Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (24 page)

N
OT TILL
the spring of 2013 did the penny drop as to what had prompted Petraeus’s sudden change of heart in the summer of 2010—and ultimately, what made the U.S. government shrink from addressing corruption in Afghanistan. On April 28, Matthew Rosenberg of the
New York Times
reported that the CIA had been paying millions of dollars per year, in cash, to President Karzai.
¹⁰
Toward the end of his article was the nugget of information that told the whole story.

The CIA’s bagman was Muhammad Zia Salehi—that aide to Karzai who had been arrested, and then quickly released, in the summer of 2010. U.S. officials had walked into a circular firing squad. Salehi, the subject of the U.S. government’s corruption test case, was also the U.S. government’s intermediary for cash payments to Karzai. The choice of this target many have been deliberate—an effort to flush out into the open the profound contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy.

Two senior U.S. officials told me later that throughout the investigation of Salehi, the planning for the arrest, and his liberation within a few hours, CIA personnel had remained silent about their relationship with him. Even afterward, despite strong words at Principals’ Committee meetings and that Joint Staff “top twenty” list, the CIA never provided the U.S. ambassador or the key cabinet secretaries with the names of the Afghans it was paying. The station chief in Kabul continued to hold private meetings with Karzai, with no other U.S. officials present.

In other words, a secret CIA agenda—which involved enabling the
very summit of Afghanistan’s kleptocracy—was in direct conflict with the anticorruption agenda. And with no one explicitly arbitrating this contradiction, the CIA’s agenda won out.

After those first few weeks in command, Petraeus veered hard away from governance efforts and devoted himself to targeted killing, which he intensified considerably. Targeted killing of individual terrorist suspects is the special domain of the CIA, which Petraeus left Kabul to run—until his tenure there was cut short by an extramarital affair that had germinated in the Yellow Building at ISAF headquarters.

The Obama administration, sickened by the cost in lives and resources that the counterinsurgency approach was exacting, and perhaps uncomfortable with the power and discretion that large-scale military operations place in the hands of the brass, turned increasingly toward special operations and drone warfare to counter security threats. Targeted, technologically advanced, secretive killing, over which the president had direct control, increased after 2010, spreading to Yemen and other theaters.

But the point officials missed in making this shift—and in letting the priorities generated by this strategy trump governance objectives—is that targeted killings still represent a military response to a problem that is fundamentally political and economic in nature: a problem that is rooted in the conduct of government. The current U.S. approach sends a message, wittingly or not, to people who are often driven to violence by the abusively corrupt practices of their ruling cliques, and by frustration at seeing their legitimate grievances systematically ignored. The message seems to be: your grievances are, in fact, of no account. They will not be heard.

That message holds out no recourse, no means of appeal.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Forging an Appeal on Earth

The Netherlands, England, America, ca. 1560–1787

A
n absence of appeal this absolute can drive men and women to extremes—especially when they suffer treatment they feel is acutely unfair. They will incur great risk, sustain material loss, and take steps that might once have been unimaginable to them, to try to redress the balance. Corroborating experiments like the “ultimatum game,” or observations of the way some primates behave,
¹
historical examples demonstrate this tendency.

Take the sixteenth century, when Europeans were confronting just such an implacable lack of recourse. Time had revealed, by then, the fundamental deficiency in all those pious books of advice written for rulers over the years. Princes were ignoring them. Fear of divine judgment had failed to persuade them to take their subjects’ interests to heart, treat them equitably, or abstain from thieving their property.

So some of those subjects set about fashioning a more reliable means of redress. The project would prove revolutionary.

A 1573 complaint, for example, that the Dutch nobleman William of Orange addressed to his overlord, seems to refer directly to the familiar terms of mirror literature. What a contrast with recommended behavior it was, William wrote, when “instead of doing justice to his faithful subjects and giving audience to them, listening graciously to their pitiful complaints, [the prince] should send a tyrant to them who would cruelly slaughter and ruin them all.”

William was writing to King Philip II of Spain, beseeching him, “in all humility, to lend an ear to us and to weigh our cause on the scales of justice.”
²
In other words:
to listen, without intermediary, to what his subjects have to say to him
.

But Phillip was in no mind to do any such thing. In fact, for decades, instead of becoming more accessible to their subjects, royal houses in Europe had been erecting more barriers. They had been consolidating their power and laying down the theoretical basis for an increasingly centralized and absolutist form of government. For justification, they were turning to a religious rationale: the divine right of kingship.
³

In William of Orange’s native Netherlands, this consolidation can be dated to the late 1400s, under Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Ruling territory that stretched from the heart of modern France to the North Sea islands that trail off from Holland, he professed to have “received his power directly from God and from God alone.”
⁴

Half a century later the Habsburg dynasty was solidifying its control over most of Europe—including the Burgundian domains in the Netherlands. In a 1529 mirror for the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (for whom the humanist Erasmus had also written his), a Spanish Franciscan, Antonio de Guevara, argued stridently in favor of sole rule by a monarch, whose authority derives strictly from God, brooking no advice or dissent: “Princes are created by God’s hand to rule. It is our obligation, therefore, to obey them in everything. . . . God wishes that one Emperor alone be . . . lord of the world.”
⁵

In 1548 Charles V himself wrote a book of advice for his son, the future Philip II, expanding the theory. Gone from Charles’s text are the timeworn exhortations to mercy and justice and care for the people. This mirror’s axiom is that kings rule through God, and that Philip should require “obedience and subordination” of all beneath him.
⁶

Spanish by culture and personally secretive—in contrast to his broad-minded Dutch father—Philip II took careful note of this absolutist instruction.
⁷
As the biographer John Lynch puts it, “Philip’s own sense of prerogative was highly developed.”
⁸
He administered his far-flung realm “through officials whose actions he controlled down to the minutest details.”
⁹
Both Philip’s private devotion and his public royal display communicated the religious rationale he claimed for this type of
rule. Philip was “well aware that Catholic sacred imagery and symbols were essential to his public presentation,” to signify that his absolutism was divinely inspired.
¹⁰

Indeed, one of the ways Phillip II tried to impose his imperious will on his Dutch domains was to try to extirpate the new Protestant heresy, by means of the brutal practices of the Spanish Inquisition, a campaign that had been launched in the previous century to root out Jews and Muslims from Spain.

