Customer Reviews

The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban

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4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

If like me you are a fiction maven who is likely to read only a couple of nonfiction books each year, do yourself the favor of making this year's pick "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban." Here's why: How often do you get to read a book by an author who is an accomplished historian, political analyst, humanitarian, philosopher, psychologist, and anthropologist - all rolled into one masterful storyteller? Indeed, Sarah Chayes is a gifted writer whose lucid and exciting prose radiates such originality that it simply could not have been crafted by anybody else.

Part memoir, part murder mystery, part history text, and part reportage with commentary on the politically charged process of nation building, this book invites readers along on a treacherous but extraordinary journey toward the creation of democracy in a country that for the past few decades has been ravaged by war, corruption, and brutal regimes. Ms. Chayes chose to remain in Kandahar after reporting for NPR on the fall of the Taliban there because she believed that the only way to reverse forces that conspired to create 9/11 and other similarly heinous events was to "get this right." And so, in an urgent act of faith and bravery, she traipsed across the globe, alone, to help run Afghans for Civil Society - an NGO founded by a previously exiled brother of the U.S. backed interim President Hammid Karzai.


After many months of tireless work under harsh conditions, the narrative tone shifts from idealistic and hopeful, to wary of a new government that relinquishes power to duplicitous warlords, to deep skepticism, to abject disillusionment, to a more personal and ultimate decision to persevere in the face of unyielding obstacles. All the while, however, her love for Afghanistan - its people, culture, history, and topography - illuminates page after page of this narrative banquet with the persistance of a desert sun. You can taste the apricots, smell the cumin, feel the bone-jarring potholes along the road to Kabul, and see the dust kicked up from arid soil. This book is beyond comparison to others of its so-called "kind" because there ARE no others like it. Best of all, "Punishment" was not written for democrats or republicans; it is for human beings who want to live in a better, more straight forward world.

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.

Chayes is a brilliant writer, and, more importantly, a trenchant observer of truths that are reported nowhere else. She has chosen to live in Kandahar, a much more dangerous place than Kabul, where other Western observers are clustered. She speaks and reads the language and is embedded with the Afghan people, not with the American military and derives her insights on the ground, not from diplomats.An amazing, fascinating read.

"The Punishment of Virtue" refers to an Afghan police chief who is poorly treated despite doing an outstanding job; ultimately he is recognized as an asset, assigned as Kabul's chief, and murdered. Worthy as he (Muhammed Akrem) may have been, his unsolved murder does not make for good reading. Neither does the sometimes laborious journeys Chayes sometimes takes into Afghan history.

What is worthwhile is Chayes' insights into today's Afghanistan and the struggle between President Karzai's government vs. tribal warlords, Taliban efforts at a resurgence, Pakistani meddling, and sometimes even the U.S. Army. Some important observations include:

1)Pashtun society, lacking the mechanisms of a strong state, tends to settle disputes by informal conflict resolution. A meeting is called between respected relatives of the two parties - they give the stolen animal back, negotiate a fine, pressure the victim's family to forgive, obtain women from the killer's family for marriage into the victim's family (saves the prohibitive cost of brideprice and helps heal the wound by uniting the families), or if all else fails, delivers the murders to the victim's family.

2)Looting filled the streets as the Taliban was forced out of various towns. This offered a foretaste of what would happen in Baghdad.

3)The Taliban, while excessively rigid, had ended an era of road robbers and general lawlessness that began after the Soviets left. These problems returned after the Taliban left.

4)Afghanistan's survival had, for a long-term, been based on pillage, road tolls, and subsidies. Opium sales now account for 60% of its economy and gorged the Taliban treasury - they banned it only after a glut lowered prices.

5)American aid efforts were severely hampered by bureaucratic infighting over territory, responsibility, priority, and process. Similarly, having a separate reporting channel for Special Forces vs. regular Army didn't help military efforts either. Finally, intended or not, the U.S. Army was THE de facto State Department in most of Afghanistan - unfortunately, its leaders received almost nothing in important cultural background training prior to deployment.

6)Afghanistan is probably the gun-capital of the world. The American attitude towards likely resulting problems was that the free market would absorb all these gunmen, notwithstanding Afghans' long history of using weapons for robbing and road tolls.

7)Warlords needed terrorists to make themselves valuable to the U.S., and thus receive aid (bribery, theft/misappropriation of aid, and extortionate contracts). Thus, they have no interest in "solving" the terrorist problem. (It was also handy for using Americans via feeding misidentification of old enemies or rivals as Taliban.)

NPR listeners will recall that Sarah Chayes filed some extraordinary reports from Afghanistan during the US invasion that followed 9/11. The Taliban were driven from power and Osama Bin Laden vanished into the mist along the border with Pakistan, our biggest "ally" in the region.

Chayes found that her bosses at NPR were censoring her. She wanted to break what she felt were the real stories. She says "my editors never really wanted me to do the breaking." She calls her editor an "ogre." NPR was a shameless cheerleader for the first Gulf War, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq. Neo-cons like to call NPR "liberal media" while those on the left feel they have sold out for McDonald's money and they are now National Pentagon Radio. But that's another story.

Chayes writes brilliantly and dispassionately about the Afghani people. They have suffered decades of war and she feels the entire nation is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress.

George W. Bush promised to rebuild the country. It hasn't happened. Chayes found most of the money went into the pockets of regional warlords and the rest went to the pending US invasion of Iraq.

The Taliban were bad. At least they had laws, however strict. Now, it is anarchy and nobody feels safe.

Worst of all, Chayes thinks our supposed ally, Pakistan, is playing us for chumps. She says the war on terror is a charade when we are giving billions to a regime that is actually supporting it.

So, 5 years later, WHERE's OSAMA?? You must read this book.

I believe the publishers misrepresented the book. The cover and reviews portray the work as an analysis of post-2001 Afghanistan, and an indictment of the errors of the US military and the Afghan government. The book focuses on the governor and police chief of Kandahar from 2002-2005. The book does describe Ms. Chayes' experience working for an NGO, but never covers the political-military situation, and charges of U.S. government mismanagement that the publisher advertises. It seems an incomplete ramble on the injustices of political reality in Kandahar, and provides no new insight into what has always been perceived as a corrupt and ineffective Afghan government, and a meddlesome Pakistani government that is often at odds with U.S. goals.

I made a wise decision to buy this book after listening to Ms. Chayes on PBS.It was a fascinating interview about living and working in Kandahar. Please read all of the other reviewer's opinions about this book and awesome woman. I have a better understanding and knowledge about the culture and sacrifices of the Afghani people. Today, I read about the senseless murder of Safia Ama Jan who was an advocate for women rights. She provided schools for vocational training and helped improve their education. I made a connection because it happen in Kandahar, Sarah Chayes had already taken me there! Please, buy the book, you will not be disappointed. Kandahar is still, unfortunately, a Taliban stronghold.

Sarah Chayes is a bold, intuitive woman with a big heart and lots of hope. This is her first-hand account of the fall of the Taliban and the couple of years afterwards, mostly in Khandahar. Ms. Chayes also relates her historical research to put Afhganistan and Khandahar in an historical context. A well writen story from her perspective. Highly recommended for people interested in Afhganistan and a believably neutral as possible view of America's recent involevment there.