The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  The meeting developed into an argument between the two men, which I did not entirely follow. It seemed that Akrem was telling my host brother that if he insisted on having me in the house, he would be responsible for my security. In Afghanistan, that is a heavy obligation. My host-brother retorted that security is the job of the police, and if Akrem was putting the family in charge of me, he should issue them some weapons. Not that he didn’t already have weapons, as he hastened to show me when we returned home. But it was a matter of principle, and both sides dug in. Akrem dismissed us by turning and looking fixedly at the next petitioner. We had ceased to exist.

  I was determined to fight this ultimatum, though I could feel my host-family cooling off.

  Then one day I crossed paths with my new boss, Qayum Karzai, when he and his brother Ahmad Wali were on their way to a funeral. They wondered what on earth I was doing in that insalubrious place. “She lives here,” one of their men informed them. And that was the end of it.

  “We’re responsible for you,” they remonstrated, aghast. “You can’t possibly live out there.” It was in fact they who were responsible for my security. By entering Qayum’s employ, I had entered the Karzais’ retinue, and overlordship in Kandahar bears certain responsibilities. For the Karzais’ sake, I realized, for the sake of their reputation, I could not leave myself at such risk.

  So I moved into a house on the other side of town with a big yard and three cows, which used to be Ahmad Wali’s office back when he ran a local NGO. The chaotic months of U.S. bombing and its aftermath had scattered contents and occupants, leaving the place prey to friends and neighbors turned temporary looters. Abdullah, the Karzais’ family engineer, lived there. But, as Ahmad Wali had often said, his habits were such as to render his own bedroom worthy of a UNDP-sponsored cleanup project. The place was a trash heap.

  I spent the summer renovating, relegating myself to the roof in the process and spreading out my bedding and my nighttime effects each evening. We fixed the bathroom, laid tiles of local white stone in the hall, built, discarded, carpeted, and furnished. We hauled out all those books and papers of President Karzai’s, which Abdullah had squirreled away, put the books on a shelf and sorted and filed the papers in a painted trunk. And then at last, we cleaned out a former storeroom to serve as my bedroom, and I could come down off my roof.

  It felt as though I were—figuratively as well as literally—constructing the floor I was standing on, hopping on one foot while I laid down a few boards to put the other down on. Kandahar’s telephone lines had been shot to hell, and the Internet was several centuries away. I had to go to a public call office or rely on the expensive foldout satellite phone I had used as a reporter to stay in touch with Eve. She heroically held fast to the other end of the tenuous rope I clung to, grounding me, protecting me ferociously, and constantly reinspiring me.

  For comic relief, there was Wooly and Big Dog.1 Big Dog, a mournful German Shepherd, was manifestly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. When I first moved to the house, he would slink off with his tail tucked in and his head hung below his sloping shoulders if you ever penetrated his consciousness. I decided he needed some pet therapy. So I bought a lamb, named Wooly. I won’t go through the complicated trilingual pun, via Albanian, which led me to that original name. The two became inseparable, Wooly first trying to nurse from Big Dog and later trying to mount him. Harried Big Dog cheered up.

  An early trip to our project site, the bombed out village of Akokolacha, was obligatory. It lies just off the main road to the airport, about the only stretch of asphalt in the province at the time, and cars still had to swerve to avoid old shrapnel scars and the twisted carcass of a tanker-truck. All around lies the stark, dun-colored wasteland of rock and clay, hardened by the punishing sun. Only a fleet of nappy-haired camels, nomads’ patchwork tents, some sheep spread out in a row to comb the stubble of a parched field, break the monotony. Scattered villages, camouflaged against the dirt they are built from, appear and disappear into its unremitting surface. At Akokolacha, the clods of the former huts were already blending back into the stony-hard earth.

  My idea was to rebuild the houses just as they had stood before the bombing, never imagining there would be any trouble recreating the layout. A half hour clambering over the piles of clay shattered that happy presumption. The village men knotted themselves around us, famished half smiles playing on their faces. One so exactly resembled the Big Bad Wolf that the nickname stuck.

