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Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by [Sarah Chayes]

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Sarah Chayes

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

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Winner of the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest.

"I can’t imagine a more important book for our time." —Sebastian Junger

The world is blowing up. Every day a new blaze seems to ignite: the bloody implosion of Iraq and Syria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine; abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria. Is there some thread tying these frightening international security crises together? In a riveting account that weaves history with fast-moving reportage and insider accounts from the Afghanistan war, Sarah Chayes identifies the unexpected link: corruption.

Since the late 1990s, corruption has reached such an extent that some governments resemble glorified criminal gangs, bent solely on their own enrichment. These kleptocrats drive indignant populations to extremes—ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion. Chayes plunges readers into some of the most venal environments on earth and examines what emerges: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also redesigning Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. In many such places, rigid moral codes are put forth as an antidote to the collapse of public integrity.

The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Through deep archival research, Chayes reveals that canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument connecting the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Thieves of State presents a powerful new way to understand global extremism. And it makes a compelling case that we must confront corruption, for it is a cause—not a result—of global instability.

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978-0393352283
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January 19, 2015
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Makes a strong case that acute corruption causes not only social breakdown but also violent extremism. . . . An important book that should be required reading for officials in foreign service, and for those working in commerce or the military. The story will interest the nonspecialist reader too."
― Giles Foden, New York Times Book Review

"Should be required reading."
― Thomas Friedman

"[A] fascinating story. . . . [T]he central revelation in Thieves of the State: at a certain point, systemic corruption became not just a lamentable by-product of the war but an accelerant of conflict . . . Chayes argues, convincingly, [that state-sanctioned larceny is] a threat not just to Afghanistan’s national security but to that of the United States."
― Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker

"[Chayes] tells the story of what happened in Afghanistan brilliantly, and compares her experience there with the current corruption in Egypt, Russia and the dismal rest . . . [a] page-turner."
― Deirdre N. McCloskey, Wall Street Journal

"Essential."
― G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs

"Informative, thought-provoking, very interesting and concisely written. . . . Through personal experience and her own research, Chayes makes a simple yet profound argument."
― Taylor Dibbert, Huffington Post

"A revolutionary book. Sarah Chayes weaves together history, adventure, political analysis, personal experience, culture, and religion in a shimmering and compelling tapestry."
― Anne-Marie Slaughter

"A vivid, ground-level view on how pervasive corruption undermines U.S. foreign policy and breeds insurgency. Thieves of State provides critical lessons that all policymakers should heed."
― Francis Fukuyama

"Sarah Chayes brilliantly illuminates a topic no one wants talk about―but we must. Corruption is an insidious force that is causing some of the most dangerous challenges our world is facing. It has to be at the core of America’s strategies, engagements and relationships for the twenty-first century."
― Admiral (ret.) Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

An award-winning former NPR correspondent, foreign policy expert, and entrepreneur with ten years’ experience in Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment and the author of The Punishment of Virtue. She lives in Washington, DC. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

An Excerpt From
THIEVES OF STATE
by Sarah Chayes
Reprinted here with permission.

The question of pursuing a serious anticorruption policy was finally put to rest in January 2011. The battle was waged in the margins of an interagency document called "Objective 2015." It had occurred to someone that the U.S. government really ought to have a picture of what it was trying to achieve in Afghanistan - what the country would need to look like by the end of 2014 if it were to weather the withdrawal of international troops without imploding.

The document was an embarrassment. Just the grammatical errors in the first paragraph made me flinch. Rather than identify true minimal requirements for Afghanistan to survive without international troops, it cut down ambitions to fit what was deemed "achievable" - whether or not such goals were sufficient to ensure Afghanistan could continue to exist.

It seemed to me, for example, that for the Afghan government to last, motivations for joining the insurgency had to diminish. Afghans had better think more highly of their government by 2015 than they did in 2011. Yet in the document, the very modest goal of an upward trend in Afghans' confidence in their government was not listed as essential to mission success. It was considered only a "nice-to-have."

The real anticorruption fight, however, was not over such fundamentals. It played out in the fine print of the document's "implementation guidelines." Over the furious dissent of mid-level Justice Department (DoJ) officials, seconded by the Joint Staff - but not by their own chief, Attorney General Eric Holder - the documents barred DoJ attorneys from mentoring anticorruption cases. They could do generalized capacity building, but they could not help shepherd specific cases against specific Afghan government officials. The investigations units, even if they were able to continue functioning, would never be able to bring a case to court. The courageous anticorruption prosecutors could never hope for backup from U.S. officials if they were intimidated, harassed, or demoted.

