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

Author:Chayes, Sarah [Chayes, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

MEANWHILE an anticorruption operation was under way in Kabul. Just before dawn on July 25, 2010, an administrative assistant at the Afghan national security council named Muhammad Zia Salehi was led out of his home under arrest, on charges of selling his influence for the gift of a car valued around $20,000. Like income taxes in the Al Capone case, the bribery was just the crime that investigators could prove. In fact, Salehi appeared to be the bagman for a vast palace slush fund that President Karzai’s closest intimates controlled and used to buy alliances, votes, or silence.

These discoveries had come to light as part of a sprawling investigation led by an old friend from Anti-Corruption Task Force days: sleepless, theatrically grumpy, meticulous Kirk Meyer of the DEA, one of the most talented officers in the U.S. law enforcement arsenal. He had told us corruption was only the third priority of his Threat Finance Cell and the special Afghan police unit it mentored, the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), below terrorist funding and drug money.

True to its mandate, the SIU had dug into the workings of a major Kabul-based hawala, a traditional money-transfer operation, often used by extremists. Single threads soon lead to dense tangles. An unprecedented raid on the hawala’s offices in downtown Kabul reaped a huge trove of data. And the team struck a torrent of cash pumping out of Afghanistan’s top private financial institution, the Kabul Bank. The resulting sinkhole was nearly a billion dollars deep—the result of $100,000 MasterCards handed out to select officials, directors’ fat expense accounts, bribes for government tenders, and the kind of “nonreimbursable loans” that were then so common in Tunisia.1

Salehi’s extortion of a set of flashy wheels was tangential to the Kabul Bank investigation. But the McChrystal headquarters and officials in Washington had asked Meyer to generate an anticorruption test case, so his team had compiled watertight evidence. The arrest was a coup. Watching from the sidelines, the Directed Telescopes crowed.

But before the sun set on that arrest, President Karzai had ordered Salehi’s release. The boss had protected his underling. The implicit promise that structured the kleptocratic system had held.

Karzai was not bashful about his interference in the judicial process. “Absolutely I intervened. . . . I intervened very, very strongly,” he boasted to ABC’s This Week a month later. He was broadcasting the fact to members of his network—just as he had broadcast his promise not to remove any corrupt officials at that press conference after the arrest of the minor border police official the previous year. Karzai was advertising the strength of his protection guarantee.

He cited the conditions of the operation against Salehi:

This man was taken out of his house in the middle of the night by thirty Kalashnikov-toting masked men in the name of Afghan law enforcement. This is exactly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union, where people were taken away from their homes by armed people in the name of the state and thrown into obscure prisons and in some kind of kangaroo courts.

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