Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (4 page)

Still, I learned something about political Islam during those years. I was brought to consider, for example, the garb that its adepts affected: square-cut tunics or monotonous headscarves tied under women’s chins, modeled on styles from the Gulf or Afghanistan, where many Algerian men had traveled to work as laborers or to fight. These clothes contrasted with the equally modest but quite different traditional local dress, which could vary from village to village by a hem of lace or the hang of the drapery—communicating geographical origins or personal taste.

“It’s a uniform,” a local historian explained to me. “This clothing has nothing to do with piety. This is about advertising adherence. And like any uniform, military or school or Boy Scouts, it removes a person’s individuality; its wearer becomes a faceless member of a mass movement, whether he lives in Algeria or Egypt or Saudi Arabia.”

Even without the violence, I realized, this burgeoning political Islam was not just an expression of devotion. It was a militant, doctrinaire response—to something.

One day one of the Algerian journalists, whose almost impossible
working conditions were the topic of my next radio report, mentioned Afghanistan. “Here, the story is over,” he commented matter-of-factly. We were chatting in the sun on the cement stoop of the press center where he and his threatened colleagues had their offices, under the watchful eyes of their police protection. “The rise of militant political Islam,” he clarified. “That story has moved on to Afghanistan.” I nodded, silently, not entirely sure what he meant.

L
ESS THAN FOUR
years later, on December 11, 2001, I was clinging to the backseat of a yellow taxi, whose color and license plates trumpeted its Pakistani origin, in the company of a burly but terrified driver, an equally terrified interpreter, and a euphoric teenager from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak, proud bearer of a Kalashnikov and a couple of pistols, whose militia commander had lent him to me as a bodyguard. I had my mike out and tape rolling, trying to capture the teenager’s comments above the remonstrances of the taxi as it negotiated the river of rocks and dust that passed for a road. We shimmied down the last spiny crest above the Afghan city of Kandahar.

Two days earlier the battened-down, earth-colored city had been the stronghold of America’s new enemy, the Taliban. Now anti-Taliban militia in turbans and flowing tunics, rocket launchers lashed to the struts of their pickup trucks, were charging through the streets on patrol. And already, through their relief, nervous residents were voicing fears that the warlords—a haunting memory from the early 1990s—would return to replace the now-hated Taliban. Tribal elders in the nearby province of Farah appealed for UN peacekeepers to come and disarm the people—not just Taliban remnants but U.S.-armed government-affiliated militias too.

I was covering the fall of the Taliban for an American public (including my NPR editors) that was still too badly rattled by the earth tremor of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to think clearly about the events, their significance, or the mix of underlying motivations that might have led men to perpetrate them.

Within another month, I had made the abrupt decision to drop my journalism career and stay behind in Afghanistan to try to
do
something.
To me, this staggering crisis seemed to provide a once-in-a-generation chance to reimagine the world—to try to contribute to one where the people of two different but deeply interconnected, culturally rich and diverse civilizations might examine and take account of each other’s perspectives. It was time to stop talking and roll up my sleeves.

For my first two and a half years in Kandahar, I worked for President Hamid Karzai’s older brother, a Baltimore businessman named Qayum. I was hired to launch the activities of an NGO of unclear mission that he and his wife had registered in permissive Delaware. Neither we, nor my older sister who gallantly leaped into the endeavor, knew much about what we were doing. We blithely combined a sister-school program with a radio station, a women’s discussion group on the drafting of a new Afghan constitution with rebuilding a village that had been flattened in the U.S. bombing, and a socioeconomic study on the potential impact of repairs to a canal system in a neighboring province. While perhaps dysfunctional, that unorthodox diversity did provide a broad-spectrum exposure to the realities of Afghanistan’s chaotic transition.

It took me a while to realize that I had better acquire some notions of accounting, for I was never asked for a budget or reckoning to submit to the Delaware tax authorities.

