The Punishment of Virtue (43 page)

I called a friend at the
New York Times,
asking for the number of another friend, the
Washington Post
correspondent—and, while I was at it, sketching the story. It was emblematic of what was going on with the Afghan central government, I said. Here was its own man, the central government's representative in Mazar, besieged by some local strongman. And no one, not President Karzai, nor the interior minister, nor anyone else in Kabul was lifting a finger.

The
New York Times
article came out two days later.

I was calling Akrem every day. “Do you still not have any food?”

“No, we're OK, we've got food now, thank you. We've come to an agreement about provisioning.”

Things seemed to be inching toward normalization. I relaxed a little.

But more than a week later, when I was sure the whole episode was long over, I found out he was still in there, hemmed in by that warlord's militia. I got in my red truck and stormed over to the old warhorse Mullah Naqib's compound. It was early morning; he was still drinking his tea.

“Let's get five hundred Alokozais together, and go up there!” I was only half joking. “The government isn't doing anything, let's us go. We have to. We can't just leave him there!”

Mullah Naqib launched into a patient argument. “Civil war isn't a good thing. We shouldn't fight.”

“Let's call him,” I said, and punched the number into my cell phone. And the two of us jollied Akrem for a little while with my plan to invade Mazar.

He must have repeated the story half a dozen times afterward in my hearing, only embellishing it a little bit. “…and she said, ‘I'll bring two hundred American soldiers, you bring two hundred Alokozais, and let's go to Mazar!'”

At length, the population of Mazar-i-Sherif, with some intervention from the U.S. and European military contingents there, ended the siege. Sending delegations to Akrem, and to the foreigners and the government in Kabul, Mazaris conveyed their solid support to Akrem and his men. They said they had confidence in the central government and they had confidence in their police chief; he had pacified the town and they wanted him back.

And thus, as I fully grasped only later, Akrem had performed a miracle. Using his own person as the girders and cables, he had bridged the gap between the two Afghan cities that were the farthest apart, the two cities that hated each other the most bitterly, that had fertilized their vows of eternal enmity with the most gruesomely spilled blood. Akrem had gone to Mazar and done his job. He had patrolled the streets, making them safe for people to travel. He had structured the police department. He had taken no bribes, stolen no land. His Persian improving every day, he had gone to meet community leaders, across all the divides. He had hired Mazaris as bodyguards, enlarging his inner circle to make room for them. Akrem loved Mazar, and Mazar loved him—and loving him, realized: if this man is a Pashtun from Kandahar, perhaps Pashtuns are not so bad after all.

It was a huge step toward turning Afghanistan back into a nation.

But there was a punch line. When it was all over, President Karzai appointed Ustaz Ata, the very warlord who had besieged Akrem, as governor of Mazar's Balkh Province.

I called Akrem. “So. How's your new governor?” I asked sarcastically.

He made a noise.

“You know that book I'm writing?” I asked. “You know what I'm going to call it?
The Promotion of Vice and the Punishment of Virtue.”

The Taliban religious police, who used to beat women caught outside without a male escort, or men whose beards weren't long enough, were part of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice.

“Woh…”
Akrem assented with a chuckle, getting the joke immediately. “That's it exactly. The promotion of vice!”

He could laugh. I wondered where he got the resilience from.

By the middle of 2004, it was becoming clear to me that my parting of the ways had not gone far enough. I realized I was going to have to leave Afghanistan altogether. For a while, anyway. It had been almost three years now—punishing years—and I had to get away for a while. I had to stand back and take stock.

I informed Akrem on the phone, almost as an afterthought, tacked onto another sentence: “
Comandan Saab,
I'm going for a while. Outside.” The communicative Pashtu word.

“For how long?” He was used to my trips to the States.

“I don't know…six months maybe.”

“Six
months?”

Not long before I left, Akrem was down in Kandahar for a visit. We got together in the private side of his home, for the first and only time. His wife was there: almost as large as he was, intelligent, canny—though kept inside—a true life partner.

“Sarah,” Akrem was looking back on his own punishing year. “You were right. I remember what you said so long ago. You told me I should leave government, that this government wasn't what I thought it was. I should have listened to you.”

But then he stopped himself and revised. “No…it's going to be OK, I think. Mr. Karzai will get better. After the presidential election he'll have legitimacy and he'll improve. You watch.”

