The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Paperback)

by Sarah Chayes (Author)
Key Phrases: loya jirga, fighting with the pen, Mullah Naqib, President Karzai, Gul Agha Shirzai (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy, and intimacy takes time," writes Chayes, a skilled but increasingly frustrated journalist, whose determination "to grasp the underlying pattern" during and after the toppling of the Taliban in late 2001 chafes against her editors' post-9/11 comfort zone. With keen sympathy for Afghanistan's indomitable people, Chayes eventually swaps NPR and its four-and-a-half-minute slots for an NGO, becoming "field director" of Afghans for Civil Society, spearheaded by Qayum Karzai, the president's brother. ACS's humanitarian work, which includes rebuilding a bombed-out village, brings Chayes into direct conflict with the warlords with whom U.S. policy remains disastrously entangled. This is the point of her engrossing narrative, which begins in Pakistan, inside the U.S.-backed Afghan resistance pushing northward to Kandahar, and is framed by the 2005 murder of police chief Zabit Akrem, a key ally in the fight against Kandahar's corrupt warlord-governor. Throughout, Chayes relies on exceptional access and a felicitous prose style, though she sacrifices some momentum to cover several centuries of Afghanistan's turbulent past in an account that adds little to those by Ahmed Rashid and others. However, her hands-on experience as a deeply immersed reporter and activist gives her lucid analysis and prescriptions a practical scope and persuasive authority. (Aug. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
The first time I visited Afghanistan, in 2002, I found a country devastated after nearly a quarter-century of war. It lacked all the basics -- schools, hospitals, roads and electricity.

But by the time I returned for another reporting stint three and a half years later, that period had come to be known among American diplomats as "the good old days." Back then, in that first spring after the Taliban's fall in December 2001, the country exuded a palpable sense of optimism, even giddiness. By the time the winter of 2005 closed in, frustration had replaced hope. Kabul had Western-style malls and five-star hotels, but the life of the average Afghan seemed to be getting worse as a violent rebellion by the resurgent Taliban mounted and critical reconstruction projects stalled.

So what went wrong in between? Some of the answers are supplied by the former National Public Radio reporter Sarah Chayes in her sharply observed, fearlessly told memoir of life in Afghanistan after the Taliban, The Punishment of Virtue.

Her instrument of choice in recounting this story is the microscope, not the telescope. This is not a sweeping history. Instead, she sticks to what she sees and hears from her perch living among Afghans in Kandahar, the deeply traditional city and former Taliban stronghold that is at the heart of the country's past, present and future.

But what a perch it is. Unlike many Westerners in Afghanistan, Chayes throws herself into the culture, learning Pashto, living with a family of 21 and wearing down the already rutted roads as she drives herself around town. She also confronts mysterious death threats and ends up sleeping with a Kalashnikov rifle propped beside her bed.

Chayes first enters Kandahar in the days after the Taliban's fall. She does so as a journalist, having volunteered to leave her cushy job as an NPR correspondent in Paris because the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks inspired her to do more than "filing a seemingly endless series of food stories." Though Chayes had covered war before, in the Balkans, she saw her assignment to Afghanistan as something bigger -- a chance to do her part in mediating between the West and Islam even as others spoke ominously of an unavoidable clash of civilizations.

What she found was a story infinitely more complex than the standard fare of American troops vs. Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists. Early on, she discovers that the United States had handed over control of Kandahar to a local thug named Gul Agha Shirzai. Shirzai had been governor before -- during a period so anarchic and bloody that city residents actually welcomed the takeover by the puritanical Taliban. Now, he was governor again, despite the wishes of President Hamid Karzai, who had also been handpicked by the United States. "The Taliban have scarcely fallen," Chayes writes, "and already U.S. policy seems at cross-purposes with itself." But her NPR editors aren't interested in that story. They want "Mullah Omar sightseeing" (as she calls descriptions of the country's self-proclaimed emir's "tacky" lair) and other tales from the Taliban's awful reign.

So Chayes quits journalism but not Afghanistan. She stays in Kandahar as field director for Afghans for Civil Society, a nonprofit group set up by Karzai's brother Qayum. Her first project is rebuilding a small village on Kandahar's outskirts where U.S. bombing had pulverized a third of the houses. Through her efforts, she glimpses the dysfunction of the American-led reconstruction. U.S. officials endlessly rotate in and out of the country, never staying long enough to learn their way around. Plans are made and then scrapped. Rules are unbreakable, except when they're broken. Chayes writes that the inefficiencies become even more acute after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, when Afghanistan's reconstruction falls even further down the priority list.

