Last week’s announcement by President Biden that corruption is a national security issue is one that has long been overdue. The modern era of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement began, in part, as a response to the terrorism of 9/11. Terrorism has long been tied directly to corruption. Professor Andrew Wilson of the US Naval War College, in his “Masters of War: History’s Greatest Strategic Thinkers” series released by The Teaching Company, LLC., tied corruption to the strategy of terrorism and a cause of terrorism.
The 2013 massacre of civilians in Kenya at the Westgate Mall made this tie clear. Dick Cassin, who has consistently written about the connection between bribery-corruption and security did so again after the attack, pointed to the continued corruption in Kenya and how this corruption led to guns and terrorists being able to cross the border and carry out the attack. Cassin said that the border controls are so porous due to corruption in Kenya that in a prior episode involving the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the UK government had banned certain Kenyan government officials from traveling to the UK, in large part because the country failed to take action against obvious cases of bribery and corruption. Cassin said, “The visa ban followed a criminal investigation by the U.K. Serious Fraud Office into contracts between the Kenyan government and U.K. shell businesses. The contracts for passport controls and border security systems went to phantom overseas companies at prices about ten times the actual cost. Kenya refused to cooperate and in early 2009 the SFO was forced to end its investigation.”
Giles Foden, in a The Guardian article, was even more specific about the culture of crime and corruption in Kenya, when he that corruption was one of the signature factors, which led to the massacre. He wrote, “In Kenya crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either. These attacks are part of a spectrum of banditry, with corruption at one end, terrorism at the other, and regular robbery in the middle. Money that should have been spent on security and other aspects of national infrastructure has been disappearing for generations.”
He concluded his piece with this warning, “You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it’s just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties. For now Kenya must mourn its dead. But unless the corruption stops, and real investment is made in the social fabric, Kenya will once again be faced with systemic shocks it is hardly able to deal with.”
Professor Wilson made it clear that terrorists incorporate these concepts into their overall strategy. If a country has strong border controls and government officials, which I believe is the situation here in the US and UK, then the terrorist will seek out a country friendly to the US or UK, where the government officials can be bribed or corrupted and use those as ports of entry. Similarly, they can directly attack civilians in a country like Kenya where the border is so porous that both terrorist and arms can flow through with impunity.
But not only can corruption be used by terrorists, ironically, it can also be the cause of terrorism. One only need look at the Arab Spring and what started it. It was a lone fruit and vegetable seller, Mohammed Bourazizi, who doused himself in paint thinner and set himself on fire in front of a local municipal office because of the corruption of Tunisian government officials and police officers. Yuri Fedotov, former head of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), has said that the Arab Spring’s call for greater democracy was “an emphatic rejection of corruption and a cry for integrity” and that the international community must listen to the millions of people involved. At the center of the Arab Spring movement was a deep-seated anger at the poverty and injustice suffered by entire societies due to systemic corruption. Do you think there was any terrorism associated with the Arab Spring?
If one wants to look back a little further in history, I would submit that China is the most prime example of the 20thcentury. For all the hand wringing about “Who Lost China”, I think the clear key was the endemic corruption of the Nationalist and their allies. Their corruption helped remove the moral authority of their government and allowed the Communists to take up that mantle in the 1940s. The Nationalists were certainly defeated on the battlefield but the groundwork was laid due to the corruption of their government. It really did not matter how much money, foreign aid and material that the US government provided to Chaing Kai-Shek; his cronies and his government simply stole it, sold it or gave it away for other favors.
This is how terrorists use corruption both as a strategy and a tool. Moreover, when you begin to understand these inter-related theoretical underpinnings of corruption and terrorism, you can see why aggressive enforcement of anti-corruption laws such as the FCPA is so important and is here to stay. In another blog post entitled “9/11 and the FCPA” Cassin said, “What happened that day a decade ago changed the way the world looks at corruption. The tracks of the 9/11 perpetrators and those who helped them led back to corrupt third-world countries — Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and others. Those regimes had leaky borders, weak passport control, unreliable law enforcement agencies, poor anti-money laundering programs — just what the bad guys needed.”
“Corruption is a risk to our national security, and we must recognize it as such.” Now President Biden has made that link crystal clear.
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