In the closing years of the Vietnam war, I traveled to a province on the Cambodian border where I heard this story:

Trade with the enemy was rife, and profitable. Most goods were delivered overland or by river from government-held territory to middlemen in the border region, who sent them on into Communist-held areas on the Cambodian side. South Vietnamese Navy river patrol boats were heavily involved, regularly traveling upriver from their base to the border area carrying fuel, medicine, and other supplies. On their way, the boats passed by an outpost manned by a platoon of the district-level militia known as PF, for Popular Forces. Angered at seeing supplies heading to enemy troops who might someday fire on their position, the militiamen one day stopped one of the Navy boats and confiscated its cargo. A day or two later, a Navy truck pulled up to the gate of their outpost. Training a .50 caliber machinegun on the 20 or so PF soldiers inside, the sailors ordered them to climb into the truck and drove them to the Navy base downstream. There they held the militiamen captive for 36 hours or so, beating some of them, and then sent them back to their outpost with a stern warning not to interfere with the Navys business dealings again.

That story did not come from political dissidents or war critics. The person who told it was a U.S. intelligence officer stationed in the provincial capital. Sitting next to him as he spoke was the National Police commander for the province, who shamefacedly nodded and confirmed the details. He added that the Navy riverboat crews were not the only government forces involved in the lucrative trade. Goods destined for enemy territory were also shipped to the border in convoys of army vehicles, with the connivance of (and rich profits for) officers up to division commander or higher. The illicit trade was protected from very high levels, the police commander said, and there was nothing he could do about it. This, its worth noting, was after ten years ten years! in which teams of U.S. military advisers were attached to virtually every South Vietnamese military unit, and every bullet and every gallon of gasoline and every dollar of soldiers pay (all of those in vastly greater quantities than any resources the enemy had) was paid for by the U.S. government.

I had only been in Vietnam for a few weeks when that conversation occurred, and at the time I did not come close to grasping the full meaning of what I heard. Over the next three years, which were also the last three years of the war, I learned how corruption became structural and why it was so damaging. Those river boat crews and army truck drivers in Vietnam I had heard about were not in business for themselves. They split their profits with their commanders, who in turn sent a cut to the commanders above them.  At each level those commanders, and their equivalents in civil government, had paid bribes to get their posts, and in return they and the profits from their illegal activities were protected up to the top reaches of the regime. Thus corruption didn’t only anger and alienate people at the bottom. It subverted the leadership up and down the chain of command. Those officers and officials were not there to defeat the enemy or provide government services, but to continue profiting from corruption. In that system there was no place for officers and officials who wanted to fight honestly for their country, and to earn the trust and loyalty of their soldiers and citizens. Those were perhaps the most demoralized of all. By the time I flew out of Vietnam in a Marine evacuation helicopter the day before the war ended, I was convinced that corruption was the single biggest reason for that defeat. I do not have the same first-hand knowledge of Iraq or Afghanistan, but abundant evidence leaves no possible doubt that the dynamic in those wars is similar, and that if the U.S.-supported war efforts in those countries fall short of their goals, corruption will have been a major cause.

Parallels between Vietnam and present wars turn up all the time, as when Iraqs new prime minister acknowledged a few months ago that the countrys military payroll listed 50,000 soldiers who were getting paid but were not actually serving the equivalent of four Iraqi Army divisions. Precisely the same practice was endemic in Vietnam, where there were two principal variants: Ghost soldiers, men whod been killed but whose deaths were not reported, so their commanders could keep collecting and pocketing their salaries, and flower soldiers who stayed home with their families and kicked back their pay to their superiors. Not uncommonly, a South Vietnamese battalion would be listed on order-of-battle charts with a strength of 300 men, but only a half or a third of that number were actually present for duty. The consequences for military capability are obvious. In Iraq, for example, when Islamic State forces seized the city of Mosul last June, it has been reported that the real number of troops defending the city was less than half as many as were listed on official rosters.

By the time I flew out of Vietnam in a Marine evacuation helicopter the day before the war ended, I was convinced that corruption was the single biggest reason for that defeat.

Or consider the practice of extortion from civilians moving around the country or trying to get ordinary government services. Anyone driving in Afghanistan, for example, is invariably stopped at frequent checkpoints where police or soldiers demand a bribe payable in afghanis, dollars, or in some areas, opium before letting a vehicle proceed. That and many other forms of corruption are a daily issue in peoples lives, says Fariba Nawa, an Afghan American who returned to her homeland and spent six years there as a journalist. Families set aside money in their household budgets to pay bribes because otherwise nothing gets done. In government offices, Nawa told me, the customary code phrase from a bureaucrat expecting a bribe is, where are my sweets? She and her husband sometimes responded by handing over an actual box of chocolates. The officials