s a diplomat in Iraq and later as an ambassador in Afghanistan, I watched as we and other donors struggled with and generally lost the battle against corruption. It was pervasive and it undercut many of our efforts at state building and improving local lives. I was and remain convinced that we have not understood the phenomenon. We conceptualize the solutions inaccurately, and, ultimately, shy away from the hard question we may sometimes have to confront; what to do when we cannot fix the problem?
Afghanistan and Iraq were not my first occasion to reflect on this problem. I spent my career in the Middle East where some measure of official corruption or economic favoritism was prevalent in every country I worked in. Yet, some had flourishing economies. It is clear that corruption is not just one thing. We need to learn new ways to consider it.
For Americans, corruption is essentially a legal and moral failure. The solution is better laws, more investigations, and an upgrade in the rule of law. But that is not the only way to think about corruption. Essentially, corruption functions like any other economic cost, very much like a tax. If the cost is known and if one gets the service one pays for, then corruption can be calculated as a cost of business and commerce and government can go on. But if corruption is rampant and predatory then it stifles business and sucks the life out of services that should help people and build the state.
The leading anthropologist on Afghanistan, Dr. Thomas Barfield, refers to “state building” and “state destroying” corruption. As an example of the first type of corruption consider what occurred in many major American cities in the 19th century where political rings made money from everything from services to construction. But the buildings they built were usually solid; we still drive on their bridges. That was essentially the old system of Afghanistan where, as one somewhat offended governor accused of corruption told my father, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in the ‘60’s, “I never took more than was expected.” We might not like this approach, but donors can work with it and accomplish much.
State destroying corruption is what occurs when the corruption becomes so rampant that it gobbles up everything and builds nothing. When soldiers go without pay, when ammunition is sold instead of delivered, when contracts are never fulfilled, or when everyday citizens are extorted at every step yet receive few services, then corruption has become so rampant that it undermines the structure of the state. That is part of the problem we encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is not unique to those countries.
It is worth pausing to consider some of the contradictions we generally refuse to examine when we press a government to deal with corruption. One is our simultaneous pressure for legal procedure and speed. In the United States with its strong system of laws, institutions, and investigative tools it can take years to bring corruption cases in state or local government to trial.
To duplicate our approach, donors should start trying to update much of the local legal system. Achieving all this may add years to the process, while corruption deepens and donors rail.
In Afghanistan we busied ourselves with designing a new wire-tapping law, which carefully balanced privacy and legal concerns. After the law was eventually passed by parliament, staff had to be recruited and trained in both legal and technical applications.
If anti-corruption action is to be a real deterrent in states with deeply embedded, corrupt practices, then the punishment will almost certainly need to be speedy and draconian. Our focus on procedure guarantees that the results will be slow and the punishment weak or delayed by appeals. If a customs official can make many times his yearly salary every month, then eventually firing him will have little deterrent effect. Prison without appeal or execution swiftly applied might get attention, but would violate our norms and be subject to criticism from donors. In essence, when we ask that corruption be dealt with swiftly and legally, we are asking for contradictory things.
Many factors drive corruption, but two seem particularly significant. One is insecurity. When life and employment are uncertain it is rational to grab what one can, when one can. That this may undermine the state and make the future more uncertain may be true from a macro perspective, but it is irrelevant at the individual level where corruption makes rational sense for the preservation of oneself, one’s family, and one’s political supporters. The duality between the interest of the state and the interest of the individual has made it difficult to use conditionality to bring about change. Restricting or cutting off funding hurts the state, but it is irrelevant at the level where the stealing occurs. Thus, the pressure is not really pressure at all unless the senior levels of government have both the will and the power, physical and political, to bring the individual into line. It is exactly this power that weak governments lack.
When Hamid Karzai came to power in Afghanistan, he arrived with neither the power of guns nor of money. When confronted early on by a threat of revolt if he did not take certain political actions, he found that the United States was not interested in helping him face down the revolt. Maneuvering through appointments (which then allowed the recipient to exploit the position) were the only tools Karzai had to rule. He was also brought to power by a delicate balance between strong political parties, each of which had to be propitiated with positions.
