Hamid Karzai & Sam Bankman-Fried
Last week you may have caught us celebrating when a judge rescinded Sam Bankman Fried’s bail and tossed him into the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center. Yesterday, Fortune’s crypto reporter, John Roberts noted that spoiled billionaire SBF just got an <>early start on his hellish new life<>. He painted a picture of cells that “reeked of sweat, stale air, and fear”— and those were just the holding cells!… As of Friday, that smell will be a permanent part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s life after the FTX swindler breached his bail conditions, leading a federal judge to rule he can no longer stay at his parents’ fancy Palo Alto home pending his October trial date. And the odor is just one unpleasant aspect of Bankman-Fried’s new life. His new home is Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, which is notorious for crammed conditions, abusive guards, and food that sometimes turns up with maggots. Bankman-Fried will also contend with rarely seeing the sun and the constant threat of violence. While there is nothing funny about inhumane prison conditions, there is plenty ironic about Bankman-Fried’s situation. Not long ago he professed not to care about money as part of the flimflam philosophy known as effective altruism— even as he lived in Versailles-level splendor. Now he will learn what a nonmaterial lifestyle really means.”
A new indictment filed yesterday— 7 counts of conspiracy— finally charged SBF with using stolen FTX funds to make more than $100 million in contributions to members of Congress and to candidates. Dominic Rushe reported that “Bankman-Fried ‘leveraged this influence, in turn, to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow, which would, in turn, allow the misappropriation scheme to continue. Bankman-Fried also used these connections with politicians and government officials to falsely burnish the public image of FTX as a legitimate exchange,’ the indictment alleges.” The indictment doesn’t name and of the scores of members of Congress who were taking outsized bribers from Bankman Fried inducting as errand-boys for him, like GOP whip Tom Emmer and Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres.
It’s also hard to feel sorry for Bankman-Fried since it’s a miracle he was out on bail in the first place. The majority of other criminal defendants in America are poor with darker skin colors, and most judges wouldn’t think twice about detaining them if they were accused of major felonies. But Bankman-Fried is from an elite family and can hire top-notch lawyers, and has an appearance and pedigree that makes him relatable to the professional class.
Finally, it’s entirely thanks to Bankman-Fried’s own hubris and stupidity that he is now in prison before his trial. He broke his bail conditions by engaging in witness tampering, and in the most egregious fashion imaginable— leaking the private diary of his girlfriend-turned-accuser to the media and proposing a corrupt deal to a lawyer who is part of the investigation. What did he think would happen?
Witness tampering? Like Trump has been doing? And now his attorneys are whining that he needs meds for depression and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). I bet a lot of the folks in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center are suffering, untreated, from the same maladies, especially depression.
I didn’t have time to get depressed when I was arrested on the Afghan side of the Russian border with 50 kilos of the best opiated Mazar hash on the planet. I had a carpenter build a sealed container into my van just big enough to hold the hash. My plan was to drive through Russia to Finland and ship the van back to America and be rich. It didn’t work. The carpenter must have turned me in and the border guards went right to the sealed container and I was thrown right into a dark hole that probably makes the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center look like a Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton. I was too busy to be depressed because I had to get out. And I had a connection. My Afghan partner— who I had been working with for a few months sending hash to the U.S. in small packages— was the postmaster of Kabul, the son of not just a governor but a relative of Mohammed Zahir Shah (the king… and father of the nation, although less that big a deal in the Kunduz area than in Kabul). He was deposed the following year.
Still, corruption is, and has always been, master in Afghanistan and I persuaded the “warden” to call my partner for $50, which was a lot of money in 1972. I didn’t spend the night in that stinking hole and the following day they returned the van and the hash to me and told me to not try to smuggle hash out of the country again. (Hash wasn’t prohibited but smuggling it was— you live and you learn.) That was my two days in Qizil Qalah, whose name had been changed to Sher Khan Bandar and was the way you could get into the Soviet Union back then. On the Amu Darya River, about an hour north of Kanduz, today it’s how you get to Dushanbe the capital of Tajikistan (until 1961 Stalinabad). Everybody concerned-- on both sides of all Afghanistan’s borders-- had to be given baksheesh (a bribe or present). Baksheesh was a way of life in Afghanistan.
