Much of the hundred billion dollars the U.S. spent to rebuild Afghanistan was stolen. Illustration by Shout

In October, 1951, a band of thieves hijacked a large shipment of opium in the port town of Punggol, in northeast Singapore. The Singapore of that era bore little resemblance to the one we know today: as a key entrepôt in the drug trade between India and China, the island was beset by crime and corruption. When British colonial authorities investigated the theft, they discovered that the culprits included several high-ranking members of Singapore’s police. In the aftermath of the scandal, the colonial administration created the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau. When Singapore achieved independence, some years later, the new Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, announced that he was “sickened” by decadence and corruption, and pledged to rid Singapore of graft. Members of his government wore white shirts and trousers when they were sworn into office, as a signal of the purity of their intentions.

New leaders often condemn the venality of their predecessors, only to exceed it when they assume office. From Duvalier, in Haiti, to Fujimori, in Peru, to Erdoğan, in Turkey, it’s a predictable twist in the drama of political transition. But Lee delivered on the rhetoric, enacting new anticorruption legislation and bestowing real power on the anticorruption bureau. He raised salaries for civil servants, to minimize any temptation to sell their influence, and instituted harsh jail terms for those caught taking bribes. In 1986, Lee’s minister of national development, an architect named Teh Cheang Wan, was investigated for accepting kickbacks from two real-estate developers. He killed himself with a fatal dose of barbiturates, maintaining, in a suicide note addressed to Lee Kuan Yew, “It is only right that I should pay the highest penalty for my mistake.”

By the time Lee stepped down as Prime Minister, in 1990, Singapore had gone from being one of the more corrupt countries on the planet to one of the least. According to Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, Singapore now ranks seventh in the world for transparent government—less corrupt than Australia, Iceland, or (by a good margin) the United States. The story is heartening but anomalous. It is almost unheard of for a nation to expunge a culture of corruption so thoroughly. Some countries get slightly better, some get slightly worse, but, the world over, corruption tends to endure.

“Everybody does it,” John Noonan, a federal judge in California, wrote in his eight-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page volume, “Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea” (1984): “Romans and Visigoths, Englishmen and Africans, Catholics and Jews, pagans and Protestants, capitalists and Communists, imperialists and patriots.” The word “corruption” derives from the Latin corrumpere, which can mean to bribe, but also to mar or destroy. Yet, on the available evidence, corruption has always permeated so many fields of human endeavor that it may be not a corruption of anything—but, rather, a regrettable feature of our natural condition. Accountable government is an ideal, to be sure. It may also be an aberration.

Definitions of corruption tend to focus on the conflict of interest that arises when private imperatives intrude upon the public sphere. Robert Klitgaard, an economist who has done field work on corruption in dozens of countries, once posited a formula: Corruption = Monopoly Power + Discretion - Accountability. In Klitgaard’s reckoning, corruption is a crime of calculation. If that’s the case, shouldn’t the problem be susceptible to rational solutions? Any country could simply take Singapore as a blueprint and tinker with the variables, as Lee Kuan Yew did, recalibrating the risk/reward ratio for officials who might feel inclined to betray their office. Scholars and activists who focus on corruption often describe the problem as one that might eventually be eradicated, like smallpox. Even Noonan concludes his sprawling chronicle of millennia of graft on an improbably hopeful note, arguing that, just as slavery was once widely accepted and is now reviled, bribery may one day “become obsolete.”

But corruption has outlived all predictions of its demise. Indeed, it appears to be thriving. According to the African Union, during the nineteen-nineties a quarter of Africa’s gross domestic product was siphoned off by graft. The United Nations estimates that corruption adds a ten-per-cent surcharge to the cost of doing business in many parts of the world. Corruption infects every level of government, bedevils foreign development, enables terrorism, and fuels transnational crime. It is a recurring conundrum in business, in religious institutions, in education, in sports. Yet our conceptual vocabulary for understanding this pathology, let alone combatting it, remains conspicuously meagre. The very term “corruption” is so inclusive as to be almost meaningless, encompassing bribery, nepotism, bid-rigging, embezzlement, extortion, vote-buying, price-fixing, protection rackets, and a hundred other varieties of fraud.

Corruption creeps in, unnoticed, “like some odorless gas,” Sarah Chayes writes in her new book, “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,”* and confounds policy objectives without attracting much policy attention. Chayes spent most of the past decade living in Afghanistan. Her book, which is part memoir and part treatise, argues that the United States has a tendency not just to ignore international corruption but to compound it, and that in places like Afghanistan this willful ignorance can be destabilizing and dangerous. Chayes tells the fascinating story of her own quixotic effort to launch a Singapore-style anti-corruption campaign in one of the most corrupt countries on earth.

Chayes arrived in Afghanistan, in 2001, as a correspondent for National Public Radio, covering the fall of the Taliban. She ended up in the arid and dusty southern city of Kandahar, which she once described as “like the moon, with goats on it.” She had not been in Afghanistan long before she decided to give up journalism and join a nonprofit called Afghans for Civil Society. Her remit was ambitious but diffuse: develop a sister-school program, establish a radio station, rebuild a village that had been destroyed by allied bombing. Afghans for Civil Society was established by Qayum Karzai, an exiled Afghan businessman who had been living in Baltimore before the U.S. invasion and happened to be the older brother of Hamid Karzai, the man coalition forces installed as Afghanistan’s interim President, in 2002.

“The classic error that outsiders make in Afghanistan is to single out a proxy,” Chayes writes. The predicament is familiar: the foreign interloper, whether a journalist, a general, or a colonial administrator, arrives ignorant of the local languages and customs, and needs someone who can serve as interpreter and guide. The foreigner often pays (or overpays) for this arrangement, with money or some other inducement, and thus a codependence between proxy and patron is born. A central theme of “Thieves of State” is the subtle power that these proxies can accumulate and the tendency for the unschooled yet profligate outsider to become hopelessly stymied by his man on the ground.

Because the soldiers and civilians who flooded into Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban did not know how to (or, in some cases, care to) engage with the local population except through their designated fixers, the fixers ended up controlling the aperture through which key members of the international community perceived the conflict. Chayes’s use of the word “proxy,” with its Cold War connotations, seems deliberate; the United States has a history of falling for strongmen in dicey locales and overlooking their sins in the interests of some larger strategic agenda. Mobutu was a hedge against the Communists. Mubarak was a hedge against regional war. The Saudis are a hedge against paying too much for gas. The culture of warlordism in Afghanistan that we know today took shape not in this recent conflict but in an earlier one—during the nineteen-eighties, when the United States paid local surrogates to fight the Soviets. As American military and intelligence operatives entered the country after September 11th, they sought out regional brokers, empowering a new generation of hard and unscrupulous partners.