Review by Choice Review
This is a very powerful, moving, thoughtful, and probing exposé on corruption and global security. It is also a wonderfully written and compelling read. It is not, however, an academic treatise that can or should be treated as a scholarly work capable of building on the existing literature or adding something new to the body of knowledge in terms of being amenable to other rigorous research. This is not a criticism of the book per se, because it was not the goal of the author (who is not an academic) to "play professor." Rather, the book powerfully compares intensely diverse times and places to show how pervasive corruption is and why and how it has always been a threat to global security. More importantly, this work breaks down global North-South prejudicial myths that seem to make corruption a problem of other countries and not a concern of the so-called First World. The discussion of remedies at the end of the book lays out a blueprint for future scholars to take up in serious ways. Hopefully this will happen; otherwise the true potential of this work will remain unfulfilled. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --Matthew D. Crosston, Bellevue University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ACROSS MUCH OF THE WORLD, populations suffer daily shakedowns by the police. At roadblocks, market stalls and entrances to government buildings, thugs in uniform gather "like spear fishermen hunting trout in a narrows," as Sarah Chayes writes. But that isn't the half of it. Globally, the three most important desiderata of our age - security, resilience and poverty reduction - are consistently being hollowed out by structural theft on a much larger scale, operating across corporations, governments, military establishments and civil services. One key reason the United States and its allies have struggled to establish sustainable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the governments of those countries are mired in graft, caught in a mafia-like system in which money flows upward. The same goes for parts of Africa and Asia, and most of the former Soviet Union. The tenure of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is being defined by his war on corruption, and in December President Hassan Rouhani of Iran spoke out against corruption there. Chayes's "Thieves of State" makes a strong case that acute corruption causes not only social breakdown but also violent extremism. She calls this a "basic fact," showing that where there is poor governance - specifically, no appeal to the rule of law and no protected right of property - people begin a search for spiritual purity that puts them on a path to radicalization. In a limited sense, this is Chayes's own story too: A former reporter for NPR in Algeria and Afghanistan, she abandoned journalism to work for a nongovernmental organization in Kandahar, then was a social entrepreneur there on her own account, finally becoming an adviser on corruption to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her personal narrative is even more complicated than any summary might suggest. In 2001, Chayes helped found a charity "of unclear mission," run by President Hamid Karzai's Baltimore-based elder brother, Qayum, about whom she has this to say: "Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds. Welded to his brother's interests, he behaved in ways that contradicted his language so starkly that for a long time I had difficulty processing the inconsistency." Elsewhere "those brothers" (there are six besides Hamid Karzai himself) are characterized as "self-serving," with the younger half brother Ahmed Wali singled out as someone "who stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias, and wielded ISAF like a weapon against people who stood up to him." This, mind you, was also someone at whose house Chayes had dinner one night in 2003, in the course of which she watched C.I.A. officers "hand him a tinfoil-wrapped package of bills." Her experience corroborates an Oct. 27, 2009, report in The New York Times, which stated that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the C.I.A. payroll. It also prompts one to wonder at Senator John Kerry's response at the time. "We should not condemn Ahmed Wali Karzai or damage our critical relations with his brother, President Karzai, on the basis of newspaper articles or rumors," he said. Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated by a police official and longtime confidant on July 12, 2011. About six years before that, Chayes severed her own relationship with the Karzais. After leaving for a few months, she returned to Kandahar in May 2005 with a project that, on the surface, could never smell of corruption and intrigue. Armed with an oil press and $25,000 from Oprah Winfrey, she set up a cooperative producing scented soap and beauty products, taking advantage of Afghanistan's horticultural riches. But she soon found that even this innocuous activity put her on the sharp end of corruption, as she tried to do simple things like deposit money in a bank without paying a bribe for the privilege of doing so. So she began, in an amateurish way, to develop ideas for limiting corruption in places like Afghanistan. Very quickly, the amateur became professional. Chayes was soon called upon by NATO and ISAF to give expert briefings with a focus on anti-corruption measures. "'Sally the Soap-Maker Gives an Ops Brief' was how I jokingly came to refer to my main presentation," she writes. This led to a job with ISAF, and then another as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flitting between Washington and Kabul as the United States laboriously and somewhat unwillingly developed an anti-corruption strategy for Afghanistan. Any such strategy was bound to conflict with political and military exigencies, which presumably explains Kerry's response to the report in The Times. But Chayes's Afghan interlocutors told her again and again that poor governance was actually what was perpetuating the conflict, with graft generating disenchantment and driving people toward the Taliban. "Western officials," she writes, "habitually flipped the sequence: First let's establish security, then we can worry about governance." Ordinary Afghans, meanwhile, took Western inaction on corruption as approval. Aid just added to the problem, in Chayes's view: "Development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency." CHAYES REFERS TO the body of medieval and Renaissance advice literature known as "Mirrors for Princes" to contextualize current abuses of government. She begins with the most famous mirror of all, Machiavelli's "The Prince," but it is lesser-known figures like William of Pagula and John of Salisbury who give her the most ammunition. She also uses the "Siyasat Nameh" - the "Book of Politics" - of the 11th-century Persian administrator Nizam al-Mulk. Among the counsels that Nizam al-Mulk gave his sultan was : Listen to the