So wasn’t I surprised yesterday when I saw the new issue of Foreign Affairs and a feature by Sarah Chayes, Afghanistan’s Corruption Was Made in America. Um, Afghanistan’s Corruption was endemic long before most Americans ever heard of the country. But, yes, the U.S. made it worse, much worse. I'd bet anything she went to Harvard or Yale.
Decades of devastating, deadly wars wars started in right after I left. Chayes wrote how she tried to help a friend start a business without paying baksheesh in 2005. She should have flown right back to America. She says she bullied a clerk into at the bank. I don’t know if I believe her story. She wrote that the ordeal “is how life was for Afghans on the United States’ watch. Almost every interaction with a government official, including teachers and doctors, involved extortion. And most Afghans weren’t able to take the risk I took in making a scene. They would have landed in jail. Instead, they just paid— and their hearts took the blows.
“The police are supposed to be upholding the law,” complained another cooperative member a few years later, a former police officer himself. “And they’re the ones breaking the law.” These officials—the police and the clerks—did not extort people politely. Afghans paid not just in cash but also in a far more valuable commodity: their dignity.”
Like I said, this was a way of life when I got there in 1969 and from what I’ve been told and what I’ve read, it was a way of life for hundreds of years. Chayes’ naïveté shocked me.
In the wake of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the Taliban’s swift reconquest of the country, and the chaotic, bloody exodus that has followed, U.S. officials have lamented that the Afghans failed to put up a fight. But how did the Americans ever expect Afghans to keep risking their lives on behalf of a government that had abused them— with Washington’s permission— for decades?
There is also another, deeper truth to grasp. The disaster in Afghanistan— and the United States’ complicity in allowing corruption to cripple the Afghan state and make it loathsome to its own people— is not only a failure of U.S. foreign policymaking. It is also a mirror, reflecting back a more florid version of the type of corruption that has long been undermining American democracy, as well.
Corruption in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan wasn’t just a matter of constant street-level shakedowns. It was a system. No cops or customs agents got to put all their illicit gains in their own pockets. Some of that money flowed upward, in trickles that joined to form a mighty river of cash. Two surveys conducted in 2010 estimated the total amount paid in bribes each year in Afghanistan at between $2 billion and $5 billion— an amount equal to at least 13 percent of the country’s GDP. In return for the kickbacks, officials at the top sent protection back down the line.
The networks that ran Afghanistan were flexible and dynamic, beset by internal rivalries as well as alliances. They spanned what Westerners often misperceive as an impermeable wall between the public sector and the supposedly private businesspeople and heads of local “nonprofits” who corralled most of the international assistance that found its way to Afghanistan. These networks often operated like diversified family businesses: the nephew of a provincial governor would get a major reconstruction contract, the son of the governor’s brother-in-law would get a plum job as an interpreter for U.S. officials, and the governor’s cousin would drive opium shipments to the Iranian border. All three were ultimately part of the same enterprise.
Westerners often scratched their heads at the persistent lack of capacity in Afghan governing institutions. But the sophisticated networks controlling those institutions never intended to govern. Their objective was self-enrichment. And at that task, they proved spectacularly successful.
That’s a good explanation of what was going on in Afghanistan… for decades and probably centuries. But here's where she went down the wrong path, asserting that this started with the U.S. occupation. Has she ever talked with an Af who leveled with her?
The errors that enabled this kind of government to take hold date back to the very beginning of the U.S.-led intervention, when American forces armed rag-tag proxy militias to serve as ersatz ground troops in the fight against the Taliban. The militias received spiffy new battle fatigues and automatic rifles but no training or oversight. In recent weeks, pictures of Taliban fighters wielding batons against desperate crowds at the airport in Kabul have horrified the world. But in the summer of 2002, similar scenes took place, with little subsequent outrage, when U.S.-backed militias set up checkpoints around Kandahar and smacked around ordinary Afghans who refused to pay bribes. Truck drivers, families on their way to weddings, and even kids on bikes got a taste of those batons.
In time, U.S. military intelligence officers figured out how to map the social networks of small-time Taliban commanders. But they never explored the links between local officials and the heads of construction or logistics companies that got to bid on U.S.-funded contracts. No one was comparing the actual quality of raw materials used with what was marked down in the budget. We Americans had no idea who we were dealing with.