  “I had nine rooms,” the owner of one mound told us as we climbed atop, eyeballing it at about eight yards by four. “And there was a bathroom with every room.”

  Incredulous, I turned to the other villagers for a backup chorus of ridicule.

  “It’s true,” they nodded gravely. “And I had seven rooms,” someone else said.

  I realized we would never know what the village had looked like. We were facing a conspiracy of exaggeration. No villager would expose another’s lie for fear of losing his own chance at an American-financed mansion.

  I was crushed, and immediately faced with a moral dilemma. What to tell Concord? If I described the scene accurately, all those wonderful people would regret their contributions and good wishes, I was sure. But could I possibly lie, or gloss it over: tread on the slippery slope that led to such cynicisms as—in one example I had heard of—an aid agency photographing gifts unloaded in Somalia, for the donors’ benefit, then carting them off to the beach for burning?

  I grappled for an explanation for the villagers’ bald, ungrateful, un-apologetic greediness. My own heart needed it as much as the Concord donors did.

  What I came up with had to do with Big Dog’s ailment: posttraumatic stress disorder. After twenty-three years of nonstop civil war, the whole of Afghan society was suffering from collective PTSD, I was coming to understand. I cataloged its symptoms: inability to bond emotionally, inability to plan for the future, inability to think beyond one’s own needs toward a collective good, excessive guile.2 People like the Akokolacha villagers had so often seen their destinies—appalling or miraculous—visited upon them from the outside, with no apparent reason or consistency, who could blame them for grasping at whatever they could obtain right now, and damn the future? What ever lasted into the future anyway? And then there was the matter of power. It is not especially empowering to be helped. And so, perhaps to try to redress the imbalance, proud beneficiaries make strident demands.

  It seemed the very conception behind our Akokolacha project was out of sync with the Afghanistan of this particular juncture. Never mind, I thought. At least we’ll get the houses built.

  All of these deductions were valid. But what I did not thoroughly understand at that point was how my actions and those of ACS fit into the age-old Afghan pattern of extracting and distributing subsidy. This pattern went back at least to the days of the Great Game and the early Afghan amirs like Abd ar-Rahman Khan.

  Back then Britain was the wealthy empire paying out the subsidy. But when Indian independence ended the Great Game, London turned off the faucet. A few years later, during the Cold War, the United States took up Britain’s contest with Russia—by then the Soviet Union. Then, its cold war over, Washington, too, cut the Afghan subsidy. Now, in the post-Taliban era, the United States was paying out again.

  In other words, the Afghan tribes have grown accustomed to receiving subsidy. It is a mark of their geostrategic importance. As such, it is not an embarrassing handout, but a badge of honor, a perfectly dignified way of making a living. Obtaining subsidy can even be seen as a mark of superiority vis-à-vis the lowland empire that has to cough it up.3 The leader who distributes it commands his tribesmen’s loyalty.

  In this traditional dynamic, I was playing the role of the representative of the foreign power, coughing up the subsidy. All of our lofty words to the Akokolacha shura about Concord, and democracy, and citizen participation, and cultural exchange were, in this context, meaningless. What we were doing fit too closely with the famili
ar pattern for the villagers to see anything distinctive in it.

  In the perception of these Popalzai villagers, Ahmad Wali Karzai was the tribal elder who had secured the subsidy and distributed it to them. He had visited them, eaten their food, and then produced a foreigner to rebuild their village. They took it for granted that I was bound by his pledges. Ahmad Wali had told them the village would get a council room, a promise construed by the village chief to mean a maelmastun attached to his house. To this head elder, it was an obligation. Never mind that the project was about replacing bomb-damaged houses only. My protestations that Ahmad Wali had no operational involvement in the project were simply unintelligible to the villagers. This was a misunderstanding that was to dog the work for its duration.