But she sees a more fundamental problem than bureaucratic bungling. U.S. support for Afghanistan flows through Afghan leaders, but when those leaders are warlords such as Shirzai, the aid is not just wasted but actually works against U.S. interests. He and his cronies get rich off U.S. funds and fool the Americans into thinking they are keeping the city safe. Meanwhile, Chayes contends, Kandahar's thugs are also taking money from Pakistan, which she sees as an ostensible U.S. ally that is deliberately undermining Afghan security. To the average Kandahar resident, America's presence became synonymous with the brutality and corruption of its local warlord proxy. "American policy in Afghanistan was not imposing or even encouraging democracy, as the U.S. government claimed it was," Chayes writes. "Instead, it was standing in the way of democracy. It was institutionalizing violence."

That sense of outrage courses through the book, and by the time Chayes is done, many readers will feel the same way. She even directs her venom at the one man she had thought could lift Afghanistan from the ashes: President Karzai, whom she ultimately blames for lacking the spine to stand up to the warlords.

Yet Chayes concludes that Afghanistan is not a lost cause. Her story has one true hero: the mighty police chief, Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal, a man who actually uses his position to make the cities of Kandahar, Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif safer, not to profit personally. Unfortunately, he gets little support from the central government or the Americans. The book begins and ends with his assassination.

For Afghanistan's sake, one can only hope there are more out there like him.

Reviewed by Griff Witte
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143112066
• ISBN-13: 978-0143112068
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #32,461 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Losing Afghanistan . . ., August 22, 2006

By	Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Hardcover)

This highly readable book is part memoir and part political analysis. The author, a former overseas NPR correspondent, describes her sojourn over the years 2001-2005 in Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, where she worked for an Afghan-based NGO and, as an instinctive investigative reporter, formed her own assessment of the political forces at work in that post-Taliban city.

Her conclusions are both alarming and disheartening. She comes to believe that Pakistan is the root cause of political instability in Afghanistan and that through its support of warlords it uses resurgent Taliban forces to manipulate and regain control of large parts of the country. More discouraging is the author's portrayal of President Hamid Karzai as an intelligent, gifted, and cultured man who is often ineffectual as a leader.

The book is framed by the account of an assassination of the Kabul chief of police, a man of unusual integritiy and ability (hence the book's title) and its subsequent coverup as a suicide bombing. Set against him is the power-hungry and corrupt governor of Kandahar, who has won the confidence of the Americans while secretly amassing a fortune that he uses to fund a private army, meanwhile working deals with Pakistan to keep alive the threat of Taliban terrorism that makes the Americans even more dependent on him.

There are large swathes of Afghan and Persian history woven into this modern-day accounting, which reveal patterns of political and cultural forces at play that go back to Alexander the Great. Vividly written, the book provides a disturbing portrayal of failed leadership on the part of both the U.S. and the current government in Kabul. Read it and weep.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning read, September 4, 2006

By	Empyjay - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Hardcover)

This book, readable as a mystery, is fueled by passion. It is really well written: direct, engaging, never leaving behind the reader who, like me, knows little or nothing about Afghanistan. Chayes's story is in Kandahar in the southern part of the country, where she arrived as an NPR reporter in late 2001. With an almost fictional immediacy she describes the situation she found and how she dealt with it -- she declined, for instance, to live in a hotel with the other foreign journalists and instead boarded with a family. She takes us with her into an increasing understanding of the tangled history that underlies Afghanistan, and particularly Kandahar, today. And she is both anguished and unsparing in her recounting of American cluelessness and misjudgments, which she sees as born of an inability to coordinate or take advantage of acquired knowledge on the ground, as US officials and military commanders are rotated in and out.

The frame of the book is the assassination of her friend Akrem, the Kabul police chief, the single best official she met in Afghanistan. It is publicly announced as the work of a suicide bomber. Chayes, who has by this time left NPR and returned as head of a private aid effort, investigates and disagrees.

A really valuable book. I read it pretty much straight through.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good read that will become essential , September 12, 2006

By	James "Pau hana" (Lincoln, NE USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Hardcover)

My wife and I were in Afghanistan in the early 1970s. We had just completed Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between" when we learned of Chayes' book.

Afghanistan is a mystery country to westerners. It houses beautiful mosques (look for Mazar-i-Sherif and the white doves/pigeons), photogenic people (think of the National Geographic picture of the young Afghan woman), and lost treasures (remember the Buddhist statutes destroyed by the Taliban in Banyan). Chayes goes beyond all this into the culture and soul of the country. She knows some of the languages of Afghanistan and can talk and, more importantly, listen to people. Chayes tells us the story of values, fate, and the mass of distinctions that the Mideast and Afghanistan force upon us.

This story of modern Afganistan after the Taliban helps the thinking reader see the variety in this desert landscape - the individual power cells, the memories, the hopes, the promises, the evasions, the frowns behind the smiles, the oasis in the wasteland.

Chayes finds good intentions everywhere, praise everywhere, lack of carry thru everywhere, and scorn everywhere. Everyone is everything! This is beyond current politicans. The Afghan situation requires vision and love and caring for the people.

Well written, well documented, and certainly passionate, "The Punishment of Virtue" captures a moment in time that is for all time. A good read that will become an essential read in the future.