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have to show we are willing to tackle corruption. We have to drop GIRoA and focus on the people.”
    Drop the government and focus on the people. The prospect still raises anxiety inside many embassies and international organizations. The World Bank recently began formulating the radical notion that its end user might perhaps not be developing-nation governments, as previous policy had it, but rather their people.
    At ISAF headquarters in 2009, the very concept was revolutionary. Implementing it would have required a rupture with years of mission statements framed around such objectives as “building and reinforcing GIRoA” or “connecting the people to the government.” It would have called upon sophisticated political judgment at every echelon. It would have required strategic direction from Washington, and explanations to allied governments, many of which had sold the Afghanistan mission to voters by arguing that their troops would be supporting a democratically elected government against religious fanatics. A new narrative, with the Afghan government sharing the role of villain, would have made for some complicated talking points.
    But a growing number of us were convinced that any hope for success in Afghanistan depended on just such a transformation.
    The first occupant of a newly minted anticorruption post—a jointed-at-the-waist, stubborn, benevolent giant of a Dutch lieutenant colonel named Piet Boering—became an inseparable partner. The two of us, together with Nick Williams and others, started from earlier recommendations on how to enhance the credibility of the upcoming Afghan presidential election. Karzai was visibly working to rig it. Vietnam and Algeria provided examples of insurgencies that had triumphed in thewake of blatantly stolen elections. With such a clear rationale for action, we gambled, approaches might be tested in the electoral context that could later be used against corruption more generally.
    Officers, however, balked at the prospect of reducing their “distance from local and international politics,” as one brigadier general put it in an e-mail to the command group. Surely managing elections was the United Nations’ role, many argued, not the military’s. Our security mandate was understood to mean protecting Afghans from violence perpetrated by insurgents only—not from violence perpetrated by the government.
    The problem with this logic was that Afghans were threatened by both—as are so many populations, caught between the abuses of a predatory government and the violence of extremists claiming to combat it. Soldiers, moreover, had more contact with the Afghan population than did their civilian counterparts—they stopped to speak to villagers or drink tea with elders during patrols. Why not add a few queries about electoral intimidation to their standard questionnaires? What about allocating some of the flight time of all those satellites and drones and blimps floating above military installations to observing polling places? Even a general picture of voter density, provided to oversight bodies for comparison to reported turnout numbers, might help.
    It was military officers, moreover, who carried on the bulk of interactions with Afghan officials—and who were seen by those officials to constitute the international community that mattered. The logic holds in other countries, too, where the military-to-military relationship constitutes the backbone of U.S. ties. In Afghanistan, forty-year-old battalion commanders were closeted with provincial governors every week. Troops were training the Afghan army and police. Special operations officers were often the only foreigners far-flung district officials encountered. If those officials were engaged in flagrant political corruption and their ISAF interlocutors ignored it, they—and ordinary Afghans—took the silence as approval.
    “Wherefore one who does this is guilty,” the strident fourteenth-century William of Pagula would