  While we were deliberating over dimensions and floor plans for the new houses, another problem cropped up. Akokolacha’s water supply went dry. The hamlet is built on the banks of a canal, part of a 1970s irrigation system that diverts water from the Arghandab River. A drought, so severe it had killed off most of the fruit trees not already splintered by Soviet shelling, had the region in its grip for the sixth straight year. The gates to the reservoir on the Arghandab River that fed the canal were closed. Akokolacha residents had to go to a neighboring village to collect water in plastic jerricans and lug it home.

  A village well, we thought, is not private property. Here was something the American troops could do.

  The U.S. Army Civil Affairs team, led by a tall redheaded hydrologist named Ben Houston, was refreshingly enterprising and practical. In those early days, when we humanitarians were still getting our feet under us, the Civil Affairs team was out there doing stuff: overseeing the building of schools and, yes, the drilling of wells.

  But not one for Akokolacha, they regretted. They had had some bad experiences with villagers sabotaging expensive new wells, so they had called a temporary moratorium. Why didn’t we try USAID?

  The United States Agency for International Development is the arm of the U.S. State Department charged with distributing America’s public foreign assistance around the world. As such, it was supposed to spearhead the effort to reconstruct Afghanistan. Behemoth USAID wields a budget of some $10 billion per year, and is staffed by two thousand men and women, half of them posted in the field, and fully half housed in the Reagan Building, a giant airless glass cube in Washington.

  We had had interactions with a variety of USAID officials in Washington, at the newly reopened U.S. embassy in Kabul, and with an assessment team that had come to Kandahar for a week. I brought two of its members over to my house in the graveyard for dinner with my Achekzais. I introduced them to a group of prominent local women to discuss priorities. Our USAID contacts were friendly and enthusiastic, full of encouragement and promises: “Don’t worry. I’m setting aside $70,000 for your radio station, whenever you’re ready”; “A vocational school is a great idea—I’m sure we’ll fund it”; and so on. The Akokolacha well request, backed as it was by support from private U.S. donors who had promised an ongoing commitment to the village, reaped a similar response. I wrote up a formal proposal for a $10,000 drinking water and irrigation well, complete with submersible pump. “A shoo-in,” we were assured.

  So we waited. And waited. I was reluctant to pester the USAID people, knowing how harassed they must be. When I finally did inquire about the status of our proposal, or of any of the other proposals we had submitted, I found that the person we had been working with was back in Washington; his or her replacement had just arrived and would be on it right away. Often his or her replacement would be unable to locate the file and would ask us to drop off another copy of our proposal at the U.S. embassy up in Kabul.

  Such was the merry-go-round at USAID—and the U.S. embassy as a whole—those crucial first months after the fall of the Taliban. In the entire U.S. delegation, only one diplomat spoke an Afghan language, learned when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran thirty years before. Called up out of retirement, he stayed at the embassy a record six weeks. Everyone else was on a two-to three-week “hardship” rotation.

  The significance of such a rapid changeover was that the United States had, in effect, no policy in Afghanistan. During that crucial window of time that could make or break the future of the country, America’s sails were luffing. 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 embassy lacked seasoned political officers with regional experience or a coherent vision. And no guidance was coming from Washington. It was as though it had never occurred to anyone to think about what would happen once the Taliban were defeated. As a result, U.S. action was slip-shod and haphazard, just when Afghanistan needed legibility, direction, and consistency.

  In this void, decisions that most affected ordinary Afghans were made by U.S. infantry or Special Forces units conducting mop-up combat operations around the countryside. It was the military who decided not only which villages would be searched or which suspects captured or killed but, more significant, which local strongmen—like Gul Agha Shirzai—would reap the extraordinary benefits of an alliance with U.S. forces. These decisions were made in the heat of battle, based on the immediate usefulness in tactical military terms of the gun-lord in question. The longer-term impact of empowering him did not enter the calculus of the combat officer making the choice; politics wasn’t his job.

  And in the void—in the absence of a policy to guide the allocation of reconstruction funds—the big public donors like USAID resorted to an acronym: the QUIP, or quick impact project. QUIPs were school buildings or clinics, culverts by the side of a road, village wells. The notion was that it was important to get money out on the ground, quickly and visibly. To be funded, a project had to be a physical object and cost less than $30,000. Those were the operative criteria, across the board. The idea seemed to me to be to spread the money around, like whitewash slapped on a broken fence.

