Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (8 page)

Many officers objected that the effort amounted to launching a two-front war. Not only were they engaged in a bloody standoff with the Taliban, they complained, now we were asking them to fight our allies in the Afghan government too. It would multiply the risks to their men.

As we cataloged those risks at the time, we did not dwell on the probable countermoves by Afghan officials. What worried us most was ourselves.

Some countries in the international coalition had historic relationships with criminal power brokers that they were reluctant to break. Concern for troops’ safety, we believed, led others to strike deals with corrupt officials or even insurgents. Most problematically, officials whose abusive behavior poisoned relations with the population were the favored “assets” of some Western intelligence agencies.

Rigorous pursuit of an anticorruption approach would expose these conflicting agendas. Savage internal battles might result, or public embarrassment, or nonparticipation or even obstruction by some NATO organizations. And Afghan frustration would only rise.

We suspected the profound and self-defeating internal contradictions that lurked beneath the awkward surface of this war. But we didn’t know the half of it.

O
N
J
ULY 5, 2009,
McChrystal’s top brass and incoming U.S. embassy officials gathered for their first joint meeting. Acting Ambassador Tony Wayne ran down a list of priority action items. Number two, after opium, was corruption. The military, he conceded, had “been thinking about it, and we haven’t.” It was a candid observation on the lack of diplomatic attention paid to the issue, nearly eight years into the war.

Wayne convened an anticorruption strategy group meeting, calling in officials from a handful of civilian agencies. U.S. embassy staff and the new ISAF Anti-Corruption Task Force began working together. I remember the moments of slightly dazed discovery. It was as though some people had made their separate ways to a park and, meeting there, had decided to spread out a single blanket and share a picnic. Baskets came open, and everyone craned for a glimpse of what the others had brought to the table.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs was sending rule-of-law advisers to Regional Commands East and South. U.S. attorneys had stood up a counternarcotics court, with its own state-of-the-art facility on the edge of town. Now they were mentoring anticorruption prosecutors too. The British government had developed a special Afghan criminal investigations unit, called the Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF), whose remit included
corruption. The FBI was helping support it. A “Threat Finance Cell,” manned by DEA, Treasury, and FBI officers, whose job was to trace terrorist funding, was nurturing its own Afghan team, the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU). These officers’ third priority, the heavyset director informed us in a deceptively bored monotone, was public 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 with ammunition, or against whom the MCTF should build its next, lone case.

A disciplined procedure existed for putting suspected insurgent leaders on the kill/capture list.
¹¹
It was a bottom-up vetting process. Via secure videoconference, each regional command would argue its case against the militants it judged the most dangerous. A single-screen
“targeting packet” informed the discussion, featuring such elements as the likely impact on his network of killing him, potential conflicts with other military operations, the quality of the intelligence on which the recommendation was based, or legal considerations.

The Anti-Corruption Task Force used that targeting process as a model for its own. We had to weigh a different set of considerations, of course—the level of public outcry about the official’s corrupt behavior, for example, whether theft of international funds was involved, his political affiliations, his connivance with the insurgency, or his involvement in drug trafficking. Our process differed, too, in that our weapons were less lethal.

Yet ironically, the prospect of turning off aid or denying a visa to someone was more complex than the prospect of shooting him. The potential unintended consequences were dizzying. Since international officials were in daily contact with potential targets, leaks were likely. And while Taliban targets could either be killed or captured, ours were subject to a far more varied menu of actions, requiring a custom-tailored selection for each case.

This complexity, and our own diversity, kicked up squalls of mistrust. U.S. law enforcement was adamant against inviting Europeans to our meetings. Stockholm syndrome, the Americans were sure, or plain naïveté would impel Europeans to warn Afghan officials of investigations, ruining months of painstaking work.

I didn’t mind the Europeans so much; I minded the CIA. I remember standing in the doorway before one meeting, chest inflated with a held breath, to bar an uninvited “regional affairs officer” from entering the room. The CIA was paying one of my prime targets—I had seen it with my own eyes—Karzai’s 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 ISAF like a weapon against people who stood up to him. The inhabitants of three provinces hated him.