grievances of your subjects directly, without intermediaries. Chayes argues that the voices of a majority of Afghans are drowned out by the Taliban on one side and by the Karzai government on the other. ISAF, she says, listened only to the government. Many of the other countries Chayes brings into this chatty study ("John of Salisbury, as usual, nailed it") show similar patterns. In each case, there are slightly different "variations on a theme," as she has it, ranging from the military-kleptocratic complex (Egypt) to the bureaucratic kleptocracy (Tunisia), the post-Soviet kleptocratic autocracy (Uzbekistan) and the resource kleptocracy (Nigeria). In her epilogue, titled "Self-Reflection," Chayes also discusses Western countries and the global financial crisis of 2008. This is 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, though the balance of exciting narrative, academic discourse and policy-wonk-speak will unsettle some. Indeed, Chayes touches on how language itself becomes corrupt. The standard terminology of military and diplomatic engagement (and much corporate rhetoric) is often evasive, with usage reflecting differences in value systems - as when assassination by drone is described as "targeted killing." While I am in full agreement with what Chayes says, I found her own prose style raising my hackles on occasion, with its effortful interpolations of color ("the legendary but painfully dilapidated blue and white Mediterranean port city of Algiers"), verbs on steroids ("I wheeled and strode over to our battered red pickup truck, clambered aboard, and roared off to the bank"), and its chapters that begin with such sentences as "Wait a second." I did, but I wish she had. GILES FODEN is the author of "The Last King of Scotland."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Government corruption in the world's hot spots is often ignored at the expense of any real chance for peace, argues Chayes, former NPR correspondent and former advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Drawing on her experiences, Chayes asserts that kleptocratic governance acute and systemic public corruption is provoking insurgency in many parts of the world. She explores the day-to-day frustrations of citizens in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Egypt, and other nations, who can't get basic things done without paying bribes to government officials. Frustration often breeds insurgency as citizens see the Taliban or Boko Haram as agents to address the need for change. Chayes parallels current geopolitics with ancient practices and the philosophers who railed against corruption, including Machiavelli, John Locke, and Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk. She criticizes diplomats, reporters, NGO workers herself included for failing to expand their contacts beyond the usual sources to get a broader sense of public concerns over massive crimes committed under the imprimatur of government. From ancient tales of avaricious rulers to modern headlines of greedy politicians, Chayes offers insightful analysis of how government corruption invites instability and insurgency and why we will never see peace in some of the world's hot spots until we address that corruption.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chayes (Punishment of Virtue) argues here that corruption among foreign governments angers local populations and thereby undermines U.S. foreign policy. Framing the narrative using medieval and Renaissance texts from the genre known as "mirrors for princes," written in Europe and the Middle East as advice to new rulers, Chayes draws from her own experiences as a reporter and aid worker in Afghanistan to show what happens when populations grow disappointed in their own governments. Most illuminating, however, are Chayes's conversations with people living under corrupt regimes that range from Nigeria, which she says suffers from a "resource curse," to Afghanistan and Syria. As she finds, problems often arise when proxies or intermediaries are able to interpose themselves between governments and the people they govern. As a result, dissent grows at the same time that politics is removed as a means of redress. Meanwhile, U.S. foreign policy, according to Chayes, tends to neglect the networks that foster corruption in favor of targeting individuals, or simply ignoring the issue altogether. Though she acknowledges homegrown American graft, she draws too little distinction between the corruption that greases wheels (such as congressional bills full of pork) and the corruption that actually disrupts progress. Nonetheless, scholars and CNN junkies alike should be intrigued by the issues Chayes brings up and impressed with the solutions she suggests. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Former NPR reporter and current Carnegie Foundation associate Chayes (The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, 2006) offers an alarming account of the role played by acute government corruption in fostering violent extremism.The systemic corruption in Afghanistan will hardly surprise informed readers, but its extent and enormous adverse impact on American efforts there (and in other failed states) are "remarkably underappreciated." In her 10 years as a reporter and entrepreneur in Afghanistan, the author found that the government existed only to enrich the ruling elite. Within the carefully structured kleptocracy, money flowed upward via gifts, kickbacks and the purchase of positions. In return, those making payments were granted protection or permission to extract resources. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of Afghan life, Chayes argues convincingly that resentment over flagrant corruption drove many citizens to turn against the government and join the insurgency. At the same time, while pursuing flailing efforts to stem corruption (Chayes was an adviser on the issue), the U.S. passed millions of dollars to President Hamid Karzai (through the CIA), thereby enabling Afghanistan's kleptocracy. The author meanders considerably between her insightful observations as a reporter, as an NGO leader dedicated to rebuilding Afghanistan and as a participant in fruitless U.S. efforts to halt government corruption. Chayes weaves in many relevant quotations from Machiavelli, Erasmus and other Renaissance "mirror writers" who advised rulers to listen to their subjects and avoid acute public corruption that could destabilize the realm. She also shows how loss of confidence in corrupt rulers prompted the Arab Spring and revolts elsewhere. Much of her material is telling, but many readers will be annoyed by Chayes' tendency to jump around between countries and between events of the past and present. The author suggests remedies for dealing with acute corruption, noting that the political courage to act is often lacking. Scattershot but often insightful, disquieting reading for policymakers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