  I believe that this was the big donors’way of hedging their bets on post-Taliban Afghanistan. Fear of failure, ironically, meant that money was not concentrated in ways that might have helped avert it. The alternative—a major project that could make a real difference, both symbolically and practically—snaked its way past Kandahar as it had for millennia. The road.

  I had thought the route from Quetta, Pakistan, across the Afghan border and into Kandahar was the worst experience on four wheels I would ever inflict on myself. That was until I drove to Kabul. On my maiden voyage there, the Toyota station wagon I was riding in with my Achekzai host-brothers simply went to pieces. First we got a flat tire. Then the muffler fell off. Though I was accompanied by two auto mechanics, I ended up wedged under the car tying the thing back on with scavenged bits of wire and a strip of tire rubber. Finally, we suffered a compound fracture of the left front wheel. That forced us to overnight in one of the derelict roadside “hotels” that cater to the truck traffic. The ceiling of our mud-brick room was about six feet off the dirt floor, held up by a massive wooden pillar of unknown age. The furnishings consisted of a metal barrel with a cockeyed pipe for a wood stove and a plastic mat.

  I came to know that four-hundred-mile, fifteen-hour nightmare quite well. My favorite part was where the deeply grooved dirt track resolved itself into a series of sine waves. If you got your timing right, gunning your motor just as you reached the crest of each rise, you could turn it into a rhythmic roller-coaster ride. I confess a certain joy, too, in the frequent games of chicken with oncoming trucks, tilting rakishly under their loads. A tacit rule prevailed, of course, encouraging drivers to stay to their right. But each encounter was in fact governed by the conditions of the road at that juncture, by which vehicle was bigger (size usually determining who got to choose the path he wanted), by which driver hit his brights first, claiming right of way, by which would dare to ignore the claim and face the other down, and, finally, by an ineffable intuition that instru
cted you where to go to avoid collision. Much of the time, in fact, was spent off the so-called road, driving on the smoother desert floor on either side. No matter how tightly windows and air vents were sealed, the pervasive talcum-powder dust was staple sustenance the whole way, its dried-clay smell sharp in your nostrils, its grit between your teeth. The wind would raise it in boiling pillars, spinning and writhing toward the sky, like Lot’s wife after her fatal glance at Gomorra. Sometimes, engulfed, cars would have to halt, visibility zero. When the ocher cloud had passed them by, they could start up again.

  It invariably took me two days to recover from the drive to Kabul. For me, it was a bruising inconvenience. For Kandahar merchants, it was crippling.

  I attended a meeting on the topic between tribal elders and a U.S. embassy official more than a year after the fall of the Taliban. “We sell grapes,” the graybeards opened. By late July, the crates start appearing beside the walled lanes in Arghandab, and bales of straw for lining them. The clusters of tiny oblong grapes, a translucent greenish gold and indescribably fragrant, are bedded in the straw like jewels.

  “Before,” the elders patiently explained to the U.S. official, “the run to Kabul took six hours. Our trucks could make a delivery to Kandahar shops in the evening, then leave for Kabul and get there before the bazaar opened at 4:00 A. M. Kabul was our main market, and we couldn’t fill demand. Now cargo trucks spend seventy-two hours on the road. Who can send grapes? Our only outlet now is Pakistan, and we have to beg for buyers there.”

  No program would have had a more positive impact on the Afghan south, and indeed on the country as a whole, than rebuilding that road. Back in the sixteenth century, the Safavi shahs in Persia understood the critical importance of road maintenance to their nation-building project. Safe, well-kept roads, equipped with amenities for travelers, bound their disparate empire together, enhanced its wealth by stimulating trade, and served as a constant, visible demonstration of the government’s power and ability to care for its people. The fortunes of the Safavi dynasty were gauged by conditions on the road through Kandahar.