Ordinary Afghans, on the other hand, could see who was getting rich. They noticed whose villages received the most lavish development projects. And Western civilian and military officials bolstered the standing of corrupt Afghan officials by partnering with them ostentatiously and unconditionally. They stood by their sides at ribbon cuttings and consulted them on military tactics. Those Afghan officials could then credibly threaten to call down a U.S. raid or an airstrike on anyone who got out of line.
By 2007, many people, myself included, were urgently warning senior U.S. and European officials that this approach was undermining the effort to rebuild Afghanistan. In 2009, in my capacity as special adviser to the commander of international troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, I helped establish an anticorruption task force at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). (McChrystal’s successor, David Petraeus, expanded the group and rebranded it as Task Force Shafafiyat.) The original team put together detailed plans for addressing corruption at a regional level throughout the country.
Later, I helped develop a more systematic approach, which would have made the fight against corruption a central element of the overall NATO campaign. Intelligence units would have mapped the social networks of ministers and governors and their connections. International military and civilian officials in Kabul would have applied a graduated range of sanctions to Afghan officials whose corruption was most seriously undermining NATO operations and Afghans’ faith in their government. And Afghan military commanders caught stealing materiel or their troops’ monthly pay would have been deprived of U.S. support. Later, while serving as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, I proposed a series of steps that would have taken particular aim at Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who had intervened to protect corrupt officials who had come under scrutiny, and whose brothers were salting away millions of stolen dollars in Dubai— some of it, we suspected, in trust for Karzai himself.
None of those plans was ever implemented. I responded to request after request from Petraeus until I realized that he had no intention of acting on my recommendations; it was just make-work. The principals’ committee of the National Security Council— a group that includes every cabinet-level foreign policy and security official— agreed to consider an alternative approach, but the plan we sent over died in the offices of President Barack Obama’s national security advisers James Jones and Tom Donilon. Task Force Shafafiyat continued operating, but it served essentially as window-dressing to be displayed when members of Congress visited as proof that the United States was really trying to do something about Afghan corruption.
ISAF and the U.S. embassy in Kabul had also formed a more specialized task force, the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, to carry out financial investigations. In 2010, it launched its first significant anticorruption probe. The trail led to Karzai’s inner circle, and police detained Muhammad Zia Salehi, a senior aide. With a single phone call to corrections officials, however, Karzai got the suspect released. Karzai then demoted all of the Afghan government’s anticorruption prosecutors, some of whom had assisted in the ATFC’s investigation, cutting their salaries by about 80 percent and barring U.S. Department of Justice officials from mentoring them. No protest came from Washington. “The cockroaches went scuttling for the corners,” as a member of the ATFC’s leadership described it.
Civilian officials at the Pentagon and their counterparts at the U.S. Department of State and in the intelligence agencies had long dismissed corruption as a significant factor in the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Many subscribed to the belief that corruption was just part of Afghan culture— as if anyone willingly accepts being humiliated and robbed by government officials. In more than a decade of working to expose and fight corruption in Afghanistan, I was never told by a single Afghan, “We don’t really mind corruption; it’s part of our culture.” Such comments about Afghanistan invariably came only from Westerners. Other U.S. officials contended that petty corruption was so common that Afghans simply took it for granted and that high-level corruption was too politically charged to confront. To Afghans, the explanation was simpler. “America must want the corruption,” I remember my cooperative’s chief financial officer remarking.
That answers my question. She never spoke to a single Af who leveled with her. I guess that’s because they knew what her laughable job was. That she thinks this all started with the U.S. only says one thing: whoever sent her over there in the first place should lose their job.
The precedent for Karzai’s impunity had been established in the wake of the Afghan presidential election of 2009. Karzai had brazenly stolen it by declaring some Taliban-infested districts safe for voting and then negotiating with the Taliban to allow for the entry and exit of ballot boxes— but not to allow voters free access to polling stations. The result was empty ballot boxes that could then be stuffed. Afghan friends regaled me with descriptions of poll workers they had observed in rural villages firing their guns in the air while on the phone to officials in Kabul. “We’re having a tough time here,” the election officials would shout into the phone. “Can you give us a few more days to get the boxes to you?” Then they would go back to filling out fraudulent ballots.
