. Armed with a book on the chemistry of soap making, a precision-cast seed-oil press, and $25,000 from Oprah Winfrey, I founded a soap factory.

The objective was to demonstrate the possibilities for productive economic activity offered by Afghanistan’s world-class horticulture—pomegranates and apricots and almonds and aromatic seeds like cumin
and anise, dye roots that had furnished rug makers for centuries, and walnut hulls, and the wild pistachios that Kandaharis snack on in winter, whose fragrant, copper-colored oil became the base for one of my favorite body lotions.

And I learned to say all that in Pashtu.

We called it the Arghand Cooperative, borrowing part of the name of the river that watered the pomegranate orchards north of town. The women, most of whom were struggling single-handedly to provide for their families, were natives of Kandahar city. The men hailed from villages scattered around it, their extended families cultivating a few acres of grapes or fruit trees.

Now living on the economy, trying to build a business in this outlandish environment, I came to experience corruption from a new angle—the receiving end.

For nine months, we attempted to register our cooperative, making weekly trips to the provincial department of agriculture on the edge of town. But each time we would find the cooperatives director absent, or the registration forms suddenly out of stock. At length, we were ready to dispatch our unflappable administrator, Pashtoon Atif, to complete the last formality. He had to deposit a sum in the national bank. Several of us, and the two dogs, trailed out into the street to see him off.