Such an approach was guaranteed to hit rough waters in the Netherlands. Apart from their passionate interest in the Protestant ideas that were electrifying northern Europe, the disparate, stubborn, industrious, creative Dutch provinces had spent decades struggling to impose local restraints on their overlords’ powers. They had already gone beyond the Mirrors for Princes’ hand-wringing and nebulous threats of divine judgment or government collapse. They were beginning to construct practical mechanisms of appeal.

By the mid-1500s, the Dutch were in full, bloody revolt. Their resistance to Philip often referred to these nascent curbs on royal prerogative and instruments of redress—and to the corruption of the king’s envoys. Burghers of towns around Ypres, for example, insisted that people accused of heresy be informed of the evidence against them. Those leveling charges should not to be able to “derive personal profit from their accusation,” the burghers stipulated, outraged at the use of legal proceedings as a pretext for confiscation of property.
¹¹
Flemish representatives rejected the plenary authority of the special envoys Philip dispatched from Spain, recognizing only “his majesty’s ordinary [local] officers, each within his district and the limits of his jurisdiction.”
¹²

Beyond such specifics, the Dutch challenged the very substance of divine right monarchy, by demanding a say in how they would be governed. “The King,” noted an argument submitted to a representative body called the States General in 1576,

has promised [not] to . . . reduce or change the laws of the country, without the common and well-considered consent . . . of the countries and the States; also that he will not impose any tax, tribute, or excise-duty upon the people without their free consent, which
they will render him not as his right but by their grace. . . . He also . . . swears to treat each individual not at will but by right and justice . . . and like the lowest of his subjects he himself will be judged in all disputes without being allowed to breach or reduce another’s right.
¹³

Declaring that kings have no
right
to collect taxes, that the people “by their grace” offer him their money voluntarily, the Dutch rebels were negating the very idea of a divinely ordained king in whom all prerogatives are vested.

In the midst of the chaos engulfing them—indeed, propelled by it into uncharted seas—Dutch writers explored broader notions about the source of government legitimacy.

The principal end for which God ordained government to men was not to convert the good, won and gathered through great labour and industry, into its own property [aka kleptocracy], neither to misuse the power which is rendered to it for intemperate and unreasonable desires . . . nor to . . . govern at will. . . . Kings have been ordained by God for the welfare and benefit of the subjects.
¹⁴

According to the pamphlet submitted to the States General, a lord should govern the Netherlands

following their rights, freedoms, privileges, and
old customs, by which he swore most faithfully upon his arrival, and by which he was inaugurated and accepted, committing himself with a grave oath not to deviate from them in any point.
¹⁵

Some writers went so far as to maintain that the principle of hereditary rule “has never been considered to be fully binding.” Before rulers of the Dutch provinces could take up their functions, they had to be formally accepted by the representative assemblies. And they had to swear those “grave oaths” to uphold the people’s rights—“on the legal condition that if they failed to maintain our ancestors’ privileges, and the freedoms and rights of the country, we would not acknowledge them as lord.”
¹⁶

In other words, the Dutch were concluding that the ruler did
not
owe his power to divine ordination, as Philip’s every word and deed proclaimed, but that he exercised power only as defined by a contract he entered into with his subjects.

Centuries of royalist claims about how God ordered political affairs were under attack.

Like the Uzbeks during the 2005 Andijan crisis, the restive Dutch hoped that their suffering was the work not of Philip himself but of subordinates gone rogue. They spent years trying to appeal directly to their monarch, over the heads of the Spanish envoys. But at length, and almost in spite of themselves, after repeated royal rebuffs, after years of barbarous torture inflicted on accused heretics, and executions and seizures of property, of land battles and naval forays, mass exodus, and the writing and printing of tracts by the thousands, the Dutch took the momentous step of withdrawing their allegiance from Philip II. In 1581 they formally abjured the Spanish monarchy.

The edict—the equivalent of a Dutch Declaration of Independence—spelled out a new view of the relative value of people and prince. “The subjects are not created by God for the benefit of the prince. On the contrary, the prince is created for the subjects . . . to govern them according to right and reason.”

Right and reason
. So did the Dutch begin the process of extracting God—or some people’s interpretation of God—from the direct conduct of human affairs. They had inaugurated a new principle for organizing the government of a nation.

Under the new order, Dutch subjects would no longer have to stand by and hope that their ruler might listen to good advice or tremble at the prospect of divine retribution. For according to the Edict of Abjuration, the people had only “accepted their prince conditionally, by contracts and agreements, and if the prince breaks them, he legally forfeits his sovereignty.”
¹⁷
The new reason-based construct of government included built-in means of redress. Rulers in the Netherlands would henceforth be subject to accountability, not just in the afterlife but here on earth, under the law of the land.

Though Philip reconquered the southern portion of the Low Countries, which eventually became Belgium and part of France, the independent northern provinces chose for the next two centuries to be governed by the people’s elected representatives, whose role was not merely to check the abuses of a prince but to exercise sovereign power. A historic shift in human political history had taken place. The new disposition ushered in an unprecedented age of prosperity and creativity.
¹⁸