This was not one of the secular idealists who would ignite revolt across the Middle East. It was Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, now its leader. His words go to the heart of Sarah Chayes’ argument in Thieves of State : that graft begets insecurity. A former adviser to the US military in Afghanistan and Washington, Chayes skewers US readiness to support kleptocrats in exchange for “counterterrorism co-operation”. Rarely has my enemy’s enemy been cut so much slack for so dubious a return.

Anyone who has suffered the indignities it yields — the roadblocks impassable without a bribe, the sight of the fine villas beside slums — knows the sheer hair-pulling rage corruption can produce. I have heard a Jamaican spit that his country’s politicians were “so corrupt they corrode”, and Nigerian militiamen threaten to resume armed campaigns because payments promised under an amnesty were being creamed off.

We hear few such voices from Chayes. To support the link between state corruption and the Afghan insurgency, she chiefly offers an anecdote about a former policeman so incensed by being fobbed off when he reported graft that he vowed not to warn his former colleagues should he spot a Taliban roadside bomb, as well as a summary of what Taliban detainees are said to have told their American interrogators.

What becomes clear from Chayes’ recollections is that former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s government abandoned national stewardship for self-enrichment. His regime is “best understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organisation”. US officials hung the Afghan proponents of a nascent anti-corruption drive out to dry rather than irk Mr Karzai. Chayes depicts a secret CIA agenda “enabling the very summit of Afghanistan’s kleptocracy”.

Chayes takes her thesis on the road, journeying through the Maghreb amid the Arab uprisings and charting systems of rule-by-theft. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s kleptocracy was rooted in the army; the civil service was at the heart of Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisian version. Nigeria, maybe the most corrupt of all, has produced Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgency with few peers in barbarity.

Kleptocracy blossomed in the late 1990s, Chayes reckons, “as governing cliques turned economic liberalisation policies — along with a newly indulgent public morality — to their personal advantage”. As the title indicates, her focus is states. But kleptocracy — like finance or jihadism — increasingly knows no borders. Its most obvious manifestations may be the national ruling classes of places such as Angola or Russia or, as Chayes argues, in western states such as Ireland in the run-up to the financial crisis. Yet venal regimes are also cogs in a worldwide system.

Chayes nods to this when she points out the role of Dubai in Afghanistan’s kleptocracy, of Switzerland in Egypt’s, or of London in Nigeria’s. She could go further. Those who oversee the offshore banking system have shown themselves equally ready to serve secular dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and exporters of fundamentalism such as Iran or the House of Saud, not to mention itinerant terrorists and arms-dealers. Chayes warns “direct enablers” including banks, accountants, PRs and lobbyists that take the kleptocrat’s shilling that they “bear some of the moral — if not currently much material — responsibility, not just for the criminal behaviour, but for the often dramatic and destabilising and expensive reaction it sparks”. Ultimately the foreign collaborators of kleptocrats, be they bankers, business partners, political allies or occupiers, are what insulates them from being called to account by those in whose name they rule. “People think you want corruption,” a Kandahar friend of Chayes told her, summarising Afghan sentiment towards Americans. It is an understandable conclusion.