… Hernando De Soto!  Let’s give him a cape and a ticket from Lima to Kabul and let him work this stuff out:

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — In the Afghan capital’s department of motor vehicles, the simple act of registering a car can turn into days, even weeks, of waiting and frustration. Unless you pay off the right people.

[...]

The chaotic outdoor space that passes for a waiting area was teeming with “agents,” men who make sure bribe money reaches the right government offices and the paperwork gets done. Some, desperate for work, want their business to become a legal profession.

That sure sounds familiar!  Sadly, I’m not sure just sending De Soto over to talk to Karzai will work, mainly because, well:

He [De Soto] has briefed a number of national leaders like Vladimir Putin and Hamid Karzai, however none of them have yet chosen to implement his policies.[13]

Damn it.  Putin and Karzai are probably two of the world leaders (I should maybe use “ex-leader” in Putin’s case, but then…) who most need to hear his message — that economies don’t succeed without the basic foundations:

De Soto argues that an important characteristic of capitalism is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded.

I think the reason that his policies have not been implemented (other than Peru, where he had the ear of the government) is that for most countries, the spoils of political power are exactly this: corruption, bureaucracy and purposely vague laws of ownership — it’s much easier to steal and take when it’s hard to prove who owns what.  This isn’t a terrible byproduct of the political system that we must squash — for a large percentage of Afghani (and Russian, and American) politicians, this is the point.  And so we see comments like this:

The key question for the Karzai government now is whether corruption so endemic can be successfully eradicated.

This is pretty typical: viewing corruption as something the government is striving against; two entities with divergent goals, fighting to see who the victor will be.  But in reality, it is the people in the government simply acting out their own natures, and struggling only to conceal it from the few who would disapprove and have the power to stop them.  And that is a vanishingly small number of people in Afghanistan.