The Other War

There is no shortage of books about the war in Iraq. Journalistic “histories of the present,” self-serving memoirs by former government officials, ideological hatchet jobs by Beltway pundits–the sheer tonnage of hardcovers generated by the U.S. invasion and its aftermath is enough to dam the Tigris and the Euphrates.

By contrast, the publishing industry has churned out almost nothing about postwar Afghanistan. The assorted policymakers who have served in Kabul have refrained from spilling their secrets after returning home, while none of the reporters dispatched there have produced anything resembling a definitive account of the country’s trajectory since 2001.

Instead, the few individuals who have written books about Af ghanistan have tended to be mavericks: idiosyncratic, adventurous characters who defy easy categorization. There is Rory Stewart, the former British officer who, shortly after the Taliban fell, decided to walk across Afghanistan, trekking 500 miles from Herat to Kabul in the dead of winter. His account of this adventure, The Places in Between, is as extraordinary as it is improbable. Then there’s Åsne Seierstad, the Norwegian journalist and author of The Bookseller of Kabul, who cloistered herself with an Afghan family for several months in 2002, using the personal histories of her hosts to tell the larger story of the postwar period.

Now comes Sarah Chayes, whose Punishment of Virtue is arguably the best book yet about politics and power in Afghanistan after the Taliban, and squarely in the maverick camp. Chayes was a National Public Radio correspondent who volunteered, in the aftermath of September 11, to go to Quetta, Pakistan, and then sneaked north across the border to Kandahar. Like the rest of the media horde that rushed into Afghanistan just as the Taliban were retreating from it, Chayes arrived knowing virtually nothing about the strange place in which she suddenly found herself. Unlike the rest, she stuck around, moving in with Afghans, learning Pashto, adopting local dress–going native, in other words, and to an extent few would dare.

This volume is the product of five years’ worth of observations and insights in Kandahar, where Chayes eventually left her reporting career for a job running a nongovernmental organization. The result is a mix of personal memoir, investigative journalism, and political advocacy, with frequent digressions into Afghan history and culture.

To be clear, Kandahar is the sort of place that most Americans would sooner chew broken glass than set foot in, “a town with no banks, no commercial airport, little running water, precarious electricity, and hardly a paved road in sight.” It was the stronghold of the Taliban regime, and its inhabitants are often reviled even among Afghans for being a violent, duplicitous lot. To Chayes’s credit the portrait she draws of Kandahar is far more nuanced and interesting than just another postcard from hell. As it happens, she genuinely likes the city, “a way station for traders, warriors, immigrants and invaders,” a crossroads of Indian, Iranian, and Central Asian cultures, and the place where the modern Afghan state first coalesced. There is something about Kandahar, she writes, “that goes right to the marrow of Afghanistan’s bones.”

Chayes captures the optimism that swept Kandahar following the Taliban’s ouster, when policemen would stop traffic in order to shake her hand, and little girls celebrated the chance to attend school for the first time in their lives, “squealing and mimicking the act of writing with fingers on their miniature palms.” It’s precisely this fleeting image of Kandahar as something other than the heart of darkness–a place populated by decent human beings eager to live under the protection of a Pax Americana–that makes Chayes’s story so poignant, especially as the shadow of the Taliban’s resurgence begins to creep over it.

The Punishment of Virtue traces the arc of the Taliban’s postwar guerrilla campaign, starting with the threats and “night letters . . . a folded slip of paper tucked into a crack in the door of the mosque,” damning the Karzai government for apostasy, or a note warning parents to stop sending their daughters to school. Next came the first attacks–the execution of an aid worker here, an assault on a police garrison there–and then a wave of assassinations of political, civil, and religious leaders, including one of Chayes’s best friends, whose June 2005 murder opens and closes the book.

Chayes bluntly attributes this escalating violence first and foremost to Pakistan, whose government continues to consider Kandahar part of its territory and sees the Taliban as a means to reclaim it. While Islamabad has captured and surrendered a steady stream of al Qaeda operatives since September 11–“a kind of bank account, money squirreled away to be exchanged later for Washington’s indulgence”–it has failed to crack down on the Taliban leaders who operate in plain sight.

“They paraded around Quetta; they carried guns and weapons-authorization cards issued by the Pakistani government; their offices and lodging were located in a well-known Quetta neighborhood, previously provided to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen,” Chayes writes with frustration. As one American soldier grouses, “The Pakistani border is just an imaginary line keeping us from doing our job.”

Chayes’s hawkishness may come as a surprise to some, given that her biography reads like a parody of blue state liberalism: an NPR reporter from Massachusetts who spent a decade in Paris. But for the most, Chayes is hardheaded in her analysis of Kandahar, and impatient with ideological shibboleths. To her credit, she slams aid workers who blame the American military for blurring the line between war fighting and reconstruction and who believe they can stay “neutral” in the struggle against the Taliban.

“I think the presence of the U.S. troops in Afghanistan made all of us safer,” she writes. Besides, “what civilian NGO has postoperation assessment built into its mode of functioning? Of course, the military did not always get it right. . . . Still, the procedure exists and compared not so badly to the ways of self-righteous humanitarians, myself included, who use the angelic nature of their self-sacrifice to cover everything from excessive salaries to an utter lack of accountability.”

If The Punishment of Virtue has a weakness, it’s that it loses steam the closer it gets to the present. It is strongest in its treatment of events from late 2001 through early 2004, but the last few years get desultory treatment. Additionally, because of her focus on events in Kandahar, Chayes neglects to say much about the overall evolution of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, fostering the false impression that it’s been relatively static. There is no mention of the Bush administration’s 2002-2003 policy review, which attempted to tackle several of the problems that Chayes identifies, including the need to roll back some of the worst warlords and bring more Pashtuns into government. Other key developments–the creation of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the shift from a counterterrorism to counterinsurgency strategy, and the expansion of NATO’s area of responsibility into southern Afghan istan–also go unexplored. These are disappointing omissions.

In the end, however, The Punishment of Virtue isn’t intended as a detached, dispassionate history of postwar Afghan istan but an impressionistic, and intensely personal, account of one intrepid explorer there. As Sarah Chayes rightly observes, “Afghanistan is a place of too many layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity. Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes time.”

This is a difficult lesson for the institutions of American foreign policy, which tend to treat personnel as interchangeable parts in a neverending, global merry-go-round. Observing the human traffic through the American Embassy during the months after the removal of the Taliban, Chayes concludes, “The significance of such a rapid changeover was that the United States had, in effect, no policy in Afghanistan. There was no strategy for targeting reconstruction dollars so as to produce the greatest positive domino effect. Worse, there was not even a clear notion of what the desired ‘end state’ in Afghanistan was.”

The truth is, it’s hard to imagine an American official either willing or permitted to live like Chayes, whose knowledge and expertise about Afghanistan are ultimately inseparable from the personal relationships and contacts she cultivated over a half-decade there. The most important insight The Punishment of Virtue offers has less to do with its narrative, and more to do with its remarkable narrator.

Vance Serchuk is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.