Corruption continues to erupt

Twenty years have passed since Moses Naim coined the phrase, “the corruption eruption.” As Sarah Chayes outlined this week in a talk at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, there is no sign of the eruption ending anytime soon. Promoting her book Thieves of State, Sarah outlined the push and pull factors driving corruption’s omnipotence in conflict environments. Systemic corruption is not merely the byproduct of war, but often an accelerant of conflict.

She opened the discussion with two common misperceptions of corruption:

1. Corruption is not merely “chump-change” siphoning off small amounts of money. It has real economic significance and implications for the social wellbeing of society. In Afghanistan for example, corruption amounts to a daily attack on people’s dignity. It creates an atmosphere of hopelessness and despondency that often leads to rage and violence.

2. There is a tendency to think of corruption as a sort of corrosion eating away at government. She turns this theory on it’s head: corruption is in fact a system created by the government. The levers of state power are put into the service of vertically integrated kleptocratic networks. It is not merely that state weakness can give space for corruption to seep in. Corrupt networks purposefully weaken institutions that will not work with them.

The policy community in Washington needs to wake up and realize that pervasive corruption has real and dangerous security implications. By enabling corruption, as the US has done in Afghanistan, it is only making the security problem more severe.

Sarah spent seven years living there. She helped Afghans rebuild homes and established a cooperative that aimed at encouraging Afghan farmers to produce flowers, fruits and herbs instead of opium poppies. It is through this work, and through her interactions with the American aid establishment, that she became aware of the extent to which corruption is destroying American efforts for peace in Afghanistan.

Anti-corruption assistance aimed at civil society can help build the expertise of local reformers who are challenging the government. But if the bulk of the US government interaction with a country reinforces corruption then these programs don’t stand a chance. Chayes believes that not enough emphasis is put on good-governance strategies, which are too often trumped by strategic considerations.

A survey conducted by the US military in Kabul asked captured Taliban prisoners why they joined the insurgency. The most common response was not anger at the US presence in their country, or a religious claim, but rather that the Afghan government was irreversibly corrupt. This sense of grievance and hopelessness has the power to fill ordinary citizens with feelings even worse than anger. They want revenge.

Intelligence collection and analysis should play a major role in fighting corruption, but that is not now the situation. She suggests subjecting intelligence agency payments to key members of corrupt governing networks to high level interagency debate, increasing the number of personnel assigned to study the structure, manning and other characteristics of corrupt governing networks (including corruption in annual assessments of security risks compiled by intelligence communities), and to design new collection requirements to fill knowledge gaps regarding corrupt networks, especially the ways in which Western governments and private-sector actors enable such systems.

The solutions are not simple or straightforward, but a better understanding of the nature of corruption and it’s implications for international security would contribute to improved policy and practice in government, civil society and business.