Instead of dismantling corrupt patronage networks in Afghanistan, America strengthened them by paying warlords to keep the peace
It was not until 2009 that America paid corruption serious attention. Ms Chayes became an adviser to Stanley McChrystal, a reformist general who then headed ISAF, the coalition of NATO-led forces in the country. An ISAF investigation unit known as Shafafiyat was set up under H.R. McMaster, who later served as America’s national security adviser. It made progress in stopping procurement fraud.
Americans of a certain age may remember the term “ghost soldiers” from Vietnam, where corrupt commanders used exactly the same system. Perhaps a quarter of the names on South Vietnamese army rosters in the Mekong Delta in 1975 were fictitious. Some ARVN officers were brilliant businessmen: one South Vietnamese colonel used to order aimless artillery barrages in order to hawk the spent shell casings as scrap metal. As in Afghanistan, police and military forces also profited from the heroin trade.
One answer is that this would require a shift in perspective. Over the past two decades many scholars have come to see corruption as a form of governance in itself. It resembles the pre-modern states that Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, calls “personalistic” governments, where power is based on ties of family or friendship rather than impersonal institutions. Such states are mainly concerned with placating armed commanders by giving them a share of the economic spoils.
Another problem is that American interventions were led by the armed forces, which are biased towards optimistic reporting and short-term thinking. Military officers “are hugely focused on actively doing things within the duration of their nine-month rotation, which is not well suited to solving corruption”, says Mark Pyman of CurbingCorruption, a watchdog.
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