PEACE PROBE by Gene Stoltzfus

Corruption is in the news again always with tough talk about what the next phase of US troops in Afghanistan will look like.  As a young volunteer in Viet Nam in the early 1960s I was assigned to work with a USAID (United States Agency for International Development) sponsored program called hamlet education.  At the time I thought that education was always good and it never occurred to me that I might be part of a larger plan to entice the Vietnamese government to embrace the U. S. Government agenda.  As I got into my work I was warned of corruption.  American government advisors told me that money for the program was lifted all along the way from Saigon ministry people, through province leaders and on down to district governments that administered the disbursement of money. I was never told what to do about it.  I had not enrolled in a class that might have been called History of Corruption in the Western World although given the soiled history of US intervention in so many places over the last 40 years it should have been a required course.

At the local level where I worked, the district chiefs contracted to have the schools built.  Vietnamese and Americans warned me that the contractors would cut corners by using insufficient amounts of cement and lower quality construction materials.  According to these same people contractors were required to kick back a certain percentage to the district chief.  It took forever for the paperwork and the money to work its way through the system down to the hamlets.  So American advisors along the way were encouraged to pressure, nice talk, and occasionally throw a fit to get hamlet education and all the other counter insurgency programs moving.  Eventually I figured out that I was the final link in that pressure process.

District chiefs told me that the blame for the slow pace of implementation order was due to the Viet Cong, or the general slowness of the Vietnamese way.  Eventually schools were built, dedicated and opened.  There were plenty of children.  Occasionally when I visited schools there was propaganda on the school walls condemning American imperialists.   I learned that when those signs appeared the schools usually closed shortly thereafter and if I went to those villages people continued to be polite and there was still tea to drink but the villagers didn’t want to talk about the school.

As the military build up proceeded I noticed that the US military civic action people took great interest in schools, loved to paint schools, and give support to projects.  Like me they also believed that schools would bring a better future   As security broke down such projects lost their luster.  But many of the programs continued to be carried on the Saigon government books and something called corruption grew as the distance from money to effective implementation became more remote, often impossible, due to war.  This led to more accusations of corruption and an influx of more American advisors always with their generous hardship pay.  Like me they arrived generally underqualified in the local arts of communication, culture and corruption.   Back in the White House situation room war councils were a weekly affair.

President Obama has promised to announce his Afghanistan decision next week in time for Christmas.  West Point, his choice of location does not suggest to me that he or his advisors have learned what I thought I learned in Viet Nam about how war and corruption embrace each other usually with the language of economic improvement and development for the people.   I can hear the generals and other senior advisors now in the situation room fine tune the use of new miracle weapons and at the same time integrating Canada, NATO and whoever else into the strategy of targeting the foe.  And then some highly medaled general or civilian security advisor will ask about how the counter insurgency plans are coming along. Somebody pontificates about “the people” and someone else describes a conversation they had in Afghanistan recently. Maybe there is a silence in the room and then someone from USAID, the civilian counter insurgency agency, reports on how many new people have been sent in to advise and track roads, schools and other development work.  Overall the mood is sombre and no one wants to say the strategy won’t work.  Someone asks about negotiations.   But that discussion doesn’t seem to go anywhere either.  One of the elephants in the room reminds the solemn gathering how embarrassing it is to give money to a government that is corrupt so someone suggests that we have to get the press to cover a success story.

Corruption usually gets worse in war because people’s survival instinct tell them to think short term and clutch at every opportunity for golden nuggets, money, or anything that has value and can be traded.  I doubt that the $500 dollar per day civilian advisors will stamp out survival corruption.  I have not heard evidence that these pricy civilians are any more prepared with communication, culture and corruption medicine than I was 45 years ago.  An Afghan’s monthly salary is less than half the amount a U. S. aid worker earns each day.  It costs about $500,000 per year to put these pricy civilian advisors and corruption doctors in the field, including the cost of their housing, transport, and security (usually provided by even higher paid contractors).  A soldier costs the American people about one million dollars per year.

But the suspension of legal and moral strictures so evident in conditions of war has its first cousins in New York and Washington where there isn’t a war.  We don’t use the word corruption unless it’s a Ponzi scheme.  By keeping the boundaries of the law as wide as possible in order to encourage free enterprise our rule of law here is respected even though people, corporations and syndicates plunder one another and feed on those who are not organized to escape the insatiable grasp for more money.  It is this kind of condition that incensed the Old Testament prophets when they warned Israel about the fate that awaits the greedy nation.  Corruption doctors are needed right here in North America, not the $500 a day kind that are sent to Afghanistan but the kind who have demonstrated with a life of bold words, or prudent action that the future is worth protecting.  Preachers and modern day prophets whose thought and wisdom have tasted from the well of sustainable economy can help.  Listeners and readers should, however, beware of the false gospel of perpetual prosperity celebrated in so many religious and economic holy places like some mega churches and Wall Street.

In Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan the word corruption is used when sharply dressed foreign advisors, who should know better, need someone to blame.   Let’s face it, corruption is universal.  Publius Cornelius Tacitus, roman senator, and historian who prosecuted a proconsul of Africa on corruption in the first century said “The more corrupt the state, the more laws.” We still have a habit of passing more laws to build a moat around corruption and deal with lapses in moral judgement.

The terms of the debate on Afghanistan are in need of change from corruption and blaming to respect and honest talk.  Foreign power and might will not change the outcome in Afghanistan although generous doses of explosives from outside will certainly lengthen the war.  The challenge of American powerlessness in Afghanistan now faces President Obama and his advisors. If he reaches back to his time as a community organizer he will get some hints of how to address the nation and the world when faced with powerlessness. Community organizers don’t take on campaigns that are not good for the community.  A healthy campaign reaches out with the possibility of real gain for all the participants

Foreign fighters in Afghanistan from the Muslim or the Christian world  can ill afford to pay for this war.  This chapter of warfare can be closed by loading up the trains, trucks, and air planes with all existing and spent war equipment.  By bringing instruments of war past and present, mines, spent tanks, everything, home for recycling it will not be used by anyone in Afghanistan or elsewhere to extend anyone’s conflict.  Then the world can turn its attention to binding up the wounds from broken relationships, the tangle of terrorism, and building a world that is incorruptible.