Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (2 page)

My focus was on economic reconstruction, not rule of law. Yet within weeks I was hearing stories of shakedowns by thugs in uniform, the private militia of Kandahar’s warlord governor. As early as 2002, Kandaharis were pointing anxiously to the presence of notorious criminals in their new government.

Years later, due to my long experience in country, I was asked to serve as an adviser to the U.S. military. By then I had watched that early chaotic warlordism take hold and solidify. I had listened to hours of my neighbors’ anguish about it. And so, given the opportunity, I spent much of my energy trying to persuade international officials to take corruption seriously. I was sure that unless they recognized the danger it presented and addressed it head on, they would never win the war.

That 2009 morning, in other words, was hardly the first time I had considered that kleptocratic governance—acute and systemic public corruption—was fodder for an expanding insurgency. Nurallah’s tale was just the most striking demonstration. Corruption, it made plain, was not solely a humanitarian affair, an issue touching on principles or
values alone. It was a matter of national security—Afghan national security and, by extension, that of the United States.

And if corruption was driving people to violent revolt in Afghanistan, it was probably doing likewise in other places. Acute government corruption may in fact lie at the root of some of the world’s most dangerous and disruptive security challenges—among them the spread of violent extremism.

That basic fact, elusive to this day, is what this book seeks to demonstrate.

CHAPTER TWO

“Lord King, How I Wish That You Were Wise”

Mirrors for Princes, ca. 700–1516

The Prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he at least avoids hatred. . . . This he can always do if he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects, and from their women
.

—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI,
The Prince

I
n the fall of 1513 and into the winter, on a small property lapped by gently rolling Tuscan hills, where December’s chill brought mud not ice, a disgraced former Florentine civil servant named Niccolò Machiavelli wrote some pages of practical advice on how not to lose a principate. His rigorously unromantic approach to the subject has become eponymous.

That Machiavelli’s everlasting fame should have been connected with cunning, self-interested autocratic rule is something of an achievement. Mere months before he put pen to paper, he had been arrested and tortured and had barely escaped beheading by the very family of the prince for whom he wrote
The Prince
.

In fact, Machiavelli was an ardent believer in representative government and had spent more than a decade in the service of Florence’s short-lived republic. When the Medici family invaded the city at the head of a papal army, toppled the republic, and (re)took power themselves,
Machiavelli was dismissed, suspect for his prior loyalties. Within months, his name showed up on a list in the pocket of a harebrained conspirator against the Medici restoration, and Machiavelli was clapped in irons and carried off to Le Stinche prison, where interrogators broke his arms, by hanging him up by the wrists bound behind his back. He made light of the screams in a sonnet for Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici.

Machiavelli survived by fluke: Giovanni was elected pope and, in thanksgiving, set all the felons free. Confined to his rural family estate, Machiavelli apparently decided the one way to return to the intoxicating tumult of his beloved politics was to prove he had forsaken his former ways and was now a reliable supporter of Medici rule. That was part of his objective in writing
The Prince
.
¹

To court Medici approval, he went so far as to challenge the timeworn list of virtues that members of budding rulers’ entourage traditionally served up in books of advice addressed to their lords. Piety, for example, fear of God, mercy, and generosity were predictable—if perhaps unappetizing—fare. Machiavelli deliberately played the contrarian. It was acceptable, he wrote, even beneficial, to be mean, not generous, to be harsh, not merciful. Those more bitter qualities, he contended—if properly understood and embodied—could keep realms secure and princes from perdition.

But there was one vice that Machiavelli admonished his reader to shun if he cared to prolong his reign: theft of his subjects’ possessions. In other words, corruption. “Being rapacious and arrogating subjects’ goods and women is what, above all else . . . renders him hateful,” he wrote.
²
And widespread hatred of a ruler was conducive to conspiracy. And conspiracy reliably brought down governments.
³

Machiavelli knew
The Prince
was vying with long tradition.
⁴
The rich and well-known body of advice literature was referred to collectively as “Mirrors for Princes.” Hundreds had been written and copied and traded across continents by the time Machiavelli wrote his.
⁵
An anonymous Irish “mirror,” addressed in verse to a mythical king, was composed around A.D. 700—and was as poetic and primeval as any of that island’s literature.
⁶
Clerics and courtiers wrote them, even monarchs, for their heirs. James VI of Scotland, for example, who would become James I of England when Queen Elizabeth I died childless, penned one
for his son Harry. His
Basilicon Doron
endures as one of the signal expositions of divine right monarchy.
⁷

Lo heere (my Sonne) a mirrour vieu and faire,

Which sheweth the shaddow of a worthy King.

Lo heere a Booke, a patterne doth you bring

Which ye should preasse to follow mair and maire.
⁸

I first encountered this body of literature decades ago, while studying history—medieval Islamic history, in fact. For Muslim scholars and statesmen wrote mirrors for their princes, too. I perused several while considering writing a dissertation on systems of justice—a dissertation I ultimately discarded, and with it my studies.

But one day, browsing the shelves of the bookstore at the Institut du Monde Arabe, on a Parisian break from Afghanistan, I happened upon a remembered text, translated from the Persian in one of those voluptuous laid-paper softcovers that French publishing houses still put out.
A Treatise on Government
, it is titled, or
Siyasat Nameh—
literally, “Book of Politics.” I bought it and brought it back to Kandahar.

Its author, Nizam al-Mulk (“Organizer of the Realm” ), was one of the greatest, most thoughtful and foresightful administrators in the Muslim world. Born around 1018 in what is now eastern Iran, he was the son of a provincial tax collector for the Ghaznavid Empire, whose capital was the city of Ghazni—about three hour’s drive up the Kabul road from our workshop in Kandahar, where I was reading Nizam al-Mulk’s text.

