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have concluded. “For, one who permits anything to take place that he is able to impede, even though he has not done it himself, has virtually done the act if he allows it.” 1 In contemporary American jurisprudence, the principle is called “consciousdisregard” or “willful blindness.” And it is considered a sign of criminal intent. 2
    In the end, none of our election recommendations was implemented. Afterward I asked ISAF’s intelligence chief, General Michael Flynn—among the most sympathetic officers to the anticorruption agenda—if any surveillance satellites had been assigned to monitor turnout. He seemed startled, as though we had never discussed the idea. Oh no, came his answer. They were too busy tracking insurgents.
    The fraud perpetrated in the 2009 Afghan election was so egregious and widespread as to stun even seasoned election monitors, several of whom declared it the most pervasive they had ever seen. Later, U.S. officers who spoke to Taliban detainees found that the election had generated a spurt in support for the insurgency, as Afghans lost faith in a “political process that only seemed to strengthen power brokers and maintain the status quo,” as one put it.
    And the sin of that is on his head .
    O NE GROUP at ISAF headquarters was receptive to the premise that systematic corruption was discrediting the Afghan government in the eyes of the people and tainting the international community by association. It was the civilian assessors who had been called in from universities and Washington think tanks to analyze the Afghanistan campaign. The strategic assessment that resulted from their work—whose leak to the Washington Post irrevocably poisoned the relationship between the Obama White House and the military—was the only major document to pinpoint poor governance as a key driver of the conflict in Afghanistan. 3
    Boering and I hosted a governance brainstorming session for those outside experts, with participants from several embassies, the UN, the European police-training mission, and key Afghan agencies. Fragile bubbles of enthusiasm pearled the mood that day, as these disparate professionals, devoted to the rule of law, came together for perhaps the first time, daring to hope that the issue they thought mattered most was finally commanding attention.
    By the end of June 2009, with the help of such discussions, ISAF’sbudding anticorruption team had elaborated both a conceptual argument and practical recommendations for why and how to tackle corruption.
    Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.”
    Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon.
    In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy.
    “This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.
    The great eleventh-century thinker Ghazali made just such a link between poor governance and insecurity—in that order and not the reverse—in his Book of Counsel for Kings : “Whenever Sultans rule oppressively, insecurity appears. And however much