Sarah Chayes is a former special advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Author, NPR correspondent, and former senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her remarkable trajectory has led her from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. She went on to advise the topmost levels of the U.S. military, serving as special adviser to two commanders of the international forces in Kabul and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen. She left the Pentagon for a five-year stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she extracted the broadly relevant core from those experiences.

She is also internationally recognized for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications. She is the author of "On Corruption In America: And What Is at Stake," "Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security" (winner of the LA Times Book Prize), and "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban." Through her research, she has uncovered the unrecognized reality that severe and structured corruption often prompts international crises, such as revolutions and other uprisings, violent insurgency, and environmental devastation. Corruption of this sort is the operating system of sophisticated networks, which weave together government officials, business magnates and private charities, and out and out criminals, and represents, in Sarah's view, the primary threat to democracy in our lifetimes.

From her remarkable perspective, Sarah Chayes will help us draw crucial lessons from the Taliban's recent triumphant return to power.

She lives in Paris and Paw Paw, West Virginia.
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Presented on-line on October 7, 2021.
Questions and Answers start at 23:17.
[http://www.coloradofoothillswac.org​​​]