The gavel had come down. By way of an apparently insignificant detail buried deep in an interagency document - a few words of guidance to DoJ attorneys - the U.S. decision to turn a blind eye to Afghan corruption was finally spelled out.

NOT TILL the spring of 2013 did the penny drop as to what had prompted Petraeus's sudden change of heart in the summer of 2010 - and ultimately, what made the U.S. government shrink from addressing corruption in Afghanistan. On April 28, Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times reported that the CIA had been paying millions of dollars per year, in cash, to President Karzai. Toward the end of his article was the nugget of information that told the whole story.

The CIA's bagman was Muhammad Zia Salehi - that aide to Karzai who had been arrested, and then quickly released, in the summer of 2010. U.S. officials had walked into a circular firing squad. Salehi, the subject of the U.S. government's corruption test case, was also the U.S. government's intermediary for cash payments to Karzai. The choice of this target may have been deliberate - an effort to flush out into the open the profound contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy.

Two senior U.S. officials told me later that throughout the investigation of Salehi, the planning for the arrest, and his liberation within a few hours, CIA personnel had remained silent about their relationship with him. Even afterward, despite strong words at Principals' Committee meetings and that Joint Staff "top twenty" list, the CIA never provided the U.S. ambassador or the key cabinet secretaries with the names of the Afghans it was paying. The station chief in Kabul continued to hold private meetings with Karzai, with no other U.S. officials present.

In other words, a secret CIA agenda - which involved enabling the very summit of Afghanistan's kleptocracy - was in direct conflict with the anticorruption agenda. And with no one explicitly arbitrating this contradiction, the CIA's agenda won out.

After those first few weeks in command, Petraeus veered hard away from governance efforts and devoted himself to targeted killing, which he intensified considerably. Targeted killing of individual terrorist suspects is the special domain of the CIA, which Petraeus left Kabul to run - until his tenure there was cut short by an extramarital affair that had germinated in the Yellow Building at ISAF headquarters.

The Obama Administration, sickened by the cost in lives and resources that the counterinsurgency approach was exacting, and perhaps uncomfortable with the power and discretion that large-scale military operations place in the hands of the brass, turned increasingly toward special operations and drone warfare to counter security threats. Targeted, technologically advanced, secretive killing, over which the president had direct control, increased after 2010, spreading to Yemen and other theaters.

But the point officials missed in making this shift - and in letting the priorities generated by this strategy trump governance objectives - is that targeted killings still represent a military response to a problem that is fundamentally political and economic in nature: a problem that is rooted in the conduct of government. The current U.S. approach sends a message, wittingly or not, to people who are often driven to violence by the abusively corrupt practices of their ruling cliques, and by frustration at seeing their legitimate grievance systematically ignored. The message seems to be: your grievances are, in fact, of no account. They will not be heard. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Author

Dear readers:

Thanks very much for visiting this page, and for your interest in Thieves of State. I wrote this book to address a dumbfounding impasse: the inability of senior U.S. officials to make the connection between acute and abusive corruption and dramatic global upheavals, from the rise of violent extremism to the revolutions of the Arab Spring or Ukraine. What Thieves of State does is take you with me, so you can experience for yourself not just the abuse and humiliation of everyday corruption in many countries, but also the inner workings of the U.S. government as it reached a decision not to address the problem.

We'll also take a fascinating historical detour, for history has much to teach us about how people have grappled with these issues - and about how similar their responses have been across time and culture. We'll detail hard-nosed options for different approaches, and we'll take a glance in the mirror.

It is an unusual book: no dry, expository policy-wonk analysis, rather a riveting story that will keep you engaged. But you'll also find plenty of thought-provoking, even sometimes provocative, analysis. I hope that you like it, and that you will let me know your thoughts either way. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

The New Yorker Magazine's Patrick Radden Keefe writes:

Chayes develops a muscular new vocabulary for talking about the problem of corruption.

