Why America keeps building corrupt client states

> The Afghan government’s own anti-corruption authorities mainly prosecuted political enemies.

This point seems crucial. If there were a way to engineer the composition and incentives of an anti-corruption body such that it prosecuted genuinely corrupt individuals, regardless of political affiliation, then there might be some selective pressure towards less corrupt people being given power.

Of course it's hard to bootstrap that process if the court system itself is corrupt, but requiring jury trials and video evidence would be a good start. The anti-corruption body would therefore be mainly tasked with carrying out sting operations against officials that they receive complaints about, using a "mystery shopper" approach to see if a bribe is requested (or accepted).

I guess you don’t want an independent, strong-willed client state. You want one that does what you tell it to do. This creates a corruptive pressure from the very top.

Then I guess it is easy to not see that there is no “client state”, only a failed state propped up by your own power.

I think this is a badly written article and missing the point.

There are so many corrupt government but they are not falling like sand. What US is doing is to injecting money into a failed company without inspecting if the company is well organized and growing. As we all know, a failed company fails for a reason, and the reason is the most important.

Paragraphs 3 & 4 : are exactly the same situation in India too.