The vote, Afghanistan's first general election in history, was scheduled for that fall. I could see the confident dream of it in Akrem's face.

“You have to be kidding me,” I replied, laughing at his stubborn optimism, my exclamation just a little off-key. During our chats, Akrem had always seemed slightly uncomfortable at my irreverent and sometimes caustic criticism of Karzai. He would agree, in private, when I said Karzai was frightened, or weak, or couldn't tell the difference between his friends and his enemies. He would air his own puzzlement that Karzai seemed incapable of keeping tabs on the people he appointed to office, or of properly defining their job descirptions. But, even now, Akrem seemed to be clinging to his loyalty.

“That's what we said before the first
Loya Jirga,
” I argued, “and he didn't improve. Then we said the second
Loya Jirga
would do the trick. But it didn't. What makes you think this will be different?”

“No, you'll see. This is an election. It will be different.”

“Let's bet on it. You know your white wool shawl?”

He'd had that shawl draped over his legs one winter day. To Pashtuns, legs—even when swathed in baggy trousers and calf-length tunics—are vaguely indiscreet, and men often spread their shawls over them when they're sitting down. I took a shine to Akrem's white wool shawl that day. When I was getting ready to leave, he asked if we could take a picture together.

“Of course,” I answered. But my hair was uncovered. I guessed he might show the picture to people, so I touched my head with an embarrassed grin, and put out a hand for his shawl. He passed it over, and I slung it around me for the picture. I was hoping he would take the hint and give it to me. He didn't.

“You know that white wool shawl of yours? If Karzai
doesn't
improve, you have to give it to me. If he does improve after the election, I'll give you a pistol. I'll give you a SIG Sauer. I'll get it in through the base.”

We shook. We called on his wife to witness the bet.

That shawl is covering my legs now, as I'm writing this.

MAY 2005

“O
H
,
ONE MORE
thing, Sarah.” I was standing up by the phone in Paris. It was one of my former employees, on the line from Kandahar. “I knew you'd want to hear this news. Khakrezwal has been moved to Kabul.”

“To
Kabul?
As chief of police?”

“That's right!”

I called Akrem. “So! You're in Kabul?” I could hear distraction in his voice; it must have been bedlam.
“Comandan Saab,”
I released him. “I'm coming in a few weeks. I'll call you when I get there.”

I wrote Interior Minister Jalali an e-mail—the first in over a year: “Congratulations. You've finally seen the light.” With characteristic indulgence, he wrote me back right away, and told everyone about my “cute note.” I started thinking maybe I was going to have to get Akrem that pistol.

A little more than six months had passed since I'd left Afghanistan. I had spent the bulk of it writing this book in my apartment in Paris, sitting sideways on my red couch, my legs stretched out the length of it; and at my mother's place in Boston, taking up one of her bookshelves with my Post-it encumbered findings from the library, sharing girlish hilarity with her, and hungered-for companionship, and contemplation of public affairs.

But then I had decided; I was going back. Most of my friends tried to argue me out of it. “You've done Afghanistan,” one commented.

That line would never have worked. It seemed to me that Afghanistan was not something one “did,” the way war correspondents in hotel bars had “done” Goma or “done” Iraq. Afghanistan was not a stamp in a passport, not for me. I had always argued the importance of continuity. I had always mourned the precious time that was wasted, the mistakes that were remade, when humanitarian workers or diplomats or military men rotated out after a few months or a year, just when they were beginning to catch on. Afghanistan, I thought, was starving for continuity. If no one else was going to provide it, the least I could do, I felt, was live by my own precept.

But I was not going back to ACS, and I was not going back to politics. I wanted to start something new, something I had been turning over in my mind for several years: making and marketing products that capitalized on Kandahar's fabled fruits—soap, skin-care products, precious oils. I wanted to found a small-scale, artisanal agribusiness.

Amir Soltani, who had been our U.S. coordinator, immediately caught the symbolism. “Soap for Afghanistan,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “You still think you can clean the place up.”

I was amused, above all, by my conversion to economics. A subject I had refused to take a single course on in college. And now, after three years in Afghanistan, I had become converted to the idea that private enterprise held a key to its recovery. I, pointy-headed Sarah Chayes, was going to start a soap factory.

Predictably, I hit a pocket of panic about a week before my flight.

