Read Online Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes - Free Book Online Page B

happened.
    President Karzai did hold one, just two weeks later, his first speech as declared victor of the August presidential election. It was a virtuoso performance in conveying different cues to different audiences.
    Karzai dwelled on corruption. “Afghanistan has been tarnished by the scourge” of it, he conceded. And he vowed, “I will launch a campaignto clean the government.” Many international observers applauded his change of course.
    Standing on either side of Karzai as he made this pronouncement, however, were his vice presidents, Karim Khalili and Muhammad Qasim Fahim, two of the most notorious war criminals in all Afghanistan. They symbolized, for most Afghans, the yawning justice deficit of the post-Taliban government.
    That bit of stagecraft—putting them on display that way—was aimed at members of the Mafia system. So was Karzai’s answer to a reporter’s question: would he be removing any key officials as part of this new anticorruption campaign?
    “These problems cannot be solved by changing high-ranking officials,” Karzai replied. “We’ll review the laws and see what problems are in the law, and we will draft some new laws.” 3 He was promising just the sort of busywork that would occupy earnest international officials. And simultaneously, he was signaling to members of the corrupt networks that they could relax—and to the Afghan people that they could swallow their frustration. No one was going to be held accountable.
    So there were answers to one set of questions. The solution of more nagging riddles followed.
    A perplexing discrepancy existed between my experience of the Afghan government and many other Americans’ characterizations of it. “Weak,” “incapable,” and “absent” were the words Americans typically used, evoking a void that the Taliban, according to the standard narrative, were filling. But that was not the government we lived with in Kandahar. Kandaharis were up against an arbitrarily powerful, abusive entity—as noxious to many of them as the Taliban themselves.
    The differing depictions, I now understood, had to do with where the observer was located with respect to the country’s main revenue streams. Most Americans were stationed in zones where intelligence indicated Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leadership might be hiding. Terrorists on the lam were expected to cling to infertile, sparsely populated terrain, far from frequented road systems. And at least until late 2009, most U.S. troops were deployed along the eastern fringes of Afghanistan, where steep crags and a lack of water, soil, and roads kept economic activity to a minimum. Afghan government officials were sparse there too.
    The presumption was that the Afghan government just couldn’t reach those uncharted tracts. Americans (and other international observers) presumed that GIRoA aimed to govern, but was failing, due to its lack of human capital and the monumental physical and institutional challenges facing a country that had suffered more than two decades of war. Secondarily, they presumed that this feeble government was also plagued by corruption—almost a side issue.
    But what if the Afghan government wasn’t really trying to govern? What if it was focused on another objective altogether? What if corruption was central to that objective and therefore to the government’s mode of operation?
    Perhaps GIRoA could best be understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organization—or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily—whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting resources for personal gain.
    If GIRoA’s main objective was siphoning riches, then why should it waste manpower on the impoverished east? It did well to leave that forbidding terrain alone and deploy its personnel, effort, and force in places like Kandahar, a city situated in the heart of opium