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

strength of the protection guarantee subordinate officials received in return for that money.
    To my surprise, those two wonky slides electrified the group. Attendees crowded down afterward to talk.
    “You just described my country,” said one officer. He pronounced it something like “cohn-try.” He was from Nigeria. Nigeria, I mused . . . didn’t they have an insurgency too? Boko Haram? Others joined us: from neighboring African countries, from Colombia, from Central Asia, from the Balkans. The correlation was uncanny. Almost every officer who told me my diagram hit home came from a place that was also confronting an extremist insurgency.
    A roaring sound began to fill my ears. The link between kleptocracy and violent religious extremism wasn’t just an Afghanistan thing. It was a global phenomenon.
     
    * Please see the Appendix for versions of these sketches, as they have now evolved.
    † Poppy’s value—to the farmers—is lower than that of pomegranates or other fruit. Structural factors make it attractive to grow anyway: One of those is access to credit. Opium buyers provide loans, otherwise unavailable. And they require repayment in opium, not cash. If a farmer wants to marry his son off, for example, he will have to count about $10,000—in bride-price, in building an extra room for the new couple, in throwing a huge party. If he has already tapped out his relatives for loans over the past few years, the only person to whom he can turn is often the opium dealer. But then he has to plant poppy to pay the loan back. Another factor is speed of return. A fruit tree takes five years to mature and begin producing. There was a drought in the late 1990s, so many trees died. To replace them, a farmer would have to be able to withstand years of no income from that patch of land, before his first harvest. Opium, on the other hand, is harvested (and so brings in revenue) the year it is put in the ground. And if an opium crop is lost due to weather or other vagaries, only that year’s investment is gone. Loss of fruit trees usually means the loss of decades of work.

CHAPTER SIX
    Revolt Against Kleptocracy
    The Arab Spring: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, 2011
    A year later, in mid-January 2011, I was returning to Washington from a trip to Afghanistan. By then I was working as a special assistant to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who two years before had confronted me in a Pentagon hallway, worried about having to call my mother with condolences. I stopped for a few days’ layover in Paris, my home base since 1993. I treasured the moments to catch my breath there, as I shuttled between Kandahar and the Pentagon—alien worlds, both.
    But Paris, that January, was hardly becalmed. The unimaginable was transpiring in former colonies across the Mediterranean—countries with which France has retained intense human and political ties. A wildfire of protest was ripping through North Africa, against the rule of long-standing despots. The myth of Arab servility, some genetic proclivity to autocratic rule, was dissolving. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had run tiny Tunisia for nearly twenty-five years, had just come crashing down. France was reverberating with the shock. W HO’S N EXT? blared giant letters across the top of the newspaper I picked up as I boarded my flight to D.C. Mug shots of half a dozen Arab leaders, from King Muhammad VI of Morocco to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, hung in a row across the page.
    In Washington, I was still throbbing with the jolt. “What do youmake of Tunisia ?” I fired at colleagues. What I got back, largely, were shrugs. Not until Egyptians poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square a few days later, demanding Mubarak’s head—forcing their urgent demands into the consciousness of U.S. officials who had long found him convenient—did Washington begin to grasp the significance of the hurtling events in the Middle East.
    For me, it seemed the most important upheaval in the