I dodged a suggestion of Qayum’s that we hit up the U.S. Agency for International Development for funding to help Qayum’s brothers develop a housing project outside Kandahar. That place, built on public land that the Karzais obtained for the equivalent of a symbolic dollar an acre, grew to be a fantastically lucrative, city-sized gated community whereby they and their partners profited from the violence that came to reign in Kandahar, by selling coveted building plots for a fortune in cash.

For a while, Qayum insisted that our NGO should organize armed village watch groups and serve as the intermediary between these militias and the interior ministry. That did not seem an appropriate activity for a U.S. 501(c)(3), and I balked.

At first I believed Qayum’s description of himself as constituting a “loyal opposition” to his younger brother the president. His analysis of events was mesmerizingly brilliant and has shaped, to this day, my understanding of his country. Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds. Welded to his
brother’s interests, he behaved in ways that contradicted his language so starkly that for a long time I had difficulty processing the inconsistency.

Throughout those same early years, I replicated at my own level the very blunders I berated American officials for committing.

T
HE CLASSIC ERROR
that outsiders make in Afghanistan is to single out a proxy in whom to repose trust and through whom to interact with most other locals. Over the years of intrusions by outside powers, some Afghans have grown adept at capturing this privileged position and exploiting it to advance and enrich themselves, while disempowering (and thus incensing) their neighbors.

In an early 2013 conversation in Brussels, a Hungarian NATO official described almost the identical process at work in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Western democracy promoters, he explained, would arrive with little experience with or intuition for local dynamics, then get captured by self-promoting “political activists,” who had learned to speak their language. “The Westerners weren’t to blame, really,” he told me. “These people are very clever. They figured out how to express just what the Westerners expected to hear.” Their objective being the seizure of power rather than the midwifing of democracy, these individuals corralled the transition: “If the rules of the new game were ‘democratic,’ they would play by those rules—well enough to get their grip on power.”

The outcome, he concluded, was the profound corruption of the resulting polities, to the point that the very notion of democracy is now discredited among much of the post-1989 generation in places like Hungary or Bulgaria. There many young people call for the return of a “good dictator” to deliver rule of law and a modicum of social justice.

In my case in Kandahar, the self-interested intermediary was a balding, dour-faced Karzai retainer named Abdullah, who called himself an engineer, and whom President Karzai’s younger half-brother, the late Ahmed Wali, recommended to me in the following terms: “If I put a million dollars in a storeroom and gave Abdullah the key, and I came back in ten years, I’d find every penny of that money still locked inside.” I hired the man.

In late 2002 I departed Kandahar for an extended flurry of talks and meetings in the United States. Before leaving Abdullah in charge of the NGO, I walked him through my system for keeping track of petty cash expenditures: marking each outlay on the back of the envelope in which I carried the money, along with the date and the purpose. For an engineer, he seemed to have trouble catching on.

I returned, after several weeks, to find not a single new mark on the back of that now-empty envelope. Not one receipt, not a record of a single purchase, did Abdullah turn over. We were building schoolrooms. He had made deliveries of bricks and sand and gypsum, had paid weekly cash wages, bought the food our cook prepared for our employees . . .

Swallowing my panic, I demanded receipts. Abdullah went scurrying around to gather some. Sweating, I pieced together forensics that could tell a semicoherent tale.

Years later another employee recounted Abdullah’s derisive comments about “Western accounting” and “Afghan accounting”—in which I was obviously unversed. I heard painful stories of suppliers who had never been paid. I reconsidered the probable reasons we’d been forced to leave a school building unfinished for lack of funds.

I had, in other words, been an accessory to fraud.

I have reflected on those suppliers, no doubt furious—and bitter and humiliated at their lack of recourse, their helplessness to make good their claims in the face of the Karzai name. Maybe their anger was initially aimed at Abdullah. But known in town as a Karzai retainer, he must have stood in for the Afghan government in their minds. And I, working for the Karzais alongside him, an American who had shown up on the heels of the fleeing Taliban, represented the new Afghan government too, not to mention its U.S. and international backers. It would have been hard to credit my negligence. I suspect most of the victims figured I had planned the heist and split the proceeds with Abdullah.

