Sara Chayes describes the obvious "outcome"--profound corruption--has reached "the point that the very notion of democracy in now discredited." As a first-hand witness of Hillary Clinton's specific personal responsibility for perpetuating corruption in Afghanistan, Chayes wrote: "If the obstacle preventing more meaningful action against abusive corruption wasn't active U.S. complicity, it sure looked like it." Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (2015) 147. The consequences of that complicity has been tracked by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). John Sopko has exposed waste and corruption in Afghanistan notwithstanding the U.S. government's lack of commitment to preventing it. Sopko e mphasized that corruption and the closely related problem of narcotics were "mission critical" factors jeopardizing all U.S. goals in Afghanistan.
Hillary Clinton's clueless approach to anti-corruption work was therefore highly consequential. Her own eponymous anti-corruption "memo entirely ignored the structured, vertically integrated nature of the corruption networks that had taken over the Afghan government," according to Chayes. Clinton's ignorance was personally responsible for the failed mission in Afghanistan, where "[t]he only victors to emerge from this military and foreign-policy debacle have been corruption and the heroin trade." The same is true in Iraq and wherever "terrorist" insurgency arises as an entirely predictable response to the systemic corruption of U.S. puppets running failed governments. As Chayes observes and tried to inform the Clinton State Department without success: "Any plan based on such a faulty analysis would never work." Id. 146. But the faulty analysis should not be a surprise in the case of one who seems to have at the same time behaved as Secretary of State in a completely tone-deaf manner to her own conflicts of interest.
An authority on that part of the beltway-bandit democracy industry that specializes in anti-corruption work captures this ignorance at the top about the systemic corruption that Chayes describes in Afghanistan. Janine Wedell, Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security (2014) 87, writes that "approaches of the anti-corruption industry diverge a full 180 degrees from the realities of [systemic] corruption with its built-in unaccountability." Spent on programs designed for failure, the USAID money for democracy programs continues to flow. This money almost certainly does more harm than good abroad, since it is directed in the opposite direction from success, as Wedell fully documents, like Chayes, from an insider perspective.
The counter-intuitive provision of the systemically corrupt Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (H.R. 2029), Division K, Title VII "SEC. 7032. (a) FUNDING", provides "$2,308,517,000 shall be made available for democracy programs." Democracy programs.
It is unlikely that Congress could point to a single country that has become an authentic democracy, free of the subversive effect of corruption, or even appreciably improved, as a result of these annual appropriations of billions of dollars for "democracy programs" that turned up in CRomnibus II. But were this same money spent strategically at home on reform of US corruption, the US could possibly become the first country to actually benefit significantly from this otherwise wasted, poorly conceived taxpayer's largesse.
One insincere piety of Obama's first Inaugural Address was, "America has carried on "because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents. So it has been; so it must be with this generation of Americans.... Our security, emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example." Force of our example?
The capacity for the United States to exemplify a functioning democracy that was not, as it is now, systemically corrupt would unquestionably have a beneficial impact on promoting democracy around the world, and therefore "our security." But corrupt US elections between the various puppets of plutocrats, plus one authentic in-person plutocrat, make the country a laughingstock, while stimulating new enemies.
Providing a role model and demonstrating effective methods and techniques for preventing the overthrow of democracy by corruption would be far more effective than these wasted "democracy program" appropriations. The existing programs are more likely part of the problem than part of the solution. It is almost certain that the officials who run these programs, like Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan, are propagating to the rest of the world the same corrupt US system of plutocracy that they know, including its judicially enforced "freedom to corrupt".
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