Afghanistan and Iraq were not unique in being examples of states where government leaders felt too weak politically to move against major supporters in the interest of suppressing corruption. Perhaps that kind of action can only be taken by a political leader with deep political support or dictatorial powers. Neither was the case in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Neither the United States nor other donors ever directly confronted the problem of weak political will. Instead, we tried one institutional solution after another. In Afghanistan, we established electronic pay systems for the police and the army. Yet many soldiers and policemen were months behind in pay. We sponsored specialized courts and judges. Many of the individuals tried hard to work against corruption, but without political support from their superiors the institutions came to naught. The dedicated staff became increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of their superiors to let cases come to trial.
Certainly there have been other countries in which the institutional or procedural changes we advocated have worked. It is not that the tools were useless, but that they were not adapted to the fundamental lack of political will and power to make change.
This absence of political power and willingness to use it was a reality from which we always averted our gaze. There were times and reasons when it seemed change might be possible. In my own, early period in Afghanistan, I still hoped and worked with Karzai to persuade him to try to control and channel corruption rather than end it. However, this approach had no formalized U.S. government backing and ended after I left. Perhaps it would have failed anyway. Many hoped that when Ashraf Ghani Amadzai became president he would take a new approach to corruption. He did not.
Whatever the might-have-beens of Afghanistan or Iraq, the question for the future is how to manage corruption if the local political will and power to control it are lacking? My own view is that when this becomes plain we need to face the fact that we lack the means to fix the problem. At that point we have a binary choice. We can abandon our efforts or we can decide that our strategic interests are so great that we have to shore up and sustain the state or government despite continuing corruption. In either case the political consequences are likely to be severe, but so is the result of hiding from ourselves the awareness of a problem we cannot fix.
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Corruption: State Building, Assistance, and Diplomacy
Photo by Marko Beljan via Unsplash.
November 19, 2021
There are some types of corruption with governments and aid organizations can work with when looking to help weak states build capacity. U.S. blunders in Afghanistan helped foster the sort of corruption which handicaps aid and state-building efforts, writes Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann.
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s a diplomat in Iraq and later as an ambassador in Afghanistan, I watched as we and other donors struggled with and generally lost the battle against corruption. It was pervasive and it undercut many of our efforts at state building and improving local lives. I was and remain convinced that we have not understood the phenomenon. We conceptualize the solutions inaccurately, and, ultimately, shy away from the hard question we may sometimes have to confront; what to do when we cannot fix the problem?
Afghanistan and Iraq were not my first occasion to reflect on this problem. I spent my career in the Middle East where some measure of official corruption or economic favoritism was prevalent in every country I worked in. Yet, some had flourishing economies. It is clear that corruption is not just one thing. We need to learn new ways to consider it.
For Americans, corruption is essentially a legal and moral failure. The solution is better laws, more investigations, and an upgrade in the rule of law. But that is not the only way to think about corruption. Essentially, corruption functions like any other economic cost, very much like a tax. If the cost is known and if one gets the service one pays for, then corruption can be calculated as a cost of business and commerce and government can go on. But if corruption is rampant and predatory then it stifles business and sucks the life out of services that should help people and build the state.
The leading anthropologist on Afghanistan, Dr. Thomas Barfield, refers to “state building” and “state destroying” corruption. As an example of the first type of corruption consider what occurred in many major American cities in the 19th century where political rings made money from everything from services to construction. But the buildings they built were usually solid; we still drive on their bridges. That was essentially the old system of Afghanistan where, as one somewhat offended governor accused of corruption told my father, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in the ‘60’s, “I never took more than was expected.” We might not like this approach, but donors can work with it and accomplish much.
State destroying corruption is what occurs when the corruption becomes so rampant that it gobbles up everything and builds nothing. When soldiers go without pay, when ammunition is sold instead of delivered, when contracts are never fulfilled, or when everyday citizens are extorted at every step yet receive few services, then corruption has become so rampant that it undermines the structure of the state. That is part of the problem we encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is not unique to those countries.
