File Photo: Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, and Deputy Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum on March 21, 2002 (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko). President Karzai's government is widely perceived to be corrupt. General Dostum is accused of committing a war crime (i.e. the mass execution of Taliban prisoners of war) in 2001 which was not investigated by the Bush administration because the General was on the CIA's payroll.


The discourse of corruption and scandal is pervasive in discussions of Afghanistan.

Corruption is visualized as a kind of rot in the architecture of the state. This rot justifies the need to create a new edifice. The idealized image of a fierce sovereign, a new Abdur Rahman Khan, who will come and redeem the promise and potential of the state sustains a glimmer of hope in an increasingly disillusioned citizenry. And the discourse of corruption is useful for the occupiers in justifying the compromised sovereignty of the occupied territory.

Meanwhile, the periodic airing of scandals within the metropole upholds the promise of an imperial occupation cleansed of abuse, exploitation, and depravity. Even the quiet scandal implicit in the change of military tactics to recognize (admittedly for instrumental purposes) the humanity of the occupied civilian population evokes the possibility of a kinder, gentler form of military domination.

These discourses and tactics are well know to the student of empire. In fact, as Nicholas B. Dirks has argued, scandal and corruption are necessary features of a system of conquest, expansion, and exploitation. Thus, it is incorrect to view scandals as aberrations and corruption as a failure in a system of good governance. Scandals and corruption are the system; they can teach us hidden truths about both the occupier and the occupied.

The corruption of the occupied is a reflection of systemic constraints in an ethnocracy. Corruption lubricates and maintains an uneasy and mechanical stability. This corruption could be harnessed for productivity or unleashed to ravage the resources of the state, but it cannot be eliminated or "cleaned up."

The scandals of the occupier reveal a vision of the outside world as a state of exception. There is no recognition of human rights for those outside the Constitution. Only those civilizations which can compel recognition on an equal footing are accorded a sense of humanity. The rest are objects of pity or scorn; they are treated as children or animals.

Labels: afghanistan, corruption, scandal, south asia, us