Good governance is often construed as an essentially humanitarian preoccupation, a civil-society concern that is forever trumped by more pressing strategic obligations. But Chayes became convinced that in Afghanistan kleptocratic rule was actually "manufacturing Taliban," providing fodder for the expanding insurgency.

In unstable and potentially explosive places..., she argues, the dilemma of corruption is not, as it might appear, one in which American values and interests are in tension. Even a hard-nosed realist should regard corruption as a dire concern, she maintains, because it is not merely a matter of the rule of law and democratic principles - it is a "matter of national security."

This is the real intellectual innovation of Chayes's book: she takes what has always been the losing position in policy debates and imbues it with a new rhetorical power. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00L4HAXDM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (January 19, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 19, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4175 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 274 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0393352285

Best Sellers Rank: #727,329 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #278 in Corruption & Misconduct in Politics
- #286 in Terrorism (Kindle Store)
- #352 in National & International Security (Kindle Store)

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4.5 499 ratings

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Sarah Chayes

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My zig-zag trajectory has led from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in 2001, to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. (Chronicled in "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban"). By the end of my decade in Afghanistan, I was serving as special advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.

I left the Pentagon for a five year stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where I examined other developing countries considered corrupt, to see if patterns I had discovered in Afghanistan applied elsewhere. Turns out, they do. (See "Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security.")

Now, sick at heart, I have applied the same methodology to my own beloved country, the United States. Read the shocking results in "On Corruption in America -- And What Is at Stake."

I will be discussing those findings and their implications throughout the fall of 2020.

Then...having spent so many years "disenchanting," I claim my turn to enchant.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

499 global ratings

5 star		69%
4 star		18%
3 star		9%
2 star		2%
1 star		2%

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BNB

A must-read for legislators and people with stars on their shoulders

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 19, 2015

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Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes, describes the nature and practice of corruption and its effects and consequences on the hapless citizens whose lives are governed by ruthless regimes. The book deserves the widest possible readership, and has been endorsed by luminaries such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sebastian Junger and Francis Fukuyama. It is a truly creative and original work.

What gives the book its credibility and authenticity is Chayes’ unique perspective. An experienced journalist, she launches and NGO and then establishes a soap-making cooperative in Afghanistan in the midst of the protracted military conflict, and, of necessity, must learn to deal with the endemic Afghan corruption. The experience yields invaluable insight into the problems of systemic corruption in Afghanistan, as well as in other countries Chayes examines in the book. This street-level view provides anecdotal material that succinctly illuminates how corruption alienates the Afghan people from both their government and the United States, which is seen as an enabler and protector of the corrupt regime. That alienation impels the disaffected Afghanis to join with the Taliban and other nefarious elements in the society.

Moving from her role as a struggling entrepreneur, the author, who speaks Arabic and Pashto, becomes a respected advisor and counselor to the highest level American military commanders working on policy issues. Here, she gains insight into policy formulation and frequently thwarted policy implementation.

Drawing upon her distinctive experience, Chayes is able to conceptualize and dramatically describe specific ways that Karzai’s kleptocratic autocracy misgoverns Afghanistan. She then aptly extrapolates her insight and experience to other vulnerable states, depicting the respective models they use to control and oppress their citizens.

One critical comment Chayes makes is that unless the US and other international stakeholders work actively to cure the problem of corruption, primary reliance on military solutions to profound political dysfunction will be counter-productive and eventually futile.

Be forewarned, the work melds different perspectives expressed in different voices from diverse points of view. It shifts from a first-person anecdotal narrative to a third-person journalist’s point of view, then shifts again to the dispassionate voice of a scholar. This creates some disjointedness in the narrative that the editors have had to struggle with. However, this is a mere quibble and does not detract from the book’s powerful delivery and message. Indeed, whatever the flaws, they are balanced by the coherent framework created by Chayes’ sparkling thematic discussion of the various “mirror writers.’ These were authors who, through the ages, recognized the importance of corruption to governance and warned princes and other rulers about the dangers and consequences of neglecting the problem. Also unifying the work are the pithily written chapters describing the different and shocking patterns of corruption existing in Egypt, Uzbekistan, Nigeria and several other states.

Admirably, Chayes goes beyond conceptualization and analysis. She provides a compelling blueprint for development of anti-corruption policies and activities in the Remedies chapter at the end of the work.