But the CIA had been paying him for years. I had watched officers hand him a tinfoil-wrapped package of bills when I was over at his house for dinner one 2003 night. I never understood what they thought they
were getting, but Ahmed Wali Karzai was an “asset.” The CIA was not joining our meetings to help, I knew it. Its aim was to learn our moves and protect its people.

I lost that battle. The CIA retained its seat at prioritization meetings, its silent representative taking meticulous notes, and never volunteering a shred of information.

ISAF
HEADQUARTERS
, shielded behind periodically heightened blast walls from the dusty, smog-choked, cacophonous welter that was downtown Kabul, boasted a garden. The whole compound had once been the Afghan National Army officers’ athletic club, until the international community came and plunked down steel containers fitted with bunk beds and collective bathrooms, put combination locks on all the doors, and converted one of the gyms into a chow hall. The garden, with its stately trees and corner gazebos where staff sections held barbecues on Thursday nights, was a reminder of the bygone elegance of the place—and, by extension, of Kabul itself.

I used it as my conference room.

That summer I got together regularly with Steve Foster, the unassuming Scotland Yard detective who had personally launched, and was nursing into autonomous life, one of the special Afghan police investigation units, the Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF). Foster had reason to favor ISAF’s involvement in the anticorruption effort and the protective support it might bring. His fledgling Afghan unit had just taken an episode of political interference right in the teeth. I had to make him spell out the details a couple of times, before I could glimpse—through his diplomatic suggestion that the Afghan interior ministry might perhaps not be entirely trustworthy—a flash of the reality.

The MCTF had concluded its first case a month or so earlier, a counternarcotics case. Unlike corruption, drug trafficking had galvanized international concern, resulting in a heavily fortified counternarcotics judicial complex on the edge of town, staffed by designated judges and prosecutors. No such structure yet existed for anticorruption. Foster chose a maiden case for his MCTF that would fit with the counternarcotics mission, so his officers could benefit from these facilities.

“They arrested our man on Kandahar Airfield,” Foster recounted. That was the sprawling base I had watched grow like a tumor over the years, devouring the dust-choked plain that stretched into the desert east of Kandahar. “Atmar didn’t take it terribly well.”

Hanif Atmar I knew. Minister of interior, former minister of education, before that minister of rural development, clipped beard shaped to a point, hooded eyes, walked with a pronounced limp, spoke with a broad, condescending English accent. One of the international community’s darlings.

“He called the head of the detention facility onto the carpet. Threatened to sack him on the spot.”

I had to mull that one over to let the implications sink in. The Afghan minister of interior had nearly relieved a senior officer for doing his job: for providing temporary detention, at the behest of U.S. and U.K. officials and his own superior, of a duly arrested suspect, who happened to be a border police officer.

In the U.K. embassy’s negotiations to preserve the case and the Afghan officer’s job, Foster and the MCTF were stripped of one of their key assets: stealth. Henceforth, the U.K. officials had agreed, the MCTF would inform Atmar ahead of any planned arrest. These arrangements could be made to sound perfectly reasonable. After all, why shouldn’t an interior minister be kept abreast of criminal investigations proceeding under his watch?

During one of these late-summer conversations, Foster shared his planning for the next MCTF arrest. Another border police official was in the cross hairs—in fact, the titular commander for the critical four provinces that make up the southeastern corner of Afghanistan. One hundred thousand dollars of police money had gone missing—including from the widows’ and orphans’ relief fund. Bank records and judicial wiretaps had three accomplices nailed. The lead suspect’s name was Sayfullah.

M
Y MIND
darted back to the last time I had seen him. Sayfullah, a soft man, a bit lost in his police uniform, whose clean-shaven face lacked much of a chin, had offered me a lift in his green police Ford Ranger, when I was in Kandahar just weeks before.

General McChrystal’s whole command team had descended on Kandahar Airfield for a daylong election update. The proceedings, begun soporifically enough, were shattered, as if a bomb had exploded in our midst, when an aide had bent over by McChrystal’s ear: Provincial Police Chief Matiullah Qatih had just been assassinated.

Matiullah Qatih, the man my cooperative member Nurallah had called the day his brother had been shaken down by the cop at the gates to Kandahar. The one who had asked Nurallah, with weary sarcasm, “Well, did he die of it?”