Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (28 page)

President George W. Bush’s long friendship with these kleptocratic Arab rulers, Bin Laden told Americans, gave him an opportunity to observe their corruption, the impunity with which they were committing it, and the lack of any means of appeal or redress. Bush, Bin Laden suggested, “became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.”
³³

The theme of corruption also dominates a 2009 video interview disseminated by Al Qaeda’s media division. Here Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded Bin Laden at the head of the organization, declared:

Regimes that are corrupt, rotten, and allied with the Crusaders . . . have tried to be secretive about the uprising and the jihadist anger. . . . [The uprising] defends the stolen Muslim rights and their honors that are being violated by those regimes every day. . . . Popular awareness is more convinced, now, that these corrupt and rotten regimes are the reason behind economic injustice and corruption, the political oppression, and social detachment.

Other Al Qaeda publications dissect the details of public corruption scandals, such as a 2006 Saudi deal to buy seventy-two Eurofighter jets, which allegedly included BAE Systems’ gift of a lavish honeymoon for the daughter of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then secretary general of the UN Security Council.
³⁴

Through application of the “command responsibility” principle that served as the basis for convicting King Charles I, that figures in so many Mirrors for Princes, and that explains why Afghans hold Washington responsible for the Karzai government’s behavior, Bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda figures blamed the United States for the corruption of their own rulers.

Abd al-Rahman Atiya, killed in a drone strike in 2011, conceded that
the 9/11 attacks had been launched because of hatred for some aspects of Western culture, but the main rationale was the U.S. role enabling Arab kleptocracies.

Yes we hate the corruptive financial lifestyle that does not please God . . . But . . . the more important reason is their . . . appointing collaborative regimes for them in our countries. Then they support these regimes and corruptive governments against their people, who demand freedom and want to abide by Islam.

This Western support for Middle Eastern kleptocracies was “the real reason that pushed the mujahideen to carry out these blessed attacks.”

Atiya went on to blast the aspects of Western culture he deemed most objectionable—excesses that have seemed especially pronounced since the 1990s: “It is a corrupt, wayward, and unjust system . . . based on beastly behavior, and seven principles: greed, gluttony, injustice, selfishness, extreme materialism, abandonment of religion.”
³⁵

In this context—and recalling the history of Dutch Protestants ransacking the physical manifestations of Catholic kleptocracy—the choice of the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, near Wall Street, as the target of the 9/11 attacks may take on an enhanced meaning. Perhaps Al Qaeda’s main intent was not to kill large numbers of Americans so much as to visit a spectacular symbolic punishment upon the manifestations of what it saw as a criminal kleptocracy that controlled the most powerful instruments of force on earth. Perhaps Al Qaeda was in fact committing an act of iconoclasm: replicating the kind of sentences that the 1566 Protestants executed on churches and articles of devotion the length and breadth of the Low Countries.
³⁶

These roughly comparable instances, from different centuries and religions, exemplify a persistent relationship between corruption and religious extremism. In periods of acute, self-serving behavior on the part of public leaders, Christians and Muslims alike have often sought a corrective in strict codes of personal behavior derived from the precepts of puritanical religion. And they have imposed it, if necessary, by force.

Those who object to this remedy should look for other ways to cure the cause.

*
The major exceptions, of course, were the Catholic French, whose reflections both inspired America and led to their own revolution. But even in France, Huguenots were the vanguard of the innovative thinking on sovereignty and the protection of rights. According to the Huguenot Philippe Mornay, kings “were raised to their dignities by the people and therefore they should never forget . . . in what a strict bond of observance they are tied to those from whom they have received all their greatness.” Mornay sketched out the notion of separation of powers, writing that “officers of the kingdom receive their authority from the people in the general assembly of the states . . . to preserve the rights and privileges of the people, and to carefully hinder the prince.” Philippe Mornay, “A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants,” in Hans Hillerbrand, ed.,
The Protestant Reformation
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2009), pp. 261ff.

†
See
Appendix
.

‡
Part of what makes this material conceptually challenging, at least for me, is the fact that a single episode epitomizes two apparently contradictory reactions to kleptocracy: the start of the process of elaborating a constitutional form of government on the one hand, and violent religious extremism on the other. The leadership of the Dutch revolt incarnated both tendencies. There is no current indication that Al Qaeda and its subsidiaries will evolve a new mechanism of representative government, the way the descendants of those early Protestant extremists did in the Dutch and short-lived English Republics, or in the United States. On the other hand, the tendency toward tolerance and representation is not Protestantism’s only propensity. A strong undercurrent of dogmatic puritanism does persist and, though not often physically violent, is growing more powerful in places like Nigeria—and in some parts of the United States.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Remedies

V
iolent religious extremism is not the only menace to international security that systemic corruption can fuel. It is just the particular variety that dominated the imagination of most Western decision makers early in the twenty-first century. Massive popular uprisings leading to revolution, government collapse, and bloody or dangerous aftershocks constitute another potential peril rooted in kleptocracy. Events across the Arab world beginning in 2011 and in Ukraine in 2014 furnish clear examples. Iraq experienced a kind of hybrid of the two that year, as militant extremists, joined by non-jihadi locals, conquered much of the north and west of the country.

Other threats to world stability are also generated by intense, systemic government corruption. Unnoticed, like some odorless gas, it fuels these threats without attracting much policy attention.

When every government function is up for sale to the highest bidder, violations of international as well as domestic law become the norm. Do Iran and North Korea frighten the world with their nuclear ambitions? Both purchased the technology from officials at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.
¹
Are international sanctions regimes often too porous to contain targeted regimes? Corrupt governments help circumvent them.