Paris had not been boring this time; it had been a shuddering relief. For seven months, I had basked in Paris—and in Boston—the way I had basked in the tub my first week home, lemon-oil in the water and lavender soap in my hand. I basked in my friends and my neighbors; I basked in being ignored on the street, in speaking a language I handled competently enough to communicate complex thought. When I needed a break from writing, I took my bicycle on long jaunts around the beautiful city, rediscovering it.

And now I was going to leave again. I was going to exile myself again, plunge into that cauldron again.

Once I was buckled into my seat on the plane headed for Dubai, however, the fear inexplicably dropped away. A Palace driver picked me up at the Kabul airport VIP gate and deposited me on Qayum's street in Wazir Akbar Khan. The temporal telescope slammed shut. I had been there last week, it seemed.

It took me two days to get through to Akrem.
“AH-salaamu alaykum!”
his patented shout of greeting rang across the line. “When did you get here? Why didn't you tell me when you were coming? I wanted to pick you up at the airport!”

Given Afghan protocol, this was preposterous. He was the chief of police.

He kept at it: “Where are you staying? I'll come get you.”

“Comandan Saab,
don't you dare. Send some men.”

And so a green-and-white police truck filled with fighters arrived at my door. Akrem was living on the far side of town, in the lee of the King's Garden, which undulates across the terraced flank of a broad hill. We looked at each other, closed the door, and spread our arms to hug a huge greeting. We were in his room, half filled by a giant bed, tentlike uniforms hanging from a coat tree, pallets for his bodyguards around the floor. “These are my temporary quarters,” he told me. He had rented a house across town and was fixing it up, so at last he could bring his family from Kandahar.

And then I remember a kind of swirl. He would call at 8:00
P
.
M
. “Have you eaten?” And I would hurriedly change into something sophisticated; he would send a car, and I would find myself at a wedding, with two hundred men, and me. Or I would arrive late at a dinner table where he was already seated with half a dozen government officials. “This man,” he introduced our host on one such night, “is your friend, Sarah. If ever I'm not here in Kabul, go to him.” The man looked as if he had eaten a lemon. After dinner, when Akrem was dropping me off, he shook his head, laughing: “Oooh! What a bad man he is. Really bad! The worst of the Northern Alliance.”

“You could have told me that,” I complained.

Another time I called him from the Interior Ministry, where I had gone to see Jalali. “I'm a few streets away from you,” I said. “I guess you're busy.”

“No, no, I'm unemployed.”

“Yeah, right.” I went over to police headquarters. As I walked in, his deputy and four or five others stood up, greeted me, and left the office.

One day he asked me on the phone, “Could you use a car to drive around Kabul?”

It would be a godsend. I was pushing my new project. Potential donors were scattered all over the sprawling city. Akrem sent someone to fetch me, and his chief of staff handed over the keys and registration to a brown Toyota Corolla.

It was like the dinner at that Iranian restaurant. What Akrem was doing was thanking me. What he was saying with this wordless generosity was that he was still there, that unlike many Afghans, he would not discard me now that he had achieved power. He would not forget my loyalty to him during hard times, and now that times had changed, he would return it. I could count on him.

And at last I came to understand part of why he cleaved so unshakably to President Karzai. It was gratitude. Karzai had helped him, back when he was a friendless refugee in Quetta. And there was no way Zabit Akrem could ever be induced to forget that.

His men got into it too. I was
Comandan Saab
's friend, and honoring me was a way to honor him. They were happy to have trappings to put at my disposal. One night, I was driving home late from his house. The streets were closed after a rocket-propelled grenade attack. One of his men accompanied me to police headquarters, where we had to wait for a truck to escort us the rest of the way. The officers at headquarters gave us a boisterous welcome and insisted on contributing a truck of their own to the convoy. So we roared through the silent streets to Wazir Akbar Khan, my little brown car sandwiched between the two green and white trucks. We pulled up; there was a checkpoint at the end of the street because of Qayum and the offices of a big U.S. engineering company, Louis Berger. “What's the problem?” the guard on the checkpoint asked me, taken aback, as the policemen leaped down from the trucks.

“Nothing!” I laughed. “These are my friends!”

