Free Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

country, near important deposits of marble and alabaster, the principal entry point to southern Afghanistan, and a major node at the intersection of transcontinental land routes.
    No executive decree would be required—no edict penned by President Karzai—to enforce these personnel policies. The system’s internal economy would weight the distribution. Officeholders who had to recoup the money they’d spent buying their jobs would request assignments in zones where cash flowed. And senior officials, anticipating the sums to be collected from subordinates, would not try too hard to fill billets in impoverished rural districts.
    I was often asked, moreover, why it was so hard to find honest people to serve in government. If that government was actually a crime syndicate in disguise, the dearth of good people was no surprise. Mafias select for criminality, by turning violation of the law into a rite of passage, by rewarding it, by hurting high-minded individuals who might make trouble. An absence of integrity within this system did not meanAfghans as a people were intrinsically or culturally corrupt. This late in the game, constructive men and women had been stripped out—and by now might prefer to stay clear. “No one would dirty his clothes getting near this government,” a Kandahar-area farmer exclaimed to me once. 4
    Twelfth-century John of Salisbury recognized this tendency of corrupt systems to distill and purify their own criminality. Acts of corruption, he wrote in his mirror Policraticus ,
    are done publicly, and neither governors nor proconsuls check them, because . . . the raven rejoices in the works of the wolf, and the unjust judge applauds the minister of injustice . . . in lands whose princes are infidels and companions of thieves; they hasten to embrace those whose misdeeds they observe, thus adding their own share of iniquity in the hope that they may gain for themselves some portion of the spoil.
    The resulting entity is almost unassailable, John continues, quoting Job:
    Their “body is like a shield made of cast and tightly packed scales which have been joined together; one is connected to the other, and not even a breathing space comes between them; one has been glued to another and, holding fast, they will not be separated from each other.” 5
    That was the Afghan government. It was not incapable. It was performing its core function with admirable efficiency—bringing power to bear where it counted. And it was assiduously protecting its own. Governing—the exercise that attracted so much international attention—was really just a front activity.
    Such an analysis might well be applied to other “failed” or “failing” states. They are failing at being states. That is because the business model their leadership has developed has nothing to do with governing a country. But it is remarkably effective in achieving its objective: enriching the ruling clique.
    In Afghanistan, faced with such moral and material depravity, abrutal and tenacious insurgency was serving up its idea of an antidote: a narrow reading of religious devotion. Many Afghans were swayed by the argument that government integrity could be achieved only through religious rectitude. Some appreciated the outlet that militancy provided for their anger. Still others just laid low, unwilling to take risks on behalf of a government that treated them almost as badly as the Taliban did. And it was all U.S. troops could do to keep that insurgency at bay.
    I N THE WINTER of 2009, the ISAF Anti-Corruption Task Force—with its evolving procedures for prioritizing “malign actors” and its still-tentative back channels for sharing information and planning joint action—was something like that airplane Hakim Angar had boarded, anticipating his new duties in the border police. The machine was on the runway. Its engines were turning. But it was not off the ground.
    Even the simple notion that the international community should refrain from