> In the face of flagrant misappropriation, she found, ordinary citizens could experience a sense of grievance so potent that it filled them with something worse than anger — a desire for revenge. Nurallah, an employee at the factory who once worked as a police officer, told her about the humiliation that his brother experienced during a shakedown by Afghan police. “If I see someone plant an I.E.D. on the road, and then I see a police truck coming . . . I will not warn them,” Nurallah said. This is the central revelation in “Thieves of the State”: at a certain point, systemic corruption became not just a lamentable by-product of the war but an accelerant of conflict. All those bribes and kickbacks radicalized the local population, turning it against the Afghan government and, at least some of the time, toward the Taliban.