How many such episodes would it take, I have wondered, before one of those suppliers decided to shutter his store and pick up a gun? Or look the other way when his son did? Or tell his wife, her skirts tucked back in the fold of her knees as she crouched by the gas cooking ring, to fix a meal for the clutch of outlaws, his distant relatives, who had come down from the hills in the north to plan an attack?

One way Abdullah kept me in thrall was by cultivating fear: by convincing me that Kandaharis were unabashed murderers and thieves. Himself a transplant from near Kabul, he professed a pious horror of the people among whom he was living. They would, he insisted, dismember me in a second were it not for his watchful protection.

A further technique was to keep me from interacting with anyone else face to face, without his presence in the room. Abdullah could get temperamental. Once when I decided to eat lunch with the rest of the staff, instead of separately with him, he threw a violent tantrum, refusing to speak to me for three days. I put it down to jealousy or made excuses for his psychological fragility. How rational would I be after more than two decades of war? Besides, I needed Abdullah. He got things done. What if he were to quit? What would I do?

And so did I commit—at my own humble level—one of the signal errors that many mirror authors warned their august readers to avoid. I lost touch with the people I was purporting to serve.

Writing to Sultan Malik Shah in 1091, Nizam al-Mulk described how Persian monarchs, “according to the books of our ancestors,” would hold court out of doors, seated on horseback, atop

a tall platform . . . so as to distinguish from among all the people gathered in the plain those who were suffering oppression, and to give them justice. The reason for this custom was that once a prince retires to a residence where doors abound, and barriers and vestibules and hallways and gates, men of ill-will and perversity can bar people’s entrance, and keep them from lodging complaints with him.
²

In a contemporary
Book of Counsel for Kings
, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the medieval Muslim world, warned that

nothing is more damaging to the subjects and prejudicial and sinister to the king than royal inaccessibility and seclusion; and nothing impresses the hearts of the subjects and functionaries more than ease of access to the king. For when the subjects know the
king is easily approachable, it will be impossible for the officials to oppress the subjects and the subjects to oppress one another.
³

An anonymous mid-twelfth-century Persian-language mirror called
The Sea of Precious Virtues
ranks such approachability at the apex of a king’s etiquette: “First, he should not conceal himself from subjects and petitioners; for when the king conceals himself the people are ruined, wrongdoers become powerful, and the sin of that is on his head.”
⁴

The sin of that is on his head
. Command responsibility, once again.

“The sovereign,” Nizam al-Mulk summed up a string of legends along these lines, “must listen himself, without intermediary, to what his subjects have to say to him.”
⁵

I was hardly a sovereign. But I did wield a lot of power over the people I employed. And I made it impossible for them to get to me to raise legitimate complaints about the conduct of my subordinate, Abdullah. I denied them any avenue of appeal.

In other words, just as the U.S. government has so often done on a grander scale, I had enabled the development of a corrupt system under my very eyes. However good my intentions may have been, they were not effectively detectable to the sufferers. As a result, I discredited not just myself, but the country and especially the principles I professed to be representing, and I provided fodder to the extremist arguments I had come to help Afghans rebut.

L
ATER
I
WOULD
devote considerable energy to encouraging senior U.S. officials to “listen themselves, without intermediaries,” to what Afghans had to say to them. I was taken aback at the resistance I encountered—not just from sidelined Afghan intermediaries, but from within the U.S. government structures I thought I was assisting.

When Representative Jane Harman of California wrote me in March 2009 that she was leading a congressional delegation to Afghanistan with Senator Jon Kyl, and what could I suggest they do, I offered to get them together with some tribal elders. For several years, a self-appointed council had been trying—sometimes clumsily and often self-interestedly but against ridiculous odds—to serve as a clearinghouse for
the concerns of a disenfranchised population. “We want to be a mirror,” the council leader told me when I visited them in late 2007, “to reflect to the government how it should be working, how it should solve the people’s problems.”