The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

90 SEPTEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Corruption As a Foreign Policy Issue Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security Sarah Chayes, W.W. Norton & Company, 2015, $26.95, hardcover, 262 pages. Reviewed By Susan B. Maitra In this absorbing book, author Sarah Chayes makes the case that corruption— a phenomenon largely neglected by today’s policymakers—is a basic driver of instability that must be addressed. Thieves of State is anchored in Afghan- istan, which Chayes called home for more than a decade after landing in Kandahar in December 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban for National Public Radio. Dropping journalism, she worked first to launch an NGO in Kandahar for the Baltimore-based brother of President Hamid Karzai, and then founded a local agricultural cooperative and soap-mak- ing factory there. Beginning in 2009, she served as an adviser to Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus in Kabul, and then transited between Afghanistan and Washington, D.C., as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. Chayes takes the reader along as gradually, through her experiences, she comes to see Afghanistan’s governmen- tal structure as a vertically integrated criminal syndicate. In this scheme, however, first sketched out for her by Chris Kolenda, one of Gen. McChrystal’s “phalanx of colonels,” patronage is not dispensed downward, but rather the proceeds of corruption are channeled up to those sitting atop the pyramid. Starting with Machiavelli’s admonition to the prince that theft of his subjects’ possessions would threaten his rule, Chayes sprinkles the narrative with other examples from the archives of advice literature, “Mirrors for Princes.” From antiquity through early European history, it turns out, even the most autocratic rul- ers have recognized that corruption must be kept in check to preserve stability. She also devotes several chapters to the problem of corruption in other coun- tries—Nigeria, Egypt, Tunisia and Uzbeki- stan. These essays are more cursory, the spoils of short visits plus some research, and they lack the in-depth understanding she acquired in Afghanistan. It is to that story that the reader is eager to return. As an adviser to McChrystal and Petraeus, Chayes worked hard to make anti-corruption a central element of the counterinsur- gency campaign. By winter 2009, the International Security Assistance Force’s Anti-Corruption Task Force was “on the runway,” engines revving—but it was not off the ground, and within months Gen. McChrystal was gone. Gen. Petraeus was far more serious about going after corruption, but then failed to follow through. It is Chayes’ explanation as to why—no spoilers here—that is the most important piece of modern history in the book, and makes it required reading for all those interested in Afghanistan policy. But was this really the whole story? Would Petreaus really have pursued her recommendations with the zeal that she recommended? Or would he have recog- nized that if corruption was as extensive as she said, then taking down so many officials would have caused the govern- ment to implode—an extremely risky strategy in the middle of a war? Perhaps he recognized that it’s very hard to fix a plane while flying it, let alone rebuild the entire thing in mid-air. This is the biggest weakness in her thesis. While persuasive in identifying the problem, her solutions for Afghanistan are less com- pelling. Would they have helped or hurt? We will never know. Many military and civilian personnel who knew the author in Afghanistan may not remember her fondly, and so her can- dor in acknowledging some of her own mistakes is to her credit. While she ran the NGO in Kandahar, she was viewed as being in league with a faction of the Karzai clan. In the book, she admits this mistake and the extent to which she had been blinded to the corruption perpe- trated by her former friends. She acknowledges her infatuation with Gen. McChrystal’s passionate, high- energy team, as well as her underestima- tion of “the accompanying arrogance.” And she owns up to her own arrogance after Petraeus empowers her and her associates to infuse the troops with a new anti-corruption focus on governance. Describing a round of briefings to the subordinate commands that were greeted with “suspicious perplexity,” she writes: “Who were we anyway? On whose authority were we telling division commanders they’d have to upend their campaigns—reassign intelligence offi- cers, overhaul procedures for partnering with Afghan military and police officers, expose their men to the risk of retalia- tion, wade into politics? Fortified by that flourish Petraeus had applied to his check marks [on our PowerPoint presentation], we stuck our chins in the air, imperious.” In two chapters following the denoue- ment of Petraeus’ governance efforts, Chayes mines 16th- through 18th-century BOOKS