What we call “corruption” has been the normal and legitimate practice of most human societies and can actually produce certain categories of good outcomes. In order to change a system like this (in the absence of endogenous demand as in, just perhaps, contemporary India) it is necessary to change the incentive structures of the society at a very micro and therefore basic level. We are talking about what the definition of ethical conduct is and the extent to which it is internally policed. Building formal institutions can in no way substitute for the creation of incentive structures that govern actual lives. And whatever else is true about other systems of social transformation that have existed historically, it appears that in our modern age there may be no way to use liberal means to attain liberal ends in nonliberal societies. Changing authority structures is a very big deal and historically has always been accompanied by violence and social dislocation. We cannot anticipate that individuals will alter their daily expectations of normal human interactions without causing an overall shift in the nature of the system of power relations.

ALL THIS brings us back to Hamid Karzai and those duffel bags stuffed with American tax dollars. The United States had a choice about intervention in Afghanistan. One option was a limited intervention along the lines of an imperial raid to settle some frontier and then leave, but done while working through the local authority structures to achieve those goals and accepting the limitation on influence and power that this implied. Or it could have attempted to restructure Afghan society on the grounds that the kind of threat that was emanating from it could only be fundamentally resolved by a change in the basic social organization of that society. Either way, the cooperation of elites would have had to have been secured on the basis of their legitimate interests. And in Afghanistan that meant that the regime through which the United States sought to achieve its goals would have had to establish its authority on the basis of the system that governed the assumptions of most of the people it was called to rule. Karzai had to have the resources with which to create clientage networks because there could be no other way for him to ensure that the administration would actually heed his orders. He had to place kin and trusted clients in key positions and they had to use their positions to further the overall network of influence because that was essential to Karzai’s power and perhaps his very life.

And where could these resources possibly have come from? Well, the only significant revenue streams in Afghanistan have been drugs and aid, and both of these have fueled the overall system. The United States should not have been surprised. Indeed, it seems that the CIA, at the very least, understood that there were no other alternatives but to deliver sacks full of cash: Karzai could not rule Afghanistan otherwise, and without funding his patronage networks the United States would have no leverage over him. What is remarkable is not that the CIA chose to bribe Karzai; what is surprising is that it shocks us (and, of course, there is an added level of hypocrisy given the tremendous public and private pressure put on the Afghans to clean up their collective act). For we are now a liberal society, and in a liberal society it is very difficult to make the case that bribery and corruption may be the only tools we have at our disposal because we do not have the power to coerce them to become like us. It reeks and taps into the residual historical anger that caused Western administrations to become modern rational-legal ones in the first place. And yet, it is difficult not to conclude that, in some instances, corruption must be accepted as an undesirable but nonetheless potentially legitimate mechanism for engaging with societies organized along different lines. Perhaps it is time to give corruption a chance.

Vivek S. Sharma is a visiting associate professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen.

Image: Flickr/Chris Potter/StockMonkeys.com. CC BY 2.0.

Image: Pullquote: Rather than viewing corruption as a pathology, it is better to understand it as a type of currency used to establish and manage power relationships under certain systems of authority.Essay Types: Essay