A follow-up on the NYT corruption article from a few days ago. A commenter paints a bleak but accurate picture:
Having spent a number of years either working in the business and development sectors with countries that are considered to be incorrigibly corrupt (including Afghanistan) I can confirm that this article is both accurate and deplorably symptomatic of the myopic American view of corruption. That is not to say that we should approve of this sort of behavior. On the contrary, we should do everything in our power to help local citizens change the way their system works. And that is the key, namely, to change the way the system works. This cannot be achieved by training police in modern methods of policing and giving them lectures on the evils of corruption. It is essential for us to understand that in the system which fails to deliver the basic necessities of life to its citizens including its public servants (i.e., police) people will take advantage of the situation to support themselves and their families in any way possible. That is the essence of why so many societies are corrupt. In some way the American approach to rectifying systemic, endemic corruption reflects our naivete. In our world, the world in which most of our foreign assistance experts and soldiers have grown up, people accept jobs, accept job responsibilities, and are paid a regular living wage that allows them to live normal, decent lives. For such people the temptation to accept bribes must always be weighed against the risk of losing one’s salary, status and, potentially, freedom. Anyone who has been to a place like Afghanistan can attest to the fact that this is a country crushed by oppressive poverty, and local authorities never have to weigh such a decision. People take civil service jobs not for the meager salaries that the government may or may not pay, but for the opportunity to take advantage of the authority (and, in the case of police, the sheer physical force of weaponry) that these positions will give them to earn a normal living. On a national scale this is devastating. But, on an individual scale, once you get to see its effects, the pilfering is actually quite modest. What you don’t see, from an article like this, in that these cops are not living in mansions, driving deluxe Mercedes-Benz limousines and spending vacations in Monaco. They maintain fairly modest standards of living against the backdrop of abject poverty (even in the capital Kabul). True, higher authorities in these countries maintain a higher standard of living through their corrupt practices than their subordinates, nevertheless, it is the rare official who one would actually called wealthy by our standards (and, giving the recent spate of revelations about the exorbitant bonuses paid to our own senior executives will have only managed to bring our society to the brink of ruin, I think it is longtime that we put some perspective on this). The millions of dollars we spend lecturing the citizens of such countries about the evils of corruption — the only thing that makes their lives endurable — are wasted. (Unless, of course, you want to consider value that these activities bring us by making us feel better about ourselves.) Any official who personally does not engage in the practice is considered to be a fool; anyone who actually tries to combat the practice endangers the livelihoods of thousands of people and risks physical extermination. There is no shortcut to reducing graft in a corrupt society like Afghanistan other than remedying the systemic poverty and the lack of government that gives rise to it in the first place.
— Marc, Silver Spring
For what it’s worth, Usmani is still the governor.
blog comments powered by DisqusArchive · RSS · Theme by Novembird
