Barry Gewen, who wrote an excellent essay probing the nature of war crimes in our pages several years ago, penned a thought-piece on corruption over at Lawrence Kaplan’s Entanglements the other day. People are complaining about the dreadful amount of corruption in Afghanistan, Mr. Gewen notes, but the idealistic critics don’t know what they’re talking about. He proceeds to argue by analogy:
I’m told that if you want to buy a house in Italy, you had better know whom you have to pay off. That’s probably true in at least 50 countries around the world, and I’m willing to bet that Afghanistan is one of them. I’m equally sure that the tribal chiefs who are our allies against the Taliban maintain their positions through a system of patronage and payoffs. How can I be so sure? Not because I’m an expert on the ethnic communities of Afghanistan, but because I know something about American history.
Corruption is nothing new, Mr. Gewen contends. In Andrew Jackson’s time patronage networks were the norm, and this kind of “honest graft” still goes on in some of our larger cities. He cites Richard Hofstadter as saying that “single-minded concern for honesty in public service is a luxury of the middle and upper classes” and concludes that “Washington’s current fight against corruption is mainly about American, not Afghan, hearts and minds.” I share Mr. Gewen’s skepticism towards the preening commentariat, and I welcome his argument as far as it goes. Unfortunately, I’m afraid it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
At root of our current confusion is the nebulousness of the concept of “corruption” itself. Like “love”, it’s one of those words in the English language so broadly defined that it nearly confounds meaning. We love ice cream, children, roller-coasters, our country, and our husbands or wives. Similarly, from a manager choosing to promote her most servile underling over a more qualified candidate, to a board chairman appointing his son as the CEO; from a wealth management firm wining and dining a potential client, to an elaborate kickback scheme for Congressmen in charge of defense acquisitions; and from an accountant cooking the books, to complicated money laundering operations using offshore jurisdictions—it’s all corruption. We of course have recourse to subordinate terms: “nepotism,” “bribery,” and “theft” spring immediately to mind. But all too often we reach for the umbrella term, especially as a cudgel.
To complicate things further, even our shared understandings of corruption are strongly culturally bounded. As Lawrence Rosen argued in our pages a few months ago, only two of my above six examples would be considered evidence of corruption in large parts of the Muslim world. Especially in tribal cultures, society is understood as a dense web of reciprocal obligations established by individuals in the course of their lifetime. Corruption, therefore, is when someone you’ve done something for refuses to return the favor when he is in a position to do so. Much of the local grousing about corruption in a place like Afghanistan has to do with modernity upending these traditional dynamics. Indeed, one could imagine a Kabul-appointed governor in the provinces refusing local bribes as we’d expect, only to gain the enmity of the people for his probity.
Now a certain level of bribery and skimming may very well be the cost of doing business, especially in an underdeveloped place like Afghanistan. But can we countenance large-scale theft where hundreds of millions of aid dollars are funneled offshore by kleptocratic elites? As Felix Salmon clearly highlights, the line between the two types of corruption seems impossibly difficult to draw. He cites Stephen Biddle (also an AI author) musing about the necessity of working within existing Afghan patronage networks, and juxtaposes this with the angry remarks of former regulator Bill Black who is incensed over the developing mess over Kabul Bank. Mr. Salmon sides with Mr. Black, suggesting that this must all be a question of poor oversight and misplaced priorities.
I’m not quite so sure. Mr. Biddle and Mr. Black are really talking past each other, mostly because their arguments prevent them from taking a step back and contemplating the larger policy mistakes which shape the entire situation. Yes, it is probably impossible to dial in just the right amount of corruption—somewhere between bribery and graft—which would ensure a smooth-functioning government in Afghanistan. But it’s equally foolhardy to assume that if only we had kept our eye on the ball, we could’ve prevented something like Kabul Bank from happening in the first place.
The situation we find ourselves in is the result of two policy decisions we made in the aftermath of our invasion: we chose to create a strong central government in a country that hasn’t had one in over 100 years; and we decided to try to transform the country in short order by pouring billions of dollars into it. Had we opted for a strategy of confederating various local warlords and strongmen, the resultant corruption would have been more diffuse. Even if the same percentage of aid money was being skimmed off the top, these abuses would have been more acceptable to your average Afghan who would benefit directly from the warlord’s local patronage network. Instead, we’re funneling all our money through President Karzai’s network and are surprised that those left out of the loop are complaining bitterly.
And even if President Karzai was some kind of saintly figure who resisted the temptation of enriching himself, and who could furthermore force his entire clan to do the same, there’s a real question of whether a country whose GDP was $4 billion in 2003 could reasonably hope to absorb the largesse the world’s development agencies are lavishing upon it like a torrential downpour on parched earth. In these kinds of circumstances, massive graft is almost a given.
So back to Barry Gewen: he is basically correct to say that there’s no alternative to using patronage networks in Afghanistan. In a tribal society, that’s just how things work, and the skimming that happens in these situations really is a cost of doing business—arguments to the contrary are dangerously idealistic. But he’s wrong to be so glib about corruption in general, to shrug his shoulders and to affirm that our policy choices are the right ones. In fact they have been disastrously wrong and have greatly multiplied our difficulties.