But U.S. embassy officials -- to let Karzai "save face," as one of them explained internally at the time -- volunteered that perhaps the arrest was a bit heavy handed. U.S. officers, who had worked hard to foster professionalism in their Afghan trainees, not to mention the Afghans who had worked the case, disagreed, and expressed bitter disappointment at the fate of their hard work, and at the lack of support from the Americans who had put them up to it.
"I have seen many a U.S. arrest that was far less polite than this one," remarked the mentor, an FBI officer.
This drama unfolded less than a month after Gen. David Petraeus took command of the more than 140,000 international troops in Afghanistan. I was part of a small group of civilian advisors helping him transition in. At the top of our agenda was Afghan governance. We were convinced that the acute and abusive corruption of the Karzai government was playing a key role in motivating Afghans to join the Taliban insurgency. Without getting a handle on corruption, it would be impossible to durably pacify the country, we believed.
Several of these civilians had helped write a strategic assessment of the Afghanistan campaign for Petraeus's predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It warned that a "crisis in confidence in the Afghan government" -- largely due to this corruption -- threatened the mission. I worked for McChrystal at the time, and with other members of the international military command, as well as U.S. and British rule-of-law officials and others, had helped design a comprehensive plan for countering runaway Afghan corruption and the international community's role in enabling it.
Our argument was practical: Systematic state corruption and abuse of power, we spelled out in internal planning documents, was discrediting the Afghan government. Afghans were outraged at it, and therefore increasingly susceptible to Taliban influence. The international community was becoming tainted by association. This dynamic was a key factor feeding the burgeoning violence and undermining the ability of either security or development efforts to reverse these trends. Fighting corruption, in other words, wasn't just a humanitarian or governance priority, it was key to winning the war. Without better governance, anything that might be achieved by extra U.S. troops or stepped-up special operations would be short-lived at best.
But by the summer of 2010, frustratingly little progress had been made in implementing the anti-corruption procedures we had developed. So Petraeus's team of civilian "directed telescopes," as he called us, set about updating the plan.
The result was a restatement of the argument, and a more sophisticated depiction of Afghan government corruption as the work of structured, vertically integrated criminal networks -- crime syndicates masquerading, in effect, as a government. Any approach to the problem had to be strategic, had to draw on techniques from the fight against organized crime. We expanded the toolbox of leverage that could be applied. We thought through likely risks, and ways of mitigating them. We emphasized the actions to be taken to protect and reinforce those officials who truly acted on behalf of the people, and who too often found themselves in mortal danger.
Our PowerPoint presentation spelling out this plan ran to more than 40 slides. We selected a dozen we really planned to brief, but at a meeting with the entire command staff, General Petraeus read through every one. With a calculated flourish, he marked a check on each page as he turned it over. Petraeus was on board.
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