Thieves Of State - London Telegraph Book Review

[johnkarls]

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The London Telegraph – 4/18/2015


Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes, review: 'a clear message'

By Oliver Bullough, British Journalist who lived in Russia 1999-2006, and authored Let Our Fame Be Great and The Last Man in Russia


In Ukraine, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in countries all across the world, governments are losing ground to violent insurgents. Crises are spreading in extent, and increasing in number, and Western countries have few tools with which to fight them. The bombs deployed against Isil are apparently as ineffective as the sanctions deployed against Putin.

For anyone confused by how the world ended up in such a state, I would strongly recommend Sarah Chayes’s book. It provides a fascinating way of looking at the turmoil, and a series of policy proposals that could upend how we confront it.

Chayes has had a number of careers, all of them involving – since 2001 anyway – Afghanistan. She was a radio journalist, than ran a charity, then a business, then advised the team running the US government’s attempts to stabilise the country. She started out enthusiastic about the country’s chances. She ended up weary and disillusioned, but also knowledgeable about the nature of its insurgency, its government and its all-pervasive corruption.

It is the study of corruption that forms the core of her book, which argues that we too often postpone fighting crooked officials until an insurgency has been defeated. Chayes argues that beating the latter is impossible without defeating the former.

Her book combines sections of memoir, describing her efforts to navigate the shoals of Afghan business and politics, with analysis of the corrupt networks that underpin them. To this, she adds a series of lessons gleaned from ancient treatises of governance, written to advise the rulers of medieval Europe and the Middle East.

The book opens with an account of an acquaintance from Kandahar who was assaulted by police for refusing to pay a bribe, and who then had his phone smashed when he reported it. She heard the story from the man’s brother, a former police officer himself, who was furious and told her: “If I see someone planting an IED on a road, and then see a police truck coming, I will turn away, I will not warn them.”

The message is clear: if police officers were so crooked that they had alienated former colleagues, then they threatened stability just like the worst insurgent. Western soldiers could kill as many Taliban as they liked, but it wouldn’t do much good if their Afghan allies kept driving young men to join their enemies. And the Westerners who funded the government, who protected it, and who associated with it, ended up sharing the blame.

Much Western analysis has referred to countries such as Afghanistan as “failed states” but, Chayes argues, this is misguided. Their rulers have no intention of providing the services we think a state should provide, but want only to get very rich. Looked at from this perspective, Afghanistan is successful.

In examinations of insurgencies in Nigeria, North Africa, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, she argues that this problem is not something unique to Afghanistan. Many governments are machines for fleecing their citizens. Citizens become tired of paying off corrupt officials, and try to stop. The officials force the citizens to pay up. The citizens, angered, fight back. Violence erupts: leading to bloodshed, terrorism, human rights abuses, and the rest. If we respond only to the last part of the process, we will be defending the thieves, thus making the problem even worse.

In short: if you want to end a country’s insurgency, you need to spend at least as much effort cleaning up its government as you do killing its terrorists. For a while, this was an argument Chayes succeeded in making in Washington, but she failed to persuade everyone. Her book is full of fury about her rulers’ failure to listen to her.

Despite producing such a polemical book, her suggested policies are pleasingly mild, though they may still be too much for the militaries on both sides of the Atlantic.