Comment by netsharc

https://archive.is/CBQFY

> Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.

A few paragraphs later:

> In the face of flagrant misappropriation, she found, ordinary citizens could experience a sense of grievance so potent that it filled them with something worse than anger—a desire for revenge. Nurallah, an employee at the factory who once worked as a police officer, told her about the humiliation that his brother experienced during a shakedown by Afghan police. “If I see someone plant an I.E.D. on the road, and then I see a police truck coming... I will not warn them,” Nurallah said. This is the central revelation in “Thieves of State”: at a certain point, systemic corruption became not just a lamentable by-product of the war but an accelerant of conflict. All those bribes and kickbacks radicalized the local population, turning it against the Afghan government and, at least some of the time, toward the Taliban.