The Punishment of Virtue (44 page)

I laid my theory on Akrem. I had been down to Kandahar and was back in Kabul for a few days. “You're absolutely right,” he said. “Except
all
of Afghanistan's neighbors want the United States out of here, so they're banding together in an alliance of all the old enemies: Pakistan, Iran, Russia, even China. In Kabul, Iran was the busiest with the demonstrations. You want to hear how it went down in Kabul?”

Akrem knew a march was planned. The night before, he had invited several student leaders over to his house for dinner. “I chose Pashtuns,” he said. That was one of Akrem's gifts: he knew how to identify Afghanistan's faults and turn them around for the good of the country. He had an intuitive feel for the tribal and ethnic dynamics, but instead of exploiting them to tear the nation apart, he harnessed them to the task of forging it.

“I told them: ‘So, you're going to demonstrate tomorrow?' They said they were. ‘You're going to carry banners and chant slogans against the central government?' They said they were. I asked: ‘But who's the central government?'They thought for a minute. I told them: ‘President Karzai is the central government. He's a Pashtun. And the interior minister, and the defense minister, and me. We're the central government. And all of us are Pashtuns. Who are you helping with these demonstrations?' The students thought about it. ‘If you're really angry about something,' I said, ‘why don't you start right now? Here I am, I'm the central government. Start insulting me, now, like you're going to do tomorrow. Whatever you plan to say then, say it now.”

The shaken students asked him what he wanted them to do.

“I told them to go to their friends, and explain to them that they were being manipulated. March, by all means. But don't break down buildings. Don't hurt people.”

Perhaps Akrem had manipulated those students too. Perhaps he was just a little too delighted to have them “eating out of his hand,” as he put it. But he wasn't inspiring them to wreak destruction, like the other manipulators he was up against. In Kabul, the anti-American protest was remarkably small and peaceful.

“The next night, I took those student leaders out to dinner,” said Akrem. “With my own money! You would have thought the minister might send me a watch or something to thank me for preventing violence.”

It seemed that, even though Karzai and Jalali had seen fit to appoint Akrem to Kabul, they still did not understand his worth. They were still having trouble distinguishing their friends from their enemies.

The third shadow that darkened our mood was the security situation in Kandahar. “Sarah, it's not like when you were here before,” Kandaharis living in Kabul would tell me. “You can't go driving around by yourself anymore.” When I called down to Kandahar, I heard the same thing. There was a change in atmosphere. Things had gotten ugly.

I told Akrem I was headed out, and double-checked that he absolutely didn't need the little Corolla, that it would be OK if I drove it down there.

“Do you really have to go to Kandahar?” His voice was almost tender. That he even asked signified a lot.

MAY 2005

I
WAS RIGHT
about continuity. No one in Kandahar really thought I was coming back. That I did said it all. It mattered not what I was planning to achieve, what project I was working on, what measurable impact it might have. The bare fact that I had come back, that I had left the comfort of my Western country and had come back again to be with them, “in this dust,” meant everything to Kandaharis. Ahmad Wali Karzai's retainers practically stood in line to greet me:

“You were away a
long
time! How's your mother, is she well? Your sister? Your friends, great and small, are they doing well?”

A traffic cop posted at an intersection blocked my way across; he pounded on the hood of my red truck: “Daughter of a tyrant! Where have you been?”

And so we renewed our vows, Kandahar and I.

I set about establishing myself. I signed a six-month contract for the place I had rented before, newly painted and twice as expensive. I bought raw cotton from Helmand to fill the velvet mattresses that would furnish the rooms. I haggled in the bazaar over steel bowls and plates, plastic ladles for dipping the watered-down yogurt drink I had learned to love. I bought two gunnysacks of almonds from the relative of a friend, a man from Urozgan who had carried them down to the city to sell. We weighed them out ourselves, a four-and-a-half-kilo stone on one side of the balance to measure the
mans.
We were going to make sweet almond oil for our soaps. I hired loyal Karim away from the Americans, with whom I had found places for my guys, my six-man retinue, when I had left the previous fall. The others would show up around three each afternoon, after quitting time at the base.

On the last day in May, we decided to take a holiday. Hayatullah, the shaggy-haired former bus driver, had an orchard in Arghandab. It is a fantastic place, shaggy as his unruly head, overlooking the mighty Arghandab River, whose shifting bed occupies a great sinuous span of land laid with smoothed river stones, the water slicing channels of changing depth and speed. It was high apricot season, and we were going to Hayatullah's garden to eat fruit. The guys had told the Americans they were sick; all of us were packed into the red truck.

I let Hayatullah drive. The road leaves Kandahar along the bank of a canal, near my old home in the graveyard. Mullah Naqib's house is on the other bank, and the light-blue festival mosque where Kandahar celebrated the end of the Taliban in December 2001. I let my eyes rest on the landscape, my inner eye on the memories. At the last second, I caught sight of a forest-green Land Cruiser coming the other way with a couple other vehicles. I knew that car! Grabbing my cell phone, I dialed up Akrem's number. I got a soldier; I had a hard time hearing him; reception was fading. But I was sure I'd heard “in Kandahar.”

Yes! He'd finally made it. Poor Akrem had been trying to get leave for over a month. He had even asked me to intercede with his boss, Interior Minister Jalali, on my last trip to Kabul. His new house was ready, and he had to go to Kandahar to fetch his family.

I had done my routine with Jalali.

“One last thing. It's Khakrezwal.”

“Again?
What
is
it about that man?”

“He needs to go to Kandahar. Would you please give him some vacation?”

“I will, I will. In a few days. I need him here.”

“How
many
days exactly? Can he leave the day after tomorrow?”

