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prosperity there may be, this will not suit the subjects if accompanied by insecurity.” 4
    But Western officials, military and civilian alike, habitually flipped the sequence: first let’s establish security, then we can worry about governance. 5 Like Ghazali, the anticorruption team saw the vector the other way around: poor governance caused the insecurity, so it was fruitless to try to reduce violence without addressing corruption.
    Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditionsfueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.”
    But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over. 6
    I had observed a more systemic problem with the way aid was delivered. Afghanistan is a country made smaller, in human terms, by its convivial and relationship-based culture. In a town like Kandahar, everyone knew who was securing the juicy development contracts and who their patrons were. Everyone discussed the quality of the work, who benefited, or the new cars the chief implementers were driving. In other words, development resources passed through a corrupt system not only reinforced that system by helping to fund it but also inflamed the feelings of injustice that were driving people toward the insurgency.
    Laboratory experiments over the past several decades have demonstrated humans’ apparently irrational revolt against such unjust bargains. The experiments, known as “ultimatum games,” allocate a sum of money to one player, with instructions to divide it with another. If the recipient accepts the offer, the deal goes through. If she rejects it, both players get nothing. Economists had presumed that a recipient, acting rationally, would accept any amount greater than zero. In fact, in experiment after experiment—even with stakes as high as a month’s salary—roughly half of recipients rejected offers lower than 20 percent of the total sum. 7
    These experiments apply almost directly to development work. I frequently heard the very same numbers come up in the arguments of Western officials. ‘Let’s say 80 percent of the humanitarian aid money is skimmed off,’ they would postulate. ‘At least the people are getting something . More than they would if we weren’t funding the projects at all.’ But ultimatum game experiments show that many recipients would in fact prefer to walk away empty-handed than accept such an unfair deal.
    This pervasive human reflex might help explain why developmentprojects kept getting attacked in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was not just the projects’ association with non-Muslim foreigners that angered the attackers. Perhaps it was also the unjust distribution of resources—especially when the benefits to ordinary people were indirect, as in the case of a road or a school, while the much greater payoffs to corrupt officials and their cronies came in the form of cash in hand. Perhaps Afghans, in line with subjects of experiments conducted in the United States or Indonesia or the Slovak Republic, would rather foul a well so no one could use it than watch most of its water irrigate a corrupt village elder’s land.
    So much for the argument. Next came recommendations. The anticorruption