Acute
corruption, in other words, can no longer be seen as just a nuisance or a
“values issue” to be handed off for technical programming to
the U.S. Agency for International Development. Even less should it be
considered a factor of stability, as some maintain. Corruption is a problem
that must be mainstreamed into national security decision-making. For military
leaders, that means tasking intelligence collectors and analysts with new questions.
It means better tailoring the terms of military assistance and the tenor of
military-to-military relationships. And it means changing the ways that
forward-deployed units gain access to territory and partner with locals
once there.
The
alternative has too often proved ugly. The case of Afghanistan is perhaps the
most egregious — because for years, the United States possessed almost perfect
leverage. But at every echelon, short-term security imperatives repeatedly
trumped corruption concerns. Battalion commanders got cozy with police
officials whose men were shaking down locals at every checkpoint, with a blow
or an insulting sneer, or were imprisoning people for ransom, or demanding
young sons for service as tea-boys – and other activities. Diplomats stood
shoulder-to-shoulder with provincial governors who were key nodes in predatory
government networks. The CIA insisted on secretly paying off key
assets, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai. And it wasn’t just the
military that looked the other way. Senior civilian officials repeatedly
shirked the issue. In this context, efforts to curb venal activities or even
reduce the active support given to corrupt networks were negligible compared to
the blatant reinforcement.
And
Afghans were watching. “People think the Americans must want the corruption,” a
former Kandahar neighbor remarked when news of CIA payments to Karzai
became public. Many, initially thrilled to be rid of the Taliban, became
frustrated with the corrupt system they blamed the U.S. for enabling.
And after a few years, they became susceptible to Taliban propaganda again,
which blamed the U.S. for supporting Karzai’s mafia government. Thus,
the very threat that the short-term thinking sought to minimize was
instead expanded.
It’s
a pattern that the U.S. repeats again and again,
when U.S. civilian strategists and military operatives deal fulsomely
with corrupt officials in places like Algeria, Bahrain, Ethiopia, Jordan,
Nigeria, Yemen or other such countries, while averting their eyes from official
looting in the name of security.
When
that looting gains international attention, it is usually the capture of
fabulous “rents” by regime elites that grabs headlines. Viktor Yanukovych’s
eye-popping pleasure palace is just the most recent example of such booty. The
Nigerian central bank governor was fired in February for daring to try tracing
an estimated $20 billion that disappeared from the country’s oil revenues over
an 18-month period. Nigerians and Western officials alike judge that most of
the money landed in the personal accounts of President Goodluck Jonathan. Yet,
while condemning the sadistic attacks of Boko Haram
insurgents, U.S. officials have failed to express concern about the
acute corruption that may have helped launch the group.
In
Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov’s daughter Gulnora ran a pay-to-play toll booth for
international investment in the telecom sector for years. In Tunisia, which
touched off the wave of upheaval across the Middle East beginning 2011, the
family of ousted leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali used the private financial
sector like a piggy bank, awarding loans to cronies and then recapitalizing the
banks out of public funds.
Western
analysts and decision-makers tend to discount what they call “petty corruption”
— constant police shake-downs in the guise of traffic enforcement; demands for
payment by school principals, doctors, or even the clerk in charge of filling
out death certificates, which happened in one case I witnessed in Afghanistan;
and systematic sale of judicial decisions. Many Westerners describe such abuses
as merely the greasing of the wheels necessary to “get things done” in
developing countries. In fact, such injustices and humiliations are sources of
daily outrage to citizens of a dozen countries I’ve studied over the past
several years. And they are intimately linked to the rent-seeking at the top.
For these corrupt networks are vertically integrated. In Afghanistan, the
Kandahar bench pays a monthly cut of the bribes local judges extort to the
chief justice of the Supreme Court, according to public prosecutors. Uzbeks say
villagers frequently pool their money to help a native son buy his way into the
police. Then the young man has to extort bribes from
motorists, since he has two debts to pay: one to his neighbors and the other,
the regular cut he owes his superior.
As
is often the case, the first obstacle to improved policy responses is a
knowledge gap. The military, the intelligence community and embassy staffs need
to get smart. If certain countries are, in effect, governed by criminal
syndicates in disguise, and the capture of resources for personal benefit is
these networks’ primary aim, then they must be studied in those terms. Where
are the spiderweb charts like the ones any battalion intelligence officer would
brief at a morning meeting in Afghanistan, mapping the links within ruling
networks? What is known about key enablers inside and outside the country? What
are the favored revenue streams? Like any crime gang, such governments need to
be subjected to this kind of analysis.
Of
course, no 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. Other factors, conjugated with
kleptocratic governance, increase the likelihood of a severe international
security event occurring. If acute corruption indicators had been analyzed
together with demographic markers as risk factors in 2010, most of North Africa
would have been blinking red well ahead of the Arab Spring uprisings, and their
increasingly dangerous aftershocks.
Is
there a terrorist or drug-trafficking network near a corrupt country that is
determined on exploiting local grievances or finding a leader to co-opt? Is
there a preexisting separatist movement? An ethnic split, or severe localized
economic disparities? Some of this information already exists in the vast
databases available to military and intelligence analysts and the policymakers
they serve — yet in my experience, it is rarely queried. Often, it is not
gathered at all, as collectors focus their efforts on targets to kill or
capture and diplomatic staffs spend their time with their
host-country counterparts.
And
what to do with such information if we had it? Curbing or rolling back
entrenched corruption is a monumentally difficult prospect. Yet there are
security advantages in visibly keeping a distance, even
where U.S. policy changes won’t lead directly to reforms on the
ground. At present, the U.S. government is hardly positioned even
to try.
For
the military, an analysis would return significant implications. A regime’s
counterterrorism bona fides, for example, would no longer automatically trump
concerns about its kleptocratic practices. Certain types of status-enhancing
military equipment – such as fighter jets, tanks, or drones — might be withheld
from such regimes. The U.S. might select which foreign security
services to train and assist with more care, based on the role they play within
the kleptocratic network, or a detested ruling clique’s ability to capture the
military assistance as a rent. Forward-deployed units would have to know who
they’re dealing with, and more realistically assess the costs and benefits of
such relationships over time.
There
is no cookie-cutter formula for designing new approaches. Each country’s
criminal governing networks are structured differently; each will seize
different revenue streams; each will present different threats for Americans to
weigh. The policy trade-offs will differ in each case — as will available
alternatives to the least-bad option. Good policy, in this as in so many other
domains, will depend on sound and evolving knowledge.
Sarah
Chayes is senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law and South
Asia Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She
previously was special adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm.
Mike Mullen. In Afghanistan, Chayes was special advisor to Generals David
McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal, commanders of the International Security
Assistance Force, or ISAF, after living and working in downtown
Kandahar for seven years.
Sarah Chayes is senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of
Law and South Asia Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
She previously was special adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Adm. Mike Mullen. In Afghanistan, Chayes was special advisor to Generals David
McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal, commanders of the International Security
Assistance Force, or ISAF, after living and working in downtown Kandahar for
seven years.