The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  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 fea
red. 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.

  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.

  CHAPTER 30

  KANDAHAR

  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 he
aring 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.