書評 竊國者及其密友們
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.”
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.
如果說話人是個世俗理想主義者，他會希望在整個中東掀起一場起義，然而他不是。視頻中的人是艾曼•扎瓦希裏(Ayman al-Zawahiri)，基地組織當時的二號首領，現在的頭號人物。他的話呼應了薩拉•蔡斯(Sarah Chayes)所著《竊國者》(Thieves of State)一書的中心思想：腐敗造成安全威脅。蔡斯擔任過美軍在阿富汗和華盛頓的顧問。她一針見血地指出，美國準備支持竊國者，以換取“反恐合作”。敵人的敵人如此可疑地迴歸，卻被如此縱容，這是鮮少見到的。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.
你可曾遇到過不賄賂就不許通過的路障，可曾見過貧民窟旁優美的別墅？但凡受過這種侮辱的人都瞭解，腐敗會讓人憤怒到何等程度。我曾聽一個牙買加人忿忿地說，牙買加政客已經“腐敗到整個人都腐爛了”，還有尼日利亞民兵威脅要恢復武裝運動，因爲特赦時允諾的款項正被人中飽私囊。
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.
我們在蔡斯的書中很少看到這種言論。爲了證明國家腐敗與阿富汗叛亂之間的聯繫，蔡斯首先講了一個前警察的個人遭遇，這位警察因舉報腐敗而遭到免職，他憤怒已極，發誓就算髮現塔利班埋在路邊的炸彈也絕不會提醒他以前的同事們。除了這段真人軼事以外，蔡斯還刊出了一份對話摘錄，據說是落網的塔利班分子吐露給美國審訊者的口供。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”.
蔡斯這本回憶錄清楚地表明，前阿富汗總統哈米德•卡爾扎伊(Hamid Karzai)政府爲了斂財而荒廢了國家治理。他的政權“是垂直一體化犯罪組織的最佳範例，毫無政府的樣子”。美國官員寧可置阿富汗支持新反腐敗運動的倡導者於不顧，也不願惹惱卡爾扎伊。蔡斯描述了中情局(CIA)的一個祕密議程，這個議程“幫助阿富汗盜賊統治到達巔峯”。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.
蔡斯在書中娓娓道來，她敘述了阿拉伯起義期間馬格利布的情形，她描繪了盜賊統治的種種體制。在埃及，胡斯尼•穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)的盜賊統治根植于軍隊；在突尼斯，行政機關是扎因•阿比丁•本•阿里(Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali)盜賊統治的核心。最腐敗的也許要算尼日利亞，伊斯蘭反叛組織博科哈拉姆(Boko Haram)便出自該國，該組織的殘暴罕有人匹敵。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.
蔡斯認爲，二十世紀九十年代末，“隨着統治集團利用經濟自由化政策爲個人謀取利益，加之公共道德滑坡”，盜賊統治興起。如其書名所示，蔡斯的重點是國家。但盜賊統治——就像金融或伊斯蘭聖戰——越來越沒有國界之分。最明顯的例子可能是安哥拉、俄羅斯等國的國家統治階級，或者如蔡斯所認爲的，還包括像愛爾蘭這種西方國家在金融危機爆發前的情形。不過腐敗政權在全球盜賊統治體系內也是少不了的一個存在。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.
蔡斯也認可這一點，她在書中指出了迪拜之於阿富汗竊國者的作用，瑞士之於埃及竊國者的作用，以及倫敦之於尼日利亞竊國者的作用。其實她還可以更進一步。離岸銀行系統的監管者已經表明，他們同樣也準備好了服務那些世俗獨裁者，比如智利的奧古斯托•皮諾切特(Augusto Pinochet)，又比如伊朗或沙特王室這樣的原教旨主義輸出者，至於流竄的恐怖分子以及軍火商更是不在話下。蔡斯警告說“直接推動者”包括銀行、會計師、公關，以及爲竊國者有償代言的遊說者，她說“這羣人即使現在還沒有承擔較大實質責任，也需承擔一定的道德責任，不僅是對犯罪行爲，還對犯罪行爲往往引起的劇烈、破壞穩定、代價高昂的反抗”。最後，竊國者在外國同夥——包括銀行家、商業夥伴、政治盟友或佔領者——的協助下，得以免於遭到人民的問責——他們正是以人民的名義治理國家的。蔡斯在坎大哈的一位朋友對她說：“人們認爲你們就是想要這種腐敗的景象”，一言概括了阿富汗人對美國的感想。這一結論可以理解。