It is worth pausing to consider some of the contradictions we generally refuse to examine when we press a government to deal with corruption. One is our simultaneous pressure for legal procedure and speed. In the United States with its strong system of laws, institutions, and investigative tools it can take years to bring corruption cases in state or local government to trial.
To duplicate our approach, donors should start trying to update much of the local legal system. Achieving all this may add years to the process, while corruption deepens and donors rail.
In Afghanistan we busied ourselves with designing a new wire-tapping law, which carefully balanced privacy and legal concerns. After the law was eventually passed by parliament, staff had to be recruited and trained in both legal and technical applications.
If anti-corruption action is to be a real deterrent in states with deeply embedded, corrupt practices, then the punishment will almost certainly need to be speedy and draconian. Our focus on procedure guarantees that the results will be slow and the punishment weak or delayed by appeals. If a customs official can make many times his yearly salary every month, then eventually firing him will have little deterrent effect. Prison without appeal or execution swiftly applied might get attention, but would violate our norms and be subject to criticism from donors. In essence, when we ask that corruption be dealt with swiftly and legally, we are asking for contradictory things.
Many factors drive corruption, but two seem particularly significant. One is insecurity. When life and employment are uncertain it is rational to grab what one can, when one can. That this may undermine the state and make the future more uncertain may be true from a macro perspective, but it is irrelevant at the individual level where corruption makes rational sense for the preservation of oneself, one’s family, and one’s political supporters. The duality between the interest of the state and the interest of the individual has made it difficult to use conditionality to bring about change. Restricting or cutting off funding hurts the state, but it is irrelevant at the level where the stealing occurs. Thus, the pressure is not really pressure at all unless the senior levels of government have both the will and the power, physical and political, to bring the individual into line. It is exactly this power that weak governments lack.
When Hamid Karzai came to power in Afghanistan, he arrived with neither the power of guns nor of money. When confronted early on by a threat of revolt if he did not take certain political actions, he found that the United States was not interested in helping him face down the revolt. Maneuvering through appointments (which then allowed the recipient to exploit the position) were the only tools Karzai had to rule. He was also brought to power by a delicate balance between strong political parties, each of which had to be propitiated with positions.
Afghanistan and Iraq were not unique in being examples of states where government leaders felt too weak politically to move against major supporters in the interest of suppressing corruption. Perhaps that kind of action can only be taken by a political leader with deep political support or dictatorial powers. Neither was the case in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Neither the United States nor other donors ever directly confronted the problem of weak political will. Instead, we tried one institutional solution after another. In Afghanistan, we established electronic pay systems for the police and the army. Yet many soldiers and policemen were months behind in pay. We sponsored specialized courts and judges. Many of the individuals tried hard to work against corruption, but without political support from their superiors the institutions came to naught. The dedicated staff became increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of their superiors to let cases come to trial.
Certainly there have been other countries in which the institutional or procedural changes we advocated have worked. It is not that the tools were useless, but that they were not adapted to the fundamental lack of political will and power to make change.
This absence of political power and willingness to use it was a reality from which we always averted our gaze. There were times and reasons when it seemed change might be possible. In my own, early period in Afghanistan, I still hoped and worked with Karzai to persuade him to try to control and channel corruption rather than end it. However, this approach had no formalized U.S. government backing and ended after I left. Perhaps it would have failed anyway. Many hoped that when Ashraf Ghani Amadzai became president he would take a new approach to corruption. He did not.
Whatever the might-have-beens of Afghanistan or Iraq, the question for the future is how to manage corruption if the local political will and power to control it are lacking? My own view is that when this becomes plain we need to face the fact that we lack the means to fix the problem. At that point we have a binary choice. We can abandon our efforts or we can decide that our strategic interests are so great that we have to shore up and sustain the state or government despite continuing corruption. In either case the political consequences are likely to be severe, but so is the result of hiding from ourselves the awareness of a problem we cannot fix.