In some cases, UN investigators who opened sealed boxes found intact pads of ballots inside, all filled out in the same ink. But Washington declined to call for a new election. Instead, the Obama administration dispatched John Kerry, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts who was then chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to try to reason with Karzai. In the end, the official results emerged from a negotiation: Karzai would still win but by fewer votes. That, ultimately, was the type of democracy that Americans cultivated in Afghanistan: one where the rules are rewritten on the fly by those who amass the most money and power and where elections are settled not at the ballot box but by those who already hold office.
No, it wasn’t; it was the kind of government Afghanistan had developed. Awful? Yes, at least from our perspective. But not imposed on them by the U.S. It’s just what it was and, alas, there was no way for the U.S. to change it. In fact, the U.S. shouldn’t have been in Afghanistan in the first place. That’s the real tragedy here. Once, I had a long discussion with a progressive congresswoman, a friend and a really smart person. When I told her it was a mistake to vote for the occupation of Afghanistan, she told me we had to do it to save the women. I laughed in her face— I know I shouldn’t have— and she never had a friendly thing to say to me again. Save the women? They have a culture that goes back over a thousand of years… and American do-gooders are going to change it in a few years? Funny enough, there was more of a renaissance for Afghan women under the Russian occupation that under the American one. But the Taliban, who represents the conservative culture of a conservative country, put an end to it after the Russians and an end to it after the Americans.
How did U.S. officials across four administrations get Afghanistan so wrong? As in any complex phenomenon, many factors played a role.
First, despite the high costs, the U.S. war was always a halfhearted effort. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush’s top advisers were obsessed with Iraq; they grudgingly set their sights on Afghanistan only when irrefutable intelligence made clear that the attacks had been carried out by al Qaeda. The organization was then based in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had long-standing partnerships with local jihadis. And yet within a few months of the collapse of the Taliban regime, U.S. diplomats and the military brass had orders to swivel to Iraq. The United States put itself in the impossible position of trying to prosecute two complex wars at once.
For his part, Obama always exuded ambivalence about the mission in Afghanistan. As vice president, Joe Biden was outspoken about his opposition to the intervention. President Donald Trump oversaw the negotiations that forced the Afghan government to make concession after concession to the Taliban so that U.S. forces could leave— and set up the Taliban for their lightning victory. And Biden, back in the White House as president, was at last able to bring about the withdrawal that he wanted 12 years ago. But today is not 12 years ago.
Throughout all four administrations, U.S. officials never met ordinary people in settings that would have made those people feel safe to speak freely. So the Americans never absorbed critical information that was obvious to Afghans, such as the prevalence of corruption and the disgust it was generating. Meanwhile, Karzai knew how to get Afghanistan into the headlines— something that none of the four presidents who oversaw the war wanted. Even out of office, Karzai seems able to outfox the White House: witness his reported role in paving the way for the humiliating denouement of the U.S. war effort by negotiating with regional strongmen and Pakistani officials (or their proxies) to smooth the Taliban takeover.
The United States could have and should have taken a different approach.
Yes, the U.S. should have left and every single moment it was there. Leaving was the greatest achievement of Joe Biden’s entire decades-long career. And he can’t even brag about because the Republicans and right-wing media have been allowed to turn it into something to be ashamed of.
On the surface, Afghanistan and the United States are vastly different places, home to different societies and cultures. And yet when it comes to allowing profiteers to influence policy and allowing corrupt and self-serving leaders to cripple the state and anger its citizens, the two countries have much in common.
For all the mismanagement and corruption that hollowed out the Afghan state, consider this: How well have American leaders been governing in recent decades? They have started and lost two wars, turned free markets over to an unfettered financial services industry that proceeded to nearly bring down the global economy, colluded in a burgeoning opioid crisis, and bungled their response to a global pandemic. And they have promulgated policies that have hastened environmental catastrophes, raising the question of how much longer the earth will sustain human habitation.
And how have the architects of these disasters and their cronies been doing? Never better. Consider the skyrocketing incomes and assets of executives in the fossil fuel and pharmaceutical industries, investment bankers, and defense contractors, as well as the lawyers and other professionals who provide them with high-end services. Their staggering wealth and comfortable protection from the calamities they have unleashed attest to their success. Not success at leadership, of course. But maybe leadership isn’t their objective. Maybe, like their Afghan counterparts, their primary objective is just making money.
OK, she finally got something right— even if it sounds like it was written a half dozen years ago.