In a 2009 video, a prominent Egyptian denounced the venality of rulers in the Islamic world. “Popular awareness,” he said, “is more convinced, now, that these corrupt and rotten regimes are the reason behind economic injustice and corruption, the political oppression and social detachment.”
在2009年的一段视频里，一位名头很响的埃及人痛斥伊斯兰世界的统治者贪污成性。他说：“人民大众现在更加确信，这些腐朽、糜烂的政权就是经济不公与腐败、政治压迫和社会分裂背后的原因。”
This was not one of the secular idealists who would ignite revolt across the Middle East. It was Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, now its leader. His words go to the heart of Sarah Chayes’ argument in Thieves of State : that graft begets insecurity. A former adviser to the US military in Afghanistan and Washington, Chayes skewers US readiness to support kleptocrats in exchange for “counterterrorism co-operation”. Rarely has my enemy’s enemy been cut so much slack for so dubious a return.
如果说话人是个世俗理想主义者，他会希望在整个中东掀起一场起义，然而他不是。视频中的人是艾曼•扎瓦希里(Ayman al-Zawahiri)，基地组织当时的二号首领，现在的头号人物。他的话呼应了萨拉•蔡斯(Sarah Chayes)所著《窃国者》(Thieves of State)一书的中心思想：腐败造成安全威胁。蔡斯担任过美军在阿富汗和华盛顿的顾问。她一针见血地指出，美国准备支持窃国者，以换取“反恐合作”。敌人的敌人如此可疑地回归，却被如此纵容，这是鲜少见到的。
Anyone who has suffered the indignities it yields — the roadblocks impassable without a bribe, the sight of the fine villas beside slums — knows the sheer hair-pulling rage corruption can produce. I have heard a Jamaican spit that his country’s politicians were “so corrupt they corrode”, and Nigerian militiamen threaten to resume armed campaigns because payments promised under an amnesty were being creamed off.
你可曾遇到过不贿赂就不许通过的路障，可曾见过贫民窟旁优美的别墅？但凡受过这种侮辱的人都了解，腐败会让人愤怒到何等程度。我曾听一个牙买加人忿忿地说，牙买加政客已经“腐败到整个人都腐烂了”，还有尼日利亚民兵威胁要恢复武装运动，因为特赦时允诺的款项正被人中饱私囊。
We hear few such voices from Chayes. To support the link between state corruption and the Afghan insurgency, she chiefly offers an anecdote about a former policeman so incensed by being fobbed off when he reported graft that he vowed not to warn his former colleagues should he spot a Taliban roadside bomb, as well as a summary of what Taliban detainees are said to have told their American interrogators.
我们在蔡斯的书中很少看到这种言论。为了证明国家腐败与阿富汗叛乱之间的联系，蔡斯首先讲了一个前警察的个人遭遇，这位警察因举报腐败而遭到免职，他愤怒已极，发誓就算发现塔利班埋在路边的炸弹也绝不会提醒他以前的同事们。除了这段真人轶事以外，蔡斯还刊出了一份对话摘录，据说是落网的塔利班分子吐露给美国审讯者的口供。
What becomes clear from Chayes’ recollections is that former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s government abandoned national stewardship for self-enrichment. His regime is “best understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organisation”. US officials hung the Afghan proponents of a nascent anti-corruption drive out to dry rather than irk Mr Karzai. Chayes depicts a secret CIA agenda “enabling the very summit of Afghanistan’s kleptocracy”.
蔡斯这本回忆录清楚地表明，前阿富汗总统哈米德•卡尔扎伊(Hamid Karzai)政府为了敛财而荒废了国家治理。他的政权“是垂直一体化犯罪组织的最佳范例，毫无政府的样子”。美国官员宁可置阿富汗支持新反腐败运动的倡导者于不顾，也不愿惹恼卡尔扎伊。蔡斯描述了中情局(CIA)的一个秘密议程，这个议程“帮助阿富汗盗贼统治到达巅峰”。
Chayes takes her thesis on the road, journeying through the Maghreb amid the Arab uprisings and charting systems of rule-by-theft. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s kleptocracy was rooted in the army; the civil service was at the heart of Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisian version. Nigeria, maybe the most corrupt of all, has produced Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgency with few peers in barbarity.
