Sarah Chayes for Secretary of State Unfortunately Will Never Happen

Unlike most people you hear in the West who purports to explain the roots and motivations of "Islamic" fundamentalist violence, Sarah Chayes lived and worked for a decade in one of those countries where an extreme fundamentalist regime ruled, Afghanistan, after the United States and a coalition of mostly Western governments overthrew the Taliban and has been fighting them off ever since.

You might be familiar with Sarah Chayes from the time she spent as a reporter for National Public Radio, the job she gave up to work on development in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell and the new government under Hamid Karzai was set up, eventually becoming an adviser on the issue of corruption.  Earlier this year her book making a relationship between governmental and judicial corruption and disgusted and desperate people turning to violent religious fundamentalism in the face of ubiquitous corruption.   The NYRB said about it:

In a limited sense, this is Chayes’s own story too: A former reporter for NPR in Algeria and Afghanistan, she abandoned journalism to work for a nongovernmental organization in Kandahar, then was a social entrepreneur there on her own account, finally becoming an adviser on corruption to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

And went on:

Her personal narrative is even more complicated than any summary might suggest. In 2001, Chayes helped found a charity “of unclear mission,” run by President Hamid Karzai’s Baltimore-based elder brother, Qayum, about whom she has this to say: “Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds. Welded to his brother’s interests, he behaved in ways that contradicted his language so starkly that for a long time I had difficulty processing the inconsistency.”

Elsewhere “those brothers” (there are six besides Hamid Karzai himself) are characterized as “self-serving,” with the younger half brother Ahmed Wali singled out as someone “who stole land, imprisoned people for ransom, appointed key public officials, ran vast drug trafficking networks and private militias, and wielded ISAF like a weapon against people who stood up to him.” This, mind you, was also someone at whose house Chayes had dinner one night in 2003, in the course of which she watched C.I.A. officers “hand him a tinfoil-wrapped package of bills.”

Her experience corroborates an Oct. 27, 2009, report in The New York Times, which stated that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the C.I.A. payroll. It also prompts one to wonder at Senator John Kerry’s response at the time. “We should not condemn Ahmed Wali Karzai or damage our critical relations with his brother, President Karzai, on the basis of newspaper articles or rumors,” he said.


Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated by a police official and longtime confidant on July 12, 2011. About six years before that, Chayes severed her own relationship with the Karzais. After leaving for a few months, she returned to Kandahar in May 2005 with a project that, on the surface, could never smell of corruption and intrigue.

The review goes on to talk about how even as she tried to set up her own projects with charitable help from such people as Oprah Winfrey, setting up a cooperative for people who made soap and beauty products, she was faced with massive and endemic corruption, having to pay bribes TO DEPOSIT MONEY IN A  BANK. It goes beyond the line from Aunty Mame about the bank so conservative that they didn't let you withdraw your money.


Through the experience with corruption, but also in listening to what Afghans thought about their own experience, she came to realize that it was the corruption of government and other institutions that, as much as anything, led to people turning to the one institution that at least aspired to non-corruption, religion and in a form willing to take extreme measures to overthrow the system of endemic corruption.   Unlike so many of our media's favorite "experts" the Afghans were there and experiencing the reasons for why people pushed up against the wall are willing to try even the oppressive alternative of fundamentalism.  

I have long had a theory that racism and ignorance among the university educated class that staffs the upper ranks of  Western governments and our media has led us into one disaster after another around the world, getting many millions of people killed and leaving the survivors worse off than they were before. That's certainly the case in Iraq where the dismissive disdain for the Iraqi people and the ignorant characterization and self-interested and reductionist stereotyping of them unleashed what is likely the worst policy decision in our history.   That racist ignorance is matched by the desire to facilitate the exploitation by corporations and money interests of countries where our governments act.   So, our own governments promote a corrupt government which will sell out its own people to the same corporate interests who have corrupted out governments.   I will note the role that the perfumed members of high courts, the secular priesthood of alleged democracies, play in setting up the whole stinking thing.

The case that Sarah Chayes lays out that fundamentalism is an understandable response to massive corruption, rule by gangsters and thugs, complete with their own violence, makes more sense to me than the alternative theories I've heard.  That any attempt to address it would run straight into the corruption of our own government, in the pockets of billionaires and their corporations doesn't do a thing to make the think she is off the track.   Honest, decent government for The People is distinctly less profitable for those people than corrupt government is.

I would be interested to hear any ideas linking the rise of violent non-Islamic fundamentalism in the United States and countries such as Britain to the increasingly corrupt governments in them.  Though I think the domestic form of the same phenomenon in such countries is more likely to take the form of gang membership and white-supremacist and other quasi-fascist organizations.  Anger in the face of corruption has no place else to go when the media present no real alternative out of fashionable cynicism and anti-democratic disdain for The People and the odd idea that they can govern themselves without the interference of billionaires and corporations.

Here is a podcast of an extremely good interview of Sarah Chayes by Maureen Fiedler,  and a short article on that interview by Maureen Fiedler, where I first heard about Chayes' book, yesterday.  So much of what Chayes says, relating the phenomenon of "Islamic" fundamentalism to the rise of Protestantism is fascinating and refreshing.  Instead of seeing the people living in Islamic societies as some other species, she is able to find common threads of experience and response to it.  It is in line with so much of what Marilynne Robinson has pointed out about the Calvinists and Puritans, what is presented as a form of oppressive religiosity in 20th century revision, was actually an aspiration to have governments and societies which where honest and not corrupt.  The massive corruption of the Tutors in England are not told in the PBS-BBC costume dramas, what the English Puritains were a reaction to was probably not different from what we are seeing today.  Though English Puritainism wasn't funded with billions of petro-dollars with access to the products of western science, modern munitions.  And inspired by the writings of the much maligned John Calvin, they wouldn't have come out in exactly the same place.  Certainly there are equivalents in the Islamic world to that kind of reform.  The choice doesn't have to be between the violent oppression of pseudo-Islam or the secular Western religion of Mammon.