Acutely corrupt governance doesn’t just aid terrorist organizations by driving indignant citizens into their arms; it provides haven and logistical support for those very same groups, as officials avert their eyes in exchange for a bribe. Nairobi residents joke about the “Shebab
bribe”—double the normal rate—that allowed attackers to infiltrate the Westgate Mall in September 2013, in a siege that claimed more than sixty lives. Trafficking rings that have secured safe passage past corrupt officials for migrants or sex slaves may also provide transit for mules carrying a dirty bomb. Some corrupt governments, like Algeria’s or Pakistan’s or Yemen’s, may deliberately cultivate terrorist groups—even while simultaneously projecting themselves as counterterrorism allies, to tap into a continuing flow of military assistance dollars.

Trafficking rings, whether they deal in illicit drugs or substandard medicine, restricted resources such as protected wildlife, or weapons, or conflict minerals, can obtain their product of choice or move it without leaving tracks through highly corrupt environments. “In Zimbabwe,” write two of France’s most distinguished Africanists, Jean-François Bayart and Béatrice Hibou, “the traffic in ivory and rhinoceros horn has involved not only guerrilla movements but also the military authorities. In general, illegal diamond exports are not carried out by small-time diggers or traders, but by those at the highest reaches of power.”
²
In some cases, the protections afforded humanitarian organizations may be wrongfully extended to trafficking networks that pose as NGOs.
³

Where criminality is the norm, the systematic theft of proprietary information across borders is rewarded. “The scale of international theft of American intellectual property is unprecedented,” a commission chaired by a former director of national intelligence and a former ambassador to China found in 2013. Losses add up to “hundreds of billions of dollars per year, on the order of the size of U.S. exports to Asia.” China, one of the world’s most corrupt countries, “is the world’s largest source of IP theft.”
⁴

In Albania, Argentina, Bulgaria, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Montenegro, among other acutely corrupt countries, public officials have entered into destabilizing alliances, even symbiosis, with transnational criminal superpowers: drug and weapons syndicates whose activities span continents. In these and other cases, some rival criminal network, often posing as a “Robin Hood,” may mount a violent challenge to corrupt government networks. Such scenarios have exacted a shocking price from populations both inside and beyond national boundaries.
⁵

Where conflict exists, corrupt governing networks may deliberately
maintain the civil strife, to provide ongoing opportunities for extracting resources—including humanitarian aid—or for profiteering from the sale of necessities: “It is at the moment that a crisis becomes most evident that external finances flow most easily.”
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The militaries in acutely corrupt countries make unreliable allies. As defense funding is siphoned off to the purses of the powerful, armies are often poorly trained and equipped, their rosters full of “ghost soldiers.” Officers sell matériel, even to the same enemies they are supposed to be fighting. Military professionalism and capabilities are inadequate to protect borders, leaving such countries vulnerable to attack. In 2014, the militaries of Ukraine, Nigeria, and Iraq put every one of these ills on display. Kleptocratic governments cannot be expected to honor the conditions attached to the provision of military aid. Proliferation, forging of end-user certificates, and other types of fraud are likely to be the norm. And cooperation, like Pakistan’s in allowing NATO to use its overland routes into Afghanistan, is often provided only for a price, which can be raised as soon as dependence is established.

Other corruption-related security threats burn on a slower fuse. Corrupt government practices contribute to severe economic distortions, threatening financial sector stability, for example, when banks are pillaged or fraudulent banking practices are widespread. Kleptocratic networks can also undermine the economic diversity of their countries, as they focus government effort on extracting natural resources whose returns they capture. Other economic sectors wither or are actively undermined by cheating on customs or other types of unfair competition. Economic opportunities dry up. Unemployment rises. And the distortions that result can have destabilizing impacts on entire economic ecosystems.

Acute corruption damages physical ecosystems just as indelibly. Kleptocracies don’t care much about environmental degradation. Their policies—or lack of them—often exacerbate the impact of climate change and incapacitate efforts to curb it. Worsening environmental conditions, in turn, increase the suffering of populations, making them more likely to rise in revolt.
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In climate-vulnerable countries—Haiti, for example, or the Philippines—the impact of natural disasters is compounded by corruption. And disaster relief, while on the face of it not a security issue, is a priority mission for the U.S. Marines.

Obviously, not even severe and structured corruption—nor any other single driver—can be solely blamed for such complex phenomena as insurgency, revolution, economic depression, or the partial capture of states by transnational criminal organizations. This book has emphasized acute corruption not because it is the sole driver but because it is a remarkably underappreciated one. The interplay of kleptocratic governance with other factors increases the likelihood of a severe international security event occurring at a given time.

Networks determined to exploit weaknesses lying nearby, such as Al Qaeda franchises that can capitalize on local grievances, or criminal superpowers on the hunt for leaders to co-opt, are one such factor. Preexisting separatist movements might be another, or high unemployment, or an ethnic or sectarian split, or severe local economic disparities caused by geographic or environmental factors, or a recent economic downturn, or an autocratic leader’s advanced age.
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I
T WOULD
be wrong to imply that Western governments have been entirely insensible to the problem of corruption. Washington has led the drive to end businesses’ habit of bribing government officials to gain access to markets. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and antibribery conventions modeled on it have revolutionized corporate behavior. As concern about terrorist financing and tax evasion has risen, efforts to combat money laundering and tax fraud have picked up momentum. The 2014 Ukraine crisis sparked further interest in the issue within the U.S. government. International institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the G-20 are helping tighten norms. Some European nations, such as Norway, have begun attaching strict conditions to foreign aid, including repayment requirements if the conditions are not met. And by funding their activities and providing at least a degree of implicit protection, international aid agencies provide lifelines to grassroots anticorruption activists.