There were just three shadows cast across this celebratory mood. One was that Akrem was absolutely exhausted. I had never seen him like this. His eyes would fade to a glaze in the middle of a conversation, and I would realize he hadn't heard the last two sentences. His heavy head would droop. Kabul was a ponderous responsibility, and he was shouldering it, like Atlas. He was meeting with the commanders of ISAF, the NATO-led peacekeeping force stationed in Kabul, and working out ways to coordinate. He was developing a plan for cleaning up the towns ringed around the capital, where criminals and riffraff would scoot after committing thefts in town. He was trying to professionalize his divisions. He was learning the ways of the different embassies, each meddling in its own fashion, often several in concert. He was constantly switched on, constantly accessible, constantly on the scene. “Yes, come see me tomorrow morning,” I heard him tell someone on the phone one evening. “I'm in the office around six. Why don't you come at six-thirty or seven? There won't be too many people then.” His days tapered off around nine or ten at night, with a patrol of the empty streets. The bodyguards and his young right-hand man, Shafiullah, were panting. Akrem was having problems with his blood pressure, Shafiullah confided.

Once I asked Akrem if I could go out with them at night. I was still in my dinner clothes, a salmon-colored silk pants suit, gauzy head shawl and heels, when we made for a precinct station on the far side of town. The men consulted maps to get there; they were still finding their bearings. As we arrived, I could tell the visit was unannounced. The half dozen officers on duty rushed to attention. They bustled about Akrem and showed him inside their tiny, leprous station. Manifestly, it was the first time a police chief had ever bothered to visit them. Akrem was pretty horrified at what he saw. While Shafiullah went through the radio check and took down the statistics they were compiling on all the precincts—number of officers, number on duty at night, number and position of checkpoints—Akrem took the time to ask about other things that mattered to these men: Were they safe? Who was on the other side of that wall over there? What was the flow of traffic down this road here, a wide swathe across the map on the wall? Where were the transport trucks coming from? This was a Hazara neighborhood; were there any tensions? Did they have hot water? How was their food? What was that? Rotten meat?

“Next time you get rotten meat with lunch, you send it straight to my office. I'll take it to the logistics department myself!” That was one problem Akrem could solve right away.

The second shadow over my return to Kabul was the discovery that President Karzai had not, in fact, improved. I wasn't going to have to worry about getting that pistol into Afghanistan after all.

When he won the October 2004 presidential election, in one of those moments of overpowering joy—when the people unaccountably, irrationally, threw everything they
knew
to the winds, and waited in line all day to vote—I reserved judgment. Friends, including Kurt Amend, the former embassy political affairs officer, now at the National Security Council, enthused about the new cabinet. I noticed a couple of names I did not care for, but I hesitated to throw cold water. “I'll let you know what I think when I get to Kabul,” I told Kurt.

It was worse than I feared. I had discussions late into the night with someone who worked in a ministry. The things described took my breath away: beatings inside the building; the minister locking employees in the bathroom; bricks of cash packed into the minister's SUV. A competent, responsible, dignified man shouldered out of the cabinet by the thugs because he would show them up. That one hit me hard, since I had always fallen back on the vague belief that there were no alternatives to the thugs. But there were; there were good and competent candidates for government jobs and they were being thrown away.

Gul Agha Shirzai had been sent back to Kandahar as governor. The ruins he left behind in Kabul were beyond description. I talked to someone who was struggling over what to tell the World Bank about $50,000 it had allocated for a project in Kabul. Shirzai had sent the money to Kandahar to embellish his father's tomb. And now this person had to come up with receipts to satisfy the World Bank.

In mid-May, anti-American demonstrations broke out. They turned very nasty, with lootings and some deaths. The supposed cause was an article in
Newsweek
magazine reporting that a U.S. guard at the prison camp for terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet.

But I suspected this was not the real reason for the demonstrations. Proof, for me, was the fact that they had been sparked by “university students.” Universities in eastern Afghanistan are packed with Pakistanis. This is utterly illogical, since the worst school in Pakistan is better than the so-called college in Kandahar, where people are taught medicine without benefit of a single anatomy chart, let alone a microscope, and the library is a cramped, locked storeroom. I had always assumed that among these “students” lurked a number of Pakistani intelligence agents.

In the wake of the demonstrations, I realized that the students served another purpose for Pakistan. They were like a giant sleeper cell in Afghanistan, which could be activated to agitate, while affording plausible deniability to the Pakistani government.

Another event had taken place that same week in May, which I thought was the true reason for the demonstrations. President Karzai had announced that Afghanistan was going to enter into a long-term strategic partnership with the United States. In other words, the United States was there to stay, and Pakistan, I suspected, was angry.