蔡斯在书中娓娓道来，她叙述了阿拉伯起义期间马格利布的情形，她描绘了盗贼统治的种种体制。在埃及，胡斯尼•穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)的盗贼统治根植于军队；在突尼斯，行政机关是扎因•阿比丁•本•阿里(Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali)盗贼统治的核心。最腐败的也许要算尼日利亚，伊斯兰反叛组织博科哈拉姆(Boko Haram)便出自该国，该组织的残暴罕有人匹敌。
Kleptocracy blossomed in the late 1990s, Chayes reckons, “as governing cliques turned economic liberalisation policies — along with a newly indulgent public morality — to their personal advantage”. As the title indicates, her focus is states. But kleptocracy — like finance or jihadism — increasingly knows no borders. Its most obvious manifestations may be the national ruling classes of places such as Angola or Russia or, as Chayes argues, in western states such as Ireland in the run-up to the financial crisis. Yet venal regimes are also cogs in a worldwide system.
蔡斯认为，二十世纪九十年代末，“随着统治集团利用经济自由化政策为个人谋取利益，加之公共道德滑坡”，盗贼统治兴起。如其书名所示，蔡斯的重点是国家。但盗贼统治——就像金融或伊斯兰圣战——越来越没有国界之分。最明显的例子可能是安哥拉、俄罗斯等国的国家统治阶级，或者如蔡斯所认为的，还包括像爱尔兰这种西方国家在金融危机爆发前的情形。不过腐败政权在全球盗贼统治体系内也是少不了的一个存在。
Chayes nods to this when she points out the role of Dubai in Afghanistan’s kleptocracy, of Switzerland in Egypt’s, or of London in Nigeria’s. She could go further. Those who oversee the offshore banking system have shown themselves equally ready to serve secular dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and exporters of fundamentalism such as Iran or the House of Saud, not to mention itinerant terrorists and arms-dealers. Chayes warns “direct enablers” including banks, accountants, PRs and lobbyists that take the kleptocrat’s shilling that they “bear some of the moral — if not currently much material — responsibility, not just for the criminal behaviour, but for the often dramatic and destabilising and expensive reaction it sparks”. Ultimately the foreign collaborators of kleptocrats, be they bankers, business partners, political allies or occupiers, are what insulates them from being called to account by those in whose name they rule. “People think you want corruption,” a Kandahar friend of Chayes told her, summarising Afghan sentiment towards Americans. It is an understandable conclusion.
蔡斯也认可这一点，她在书中指出了迪拜之于阿富汗窃国者的作用，瑞士之于埃及窃国者的作用，以及伦敦之于尼日利亚窃国者的作用。其实她还可以更进一步。离岸银行系统的监管者已经表明，他们同样也准备好了服务那些世俗独裁者，比如智利的奥古斯托•皮诺切特(Augusto Pinochet)，又比如伊朗或沙特王室这样的原教旨主义输出者，至于流窜的恐怖分子以及军火商更是不在话下。蔡斯警告说“直接推动者”包括银行、会计师、公关，以及为窃国者有偿代言的游说者，她说“这群人即使现在还没有承担较大实质责任，也需承担一定的道德责任，不仅是对犯罪行为，还对犯罪行为往往引起的剧烈、破坏稳定、代价高昂的反抗”。最后，窃国者在外国同伙——包括银行家、商业伙伴、政治盟友或占领者——的协助下，得以免于遭到人民的问责——他们正是以人民的名义治理国家的。蔡斯在坎大哈的一位朋友对她说：“人们认为你们就是想要这种腐败的景象”，一言概括了阿富汗人对美国的感想。这一结论可以理解。