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My zig-zag trajectory has led from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in 2001, to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. (Chronicled in "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban"). By the end of my decade in Afghanistan, I was serving as special advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.
I left the Pentagon for a five year stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where I examined other developing countries considered corrupt, to see if patterns I had discovered in Afghanistan applied elsewhere. Turns out, they do. (See "Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security.")
Now, sick at heart, I have applied the same methodology to my own beloved country, the United States. Read the shocking results in "On Corruption in America -- And What Is at Stake."
I will be discussing those findings and their implications throughout the fall of 2020.
Then...having spent so many years "disenchanting," I claim my turn to enchant.
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