This work exhibits extraordinary cognitive intelligence in its ability to ‘connect the dots.’ Though this may be an unusual way to bestow an encomium in a review, I recommend that Chayes be nominated for a MacArthur grant; and at the April 2016 conference of the American Society of International Law, Thieves of State should be a topic of a symposium co-chaired by Chayes and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Bernard M. Brodsky

3 people found this helpful

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X-Diplo

An Eye-Opener

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 6, 2015

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An important book on a provocative theme. Chayes, drawing on her years of experience in Afghanistan and elsewhere, argues persuasively that the United States cannot achieve its foreign policy goals by working through partner governments so corrupt that they repel their own citizens. She also exposes the contradictions that occur as different agencies try to accomplish specific goals through corrupt instruments. My favorite story in the book tells oft a slam-dunk corruption prosecution in Afghanistan that was shut down suddenly without an explanation, undermining the whole anti-corruption effort. It turned out that, unbeknownst to the corruption fighters, the apparently minor official was a bagman transmitting money between the CIA and the highest levels of the Afghan government. Having spent a career as a U.S. diplomat, I found that to be all too credible - and depressing.

Another thing I like about this book is that Chayes starts out with an account of her own missteps and misperceptions when she first got to Afghanistan. You can tell she's not a politician - no politician ever admits a mistake!

In her final chapter, Chayes offers policy suggestions for raising the emphasis on good governance and honest government in U.S. partners. Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine how we could succeed. Cleaning up corruption in a place like Afghanistan (which ranks near the bottom of Transparency International's global corruption list) is a basic nation-building task that may be beyond the capability of any foreign power, however well-intentioned and well-funded.

I used this book as a class reading for my adult-education seminar in foreign policy. It was well-liked by all the participants and led to a lively discussion in class. Many of the class members were surprised and disturbed at the overwhelming top-to-bottom corruption in Afghanistan and many other U.S. allies in the developing world. I also used the session to introduce the class to Transparency International, which studies and reports on corruption around the world. I highly recommend the Transparency International website to anyone who is interested in this book.

9 people found this helpful

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K. J. Broekema

Interesting but flawed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 23, 2016

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I was impressed by her first book and therefore had high expectations for this one. The book turned out to be very interesting and highly original, if it were only for the informed piece of Dutch history, therefore 4 stars, well deserved. However, for two reasons, I think the book is flawed. The first is that she too exclusively describes Afghanistan/African/Asian wrongdoing while all the westerners in these rooms look to be noble people, shocked when confronted with all this evil. Believe me, both sides are equally involved. Usually westerners take the initiative while the other side is passively facilitating. For every 100.000 bribe paid to them one gets 25.000 back of which one can keep 5.000. The rest goes to bosses whose protection one needs in case things go terribly wrong. The system would not work if only one side benefited. The second reason is her description of Patreus backtracking on his initial support fighting corruption because he had discovered that Karzai was directly talking to the CIA and there was nothing he could do about it. That is all she has to say about this issue. At the time it was widely published what business Karzai and the CIA were discussing. Afghanistan drugs pay for the weapons to fight the Taliban. Therefore the CIA faciltiates this drug trade and some papers even accuse them of outright selling these drugs on behalve of Karzai. There was a huge scandal when one of Karzai's ministers, mr. Massoud the sun of the famous general, was cought with 60 million drugs dollars in Dubai and the CIA had to use its influence to get him out with the money. For these two reasons I am left with the uneasy feeling that only half of the problem is discussed.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Eric J M Woehrling

This is one of the best books I have read this year

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 6, 2015

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This is one of the best books I have read this year. The thesis is simple: what makes insurgent and terrorist groups thrive in countries like Afghanistan is corruption and injustice, not religious beliefs or nationalistic impulses. Corruption makes their children go hungry and their businesses fail, and allows their property to be taken away. Injustice means that their wrongs are never righted, and in fact the corrupt exploiters are protected.

Chayes demonstrates that this corruption is not just perpetrated by small time officials seeking petty backhanders. It goes all the way to the top. In countries from Afghanistan to Algeria, Nigeria to Uzbekistan, it is the ruling elite which manages and takes most benefit from the corruption. The money flows to the top.

More shocking is her demonstration that Western governments deliberately and persistently turn a blind eye to this, indeed actively discourage its reporting. They are too close to and complicit with the corrupt governments with whom they are allies. In this respect, the West is actively propagating the circumstances which feed the terrorists with desperate volunteers who have lost everything - and therefore have nothing to lose.