His world flourished at the confluence of three powerful human currents: a millennial Persian-speaking tradition of letters and administration, a crystallizing Muslim orthodoxy expressed in Arabic and nominally represented by the caliph in Baghdad, and an increasingly separate secular power wielded by Turkic sultans and their seminomadic troops.

Nizam al-Mulk was chief minister to two of those sultans in turn. Coming from the Persian tradition himself, he wrote
Siyasat Nameh
not just to help his second master keep his principate but to show him how to consolidate, organize, and expand it. Nizam al-Mulk contributed to
that effort by overhauling and streamlining a complex land-grant system for paying military commanders, and by expanding—in order to ensure a supply of competent civil servants—an educational innovation: residential institutions of higher learning, otherwise known as colleges, or in Arabic,
madrassas
.

When, around 1090, Sultan Malik Shah asked “his peers, elders, and men of science to reflect upon the constitution of his government,” the aging Nizam al-Mulk produced a manual that, while full of colorful anecdotes, is at least as practical as
The Prince
. Its chapter headings catalog the administrative functions required in a sophisticated empire: “Of financial inspectors and their means of subsistence.” “Of envoys sent out from court for important matters.” “The necessity of maintaining supplies of forage at way-stations.” “The necessity of a racially integrated army.” “Of civil servants.”
⁹

Alerted as I was, by then, by the frustrations of my Afghan neighbors, I found myself increasingly spellbound by the book’s admonitions against various forms of corruption:

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.

Now
there
was an anticorruption measure that would make an impact. If the police officer who had shaken down Nurallah’s brother had lost his house over it, others might think twice.

Stories of land grabs, like the ones taking place in Kandahar, come up again and again in the
Treatise
.

It is reported that [the powerful eighth-century governor of Basra] Umara b. Hamza attended Caliph Wasiq’s audience on the day the caliph was meting out justice for those complaining of arbitrary conduct. A man . . . rose and accused Umara in these
terms: “Umara b. Hamza forcibly commandeered a property that belongs to me.”

According to the legend, Umara, thus shamed in public, renounced the property on the spot.
¹⁰

Half a dozen pages are devoted to the tale of an aged widow who gleaned a bare subsistence from a parcel of land that the governor expropriated, and the legendary Persian king Anushirvan’s investigation and redress of the grievance. Another monarch of Persian fable, Bahram Gur, comes to suspect his most powerful minister of corrupt practices. To learn more, Bahram Gur decides to question detainees in the main jail. “I had,” said one, “a beautiful and pleasant garden. [Minister] Rast Revish possessed a domain nearby. One day he entered my garden and was enchanted by its beauty, and voiced his desire to buy it. I refused to sell, and he had me arrested.” The man had been in prison for four years.
¹¹
Other stories follow in a similar vein.

This Persian fable’s narrative device would sound perfectly contemporary to residents of present-day Kandahar, where arbitrary detention to extort a fat payment (or, looked at differently, official kidnapping) is a frequent event. Say the man is a Talib, and few would question his arrest.

Nothing preoccupied Nizam al-Mulk so much as justice. “The salaries and emoluments accorded to judges,” he wrote, “assure their independence and keep them from unfairness. This point is extremely important and extremely sensitive, for judges . . . dispose of the lives and fortunes of Muslims.”
¹²
One king is described descending from his throne to kneel down in public audience if a subject has a complaint against him, and warning the judge of judges to rule without favoritism on pain of death.

By including such tales, in so many variations, Nizam al-Mulk was hammering home a point: that a government’s ability to administer justice—and especially to hold its highest officials to account—was indispensable to its very survival.

One story about Umar ibn al-Khattab, an early caliph whose name became synonymous with justice in Islamic literature, has him promise on his deathbed that he will return to visit his heir in a dream within three days of passing. But it takes twelve full years for the new caliph
to dream of his father. When the young man complains about the delay, Umar explains he was too busy to come earlier. “A bridge in the region of Baghdad fell into disrepair because local officials neglected its maintenance,” Umar tells his son in the dream. “A sheep’s hoof got caught in a hole in the bridge and broke. From the day of my death till today, I’ve been discharging my responsibility for that accident.”
¹³

O
UTSIDE
K
ANDAHAR,
beyond the arched city gates in the direction of Pakistan, a long bridge straddles the shallow, winding bed of the Tarnak River. That bridge, rebuilt and paved with international development funds in 2003, was always coming apart. Inching past the latest hole in its surface, colleagues and I would peer down at the stony river through a tangle of steel reinforcing rods denuded by the missing concrete. Often the bridge would be closed altogether, and we would join the rest of the traffic—gaudily caparisoned cargo trucks with their skirts of jingling chains, taxis and minivans, police trucks, white Toyota Corollas with their bouquets of children peering out the back window—and jump the banks of the road, angle downward through the talcum powder dust till we reached the river floor, and navigate a route across the shallowest stretches of water.

That bridge was a constant affliction to Kandaharis. People would trade figures on how much money had been allotted for the repair. They knew how the scam worked: the well-connected outfit that had won the contract would transfer it to a subcontractor—pocketing a percentage. That subcontractor would hand the deal off to a sub-subcontractor, also minus a cut, till the company actually doing the work received only a fraction of the initial contract and threw something together with shoddy materials and underpaid workers. Meanwhile cocky young employees of the companies up the line would thrust around town in slick SUVs worth years of an ordinary farmer’s harvest.

“We know all this money is coming in,” a man from the orchards north of town once told me. “We just don’t know which hole it is spilling out through.” That bridge kept springing holes. And the foreigners kept paying more money for more repairs. And no one, so far as we knew, was called to account.