“Sarah! You haven't changed at all! He can leave in three days. And he can spend five nights away.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Of course it hadn't been three days, it had been fully two weeks. I told the soldier through the static on the cell phone that I was off to Arghandab and I would call back in a few hours.

It was Akrem who called me, shortly after I returned, grubby from fording the river and clambering among the fruit trees, my pockets stuffed with apricot stones for turning into oil.

“AH-salaamu alay-kum!”
Irrepressible. He was in that friend's garden across town. I had to come and eat some mulberries.

I told him to give me half an hour to take a shower and get there.

When I arrived, Akrem was seated at a long plastic table set out on the grass. There were plates of apricots and fragrant, chilled mulberries, which he had specially requested from our host, remembering how I loved them. As I sat down, a fresh, mounded plate of them arrived, and a bowl of water for rinsing my fingers. Around the table sat assorted Alokozai elders. I never knew who I would encounter when I went to meet Akrem these days; I should have learned to watch my mouth a little. But I never did. I remember the graybeards smiling at my Pashtu and the frankness of my political humor. As the call to sunset prayer drifted through the air, they all got up to do their devotions, a little apart.

Afterward, the elders stayed seated in the grass at the end of the garden. Only Akrem came back to join me, and his right-hand man, Shafiullah.

I'd had almost no interaction with this young cousin of Akrem's over the years—it was he who had delivered the letter ordering me to leave my house in the graveyard, and I had avoided him ever after. But suddenly he was coming to life for me; our shared affection for Akrem was beginning to forge a kinship. In Kabul I had begged Shafiullah to make him get some exercise.

“So, Sarah,” Akrem asked. “What's happening in Kandahar?”

“
Comandan Saab,
I keep telling you. I'm out of politics.”

Akrem smiled.

We started discussing the assassination, two days before, of a local mullah, or religious leader. This was a major event. The man had been the head of a provincial council of mullahs, and was an outspoken supporter of the current regime. A distinguished religious scholar, he had debunked the resurgent Taliban's interpretation of Islam in his sermons, staying the course with the fundamentalists, verse for holy verse.

This man had been murdered in downtown Kandahar, on the guarded street that runs between the old governor's palace and the sacred mosque with the relic of the prophet Muhammad. In broad daylight, two men on a motorcycle had ridden up to him, shot him dead, and ridden away.

“What Taliban?” Shafiullah was saying. “The Taliban wouldn't dare!”

“How wouldn't they dare?” I countered. “It doesn't exactly take daring. There's no security in this town. There are no searches.
I
could drive around with a gun in my car; no one would know the difference.”

“Agha!”
Asma appeared, Akrem's daughter: a little girl now, sparks for eyes framed by a pageboy cut, earrings in her ears. Leaning against his knee, she stood on tiptoes and peered over the edge of the table, reached for a plate of apricots, and then carried it carefully away in two hands.

“His family's been saying that if it was the Taliban, why didn't they kill him in Arghandab or in Malajat, one of those places where they have power? He went to those places every day. Why kill him in the middle of town?”

“But Shafiullah, that's the whole point! They want to make a splash. And what could make more of a splash than nailing him in broad daylight, right in front of his office.”

I saw what Shafiullah was driving at, though.

“That street is barred. There are soldiers on the gate. There are fifteen soldiers posted at the entrance to the governor's palace, right next door to the building he was leaving. You're telling me a gun goes off—even if no one is killed—a gun goes off and not one of those soldiers steps out into the street to see what's going on?”

What Shafiullah was saying, and I agreed, was that “the Taliban,” as such, as an autonomous movement, did not exist. The “Taliban” were creatures of the Pakistani authorities, and if they had committed murder in Kandahar, they had done so with the connivance of other creatures of the Pakistani authorities who held positions in provincial government.

“Pakistan's strategy,” Akrem remarked, “is always the same: to make haste slowly, to take one step forward and ten steps back.”

He was right; the proof was before us. Here was the murder of a mullah—and not just any mullah, but the top religious leader of the province, in the middle of town, at one o'clock in the afternoon. This was much worse than what had been going on back in the summer of 2003, when I had been so stricken with foreboding. Mullahs had been killed then too, but little-known ones, out in the districts. This assassination represented a quantum leap. Just as Akrem's mole had predicted before the ambush of that ICRC engineer, two years earlier, the killings had started in the districts; they had slowly circled Kandahar. Now this one had happened right in the heart of town. And we were discussing it calmly. We had been inured. The violence had been carefully dosed, so we needed it in ever-higher levels to register the shock.

“You're right,
Comandan Saab,
” I said. “Do you remember when you infiltrated that training camp two years ago? They were teaching the targeted assassination of public figures, you remember? That's just what you're saying. They were training it back then, and now it's started.”

“
Woh
…” Akrem assented, in an intake of breath. “Now it's started.”

But, my God, I wasn't thinking of him. He was in Kabul. He was chief of the Kabul police. We were impregnable in our garden.

The evening call to prayer threaded the eye of our conversation. Akrem stood up. Our host insisted we stay for dinner. “No, no, we're going home,” replied Akrem. He called to his soldiers to “throw those kids in the car.” The shouts of his children had edged into the register that indicates the end of the day.

I
think
he wanted me to come with him. This was my difficulty with his elegant manners. I always felt that each of us was silently trying to work out what the other wanted, so we could comply. I
think
he assumed I would join him at his house. But I was imagining his homecoming that day: he had scarcely seen his family in a year and a half. I wanted to give him space. I stuck out my hand. Abruptly, formally, he shook it.

“I'll call you,” I said.

And I followed his convoy out the gate. He turned left; I turned right.