Chayes presents her argument in writing which is crisp and incisive when analysing corrupt practices, and subtle and atmospheric when evoking the countries and people that suffer from them. She combines first hand personal experience with rigorous analysis of primary sources including US state department memos, informed by Medieval and Renaissance texts on good governance from a France to Persia. One of the most painful facts she presents in her magnificent book is that there is nothing new. Today's corruption follows the template of that against which the writers of "Mirror Books" were warning kings in the 13th century. Plus ca change.

3 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Good basic insights to how state corruption threatens global security

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 19, 2017

Verified Purchase

The central thesis of the author is basically that state corruption is a huge contributor to fuling hatred and gaining support for radical terror groups around the world. The book central thesis is well founded and one that should be done more to adress the violent extremism and terror groups around the world. But you get the point 30-40 pages in, and then there is just the authors own experinces (as an journalist) in various other countries where she found similair problems( i get that is what the author intended that state corruption is a global security problem), where we get some interesting insights to these countries and their own systemic way of corruption, but the analysis all feel like on an superficial level, and every country is only given about 10-20 pages each.

However even though the author notes that corruption isnt the only factor that ignites support for terror groups, the author does seem to neglect the strong idelogical factor for some of these terror groups. The author claims for example that the vast majority of Boko Haram attacks has been focused on goverment officals and the military is simply not true, and furthermore the author claims that boko haram isnt so much against western culture and civilazation, but the real meaning of their name is better understood in the context of the western education that the goverment officals recive and "use" afterwards in their high postions to rob the country. This is partly true, but again there the author neglects that the leaders of boko haram themselfs have claimed hatred for all westeren culture, the then acting leader of Boko Haram as in August 2009, Mallam Sanni Umaru, jettisoned such designation. He charged that “Boko Haram does not in any way mean ‘Western Education is a sin’ as the infidel media continue to portray us. Boko Haram actually means ‘Western Civilization’ is forbidden”.

Furthermore i personally think the author could had done without the chapter where she compared the protestant uprisings in Holland with the current unstability in the middle east. This historical comparsions is interesting, but largely it just feels like filler for the book.

Overall i did like reading the book, and it did expand my horizon on these issues, and would recommend the book.

2 people found this helpful

Tallat M Azad

An Eye Opener & a Wake Up Call

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

Excellent book, gives a new light onto why ordinary people feel the need to start taking matters into their own hands. Corruption is a virus that spreads rapidly. if unchecked. Sarah has been in the middle of it (i.e Afghanistan) and much of what she says rings true even for someone like me that has little first hand, second hand and even third hand experience of such things. The cleverness of the Afghan political elite and their undertsanding of the American psyche is quite a surprise. This does seem like a wake up call that if we, the public, allow our politicians to continue to accept the obvious injustices perpertrated by foreign governments (to whom we are providing aid blindly and without the requiste governance), intelligence agencies and larger corporations with the impunity and the apathy (from us) that they rely upon we will continue to see an erosion of social fabrics worldwide. I am glad this is getting out.

Ademola Lawal

An Incisive and Bold Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 15, 2015

Verified Purchase

Thieves of State is a very bold narrative considering the personalities involved. I admire the courage of the author and believe it will encourage others who have similar experiences to speak truth to power. I think the Nigerian segment was quite lenient because Nigerians believe the thieving in the country is by far wider and more crushing than has been portrayed. One could have thought that perhaps the personalities involved in Nigeria are far too powerful to expose hence the mild portrayal. But the Afghan exposure was very daring so one tends to believe not enough work was done on Nigeria. Still on Nigeria, disbursement of funds to States is not corruption as the author tends to portray. It is a constitutional provision. However, money to these tiers of governments have been largely looted. I enjoyed the book and have passed it to my son in the college to read and learn lessons from it.

2 people found this helpful

jk

Very Informative....goes back to the beginning of time.....Corruption a deep seated human conundrum

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 16, 2017

Verified Purchase

Insightful account of a criminal few creating oppositions (some benign & with righteous antidote but some others with seriously perverted ideologies towards an aim of recourse that never materialises) and the innocent abiding citizens bearing the brunt the world all over! Very nice

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