The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  A typical dispute might go something like this: If someone commits a crime—steals an animal or kills someone—a meeting is called between respected relatives of the two parties. These elders talk the matter out. They get the animal back; they negotiate a fine; they pressure the victim’s family to forgive; they obtain women from the killer’s family for marriage into the victim’s family. (This solution, which women abhor, has the double advantage from the male perspective of saving the victim’s kin the prohibitive cost of brideprice, and healing the wound between the two families by joining them.) If all else fails, the elders deliver the murderer to the revenge of the victim’s family.

  During these parlays, however, the criminal is protected. The honor of both families depends on it.

  This custom might explain a lot, I realized. Thinking of the Taliban as criminals in the eyes of other Pashtuns—criminals with ancestral rights to such protection while the elders deliberated—I began to understand the apparent lull we were experiencing, while much tea was drunk late into the Ramadan night.

  Two main sticking points were obstructing the progress of the parlays. One was the fate of Taliban trapped in Qunduz, a city near Afghanistan’s northern border with Tajikistan, which had fallen to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. The Taliban in Kandahar rightly feared their friends trapped there would be massacred, and wanted to hold out for their release and safe passage. The other issue was the intransigence of the Al-Qaeda Arabs. They had nothing to gain in a postwar settlement and were, more than any Afghan, motivated by a radical Islamist ideology with pretensions to universality. The Al-Qaeda Arabs and a small core of Taliban close to the head of their movement, Mullah Muhammad Omar, were gunning for a fight to the finish.

  On November 20, 2001, these unconditionals made a last-ditch effort to impress the foreign press corps. They invited us all to a press conference in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan. It was, bar none, the most surreal experience of my reporting career.

  We suffered through an exaggerated version of the usual ordeal to obtain our Pakistani authorization for travel to the border, and worse for the coveted Afghan visa. None of us found it worthy of mention that though Kabul had fallen a week before, the Taliban consulate in Quetta was still manned and functioning.

  The rumor that this consulate was issuing visas was only vague—no one knew for what, for where, or how long. Yet we would turn up and wait aimlessly. I predicted we would get to go to Spin Boldak for a briefing on the hard-line Taliban position, period. This was not a popular forecast. The action-starved newshounds, whose colleagues assigned to the Northern Alliance had been whooping it up during the fall of Kabul, were salivating to reach Kandahar for a scoop of their own. I confess I let the Los Angeles Times’s endlessly patient Alissa Rubin do much of my waiting for me. It is thanks to her that I was along on the venture at all.

  I was feeling some foreboding. Soon rumor had it that the visa would be an open one after all, good for the whole country, and we would be able to travel to Taliban-held Kandahar. But, even in “liberated” territory around Kabul, conditions were hardly safe, let alone in this lair of die-hard fanatics. A few days earlier, four journalists traveling in a convoy to Kabul from the eastern city of Jalalabad had been pulled from their cars and shot. “If I were Al-Qaeda,” I pontificated to my colleagues, “I would post some artillery on the hills overlooking the road to Kandahar, and take out a hundred foreign journalists. If you want to go out with a bang, what better way?”

  I am not inordinately fearful, but I believe in calculating risks and reducing them where possible. In my view, a reporter’s safety in such circumstances lies not in numbers, but in discretion. I kept remembering Albania during the 1999 Kosovo war, where the TV folks in the four-by-fours they rented for $250 a day would get stripped to the bone by highway robbers. For $7 I would take the minivan the locals ride up to the Kosovo border, to the delight of the (all male) passengers, who would teach me Albanian and make me drive the tortuous mountain road when they discovered that I—a woman!—had a license.

  But it was impossible to address these safety concerns my way. NPR had already informed me that if I crossed the border illegally, or alone, I was fired. It was the convoy or nothing.

  So I teamed up with the Los Angeles Times. Afghan and Pakistani formalities finally complete, the whole herd of journalists and their retainers charged for the border on the morning of November 21. My team of three—my interpreter, my driver, and me—suffered a single bad moment just as we crossed into Afghanistan. A crowd of yelling, kicking, stone-throwing men arrayed themselves in a gauntlet that we had to gun through, ducking our heads uselessly. A well-aimed blow shattered the back window of our yellow taxicab, and I felt sorry for my funny, streetwise, dignified—but sticky-fingered—driver. “My poor car,” he lamented, with a pantomime-mournful face. I more than made it up to him.

  The convoy turned in at a former UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) compound, where the BBC, CNN, and others had already staked out their ground: tents pitched, cases of bottled water stacked like earthworks, satellite dishes in parallel rows pointing south, and flies buzzing absolutely everywhere. There was no electricity, not really any water, no shelter for sleeping. The first priority was to stake out some space to spread our bedding—such as it was—and send our staff to the bazaar to buy extra blankets. The Los Angeles Times’s Tyler Marshall was at first authorized to go out with a guard, but fifty yards outside the gate the Taliban turned him back for “security reasons.”

  In itself I found this a telling sign. The Taliban, fabled authoritarians, could no longer cow the people? Crowds of locals would jump up on the compound walls and squat there like great carrion crows, staring and mocking us. Our hosts sent fighters around with sticks or lengths of thick rope to chase them off, but they kept coming back.

  Word coming from locals we sent our staff out to interview was equally telling. One prominent doctor said he was feeling so insecure he slept in different places every night, just as he had during the chaotic time after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan a decade before. But this sense of danger made him happy, he claimed, because it was a portent of changes to come.

  The promised press conference finally took place the second day. Much of what was said was false, much of it disingenuous. For example: “Forget about September 11. That doesn’t have anything to do with this.” But the spokesman—a poised twenty-five-year-old who spoke in English, in unswervingly measured tones despite the often hostile nature of our questions—laid out some of the recent history of the region. He explained the bloody chaos ushered in by the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, when for several years, the former resistance factions turned their unspent rage on one another. And he argued that the Taliban had taken power only because people outside the south wanted their lands pacified too.

  Despite the self-serving aspect of his version of events, I was not unim-pressed with the performance. I wondered how many Americans his age would have been able to handle an equivalent situation with such aplomb. As I persisted in asking questions, I got looks of frank, but smiling, astonishment from the Taliban, who had probably never seen a woman participate in a public event.

  The most stunning part of the trip, for me, was what happened when word got out that I was fasting for Ramadan. I had kept the month-long dawn-to-dusk fast when I lived in Morocco as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1980s, and it never occurred to me that I should not do so again, as a gesture of respect for the culture I was working in. But I was the only journalist who did, and it made the Taliban, to my astonishment, adopt me. Najibullah, head of security for the event, invited me to break fast with him. A scraggly bearded young Talib solemnly presented me with me his Parker fountain pen. Another came to me during the night, as I was sitting under the one electric light writing my story, bearing a precious apple.

  The best were the cooks: two Tajiks from the cosmopolitan northern town of Mazar-i-Sherif who were desperate to go home but couldn’t, because a front line cut the road t
hat leads that way from Kandahar. They took me under their wing, made me sit in their warm kitchen, gave me their bed—a stack of mattresses in an alcove in the wall—and served me endless cups of hot green tea all through the night. I slipped them dried apricots for the predawn meal, as the Taliban filed in to take away dishes of rice amid a din of clanking pots and clattering plates I was too tired to get up and record.

  So there was I—an American female—the pampered pet of the Taliban during the death throes of their regime.

  The final day of this bizarre jaunt was a textbook study in what is wrong with journalists. The rumor that the Taliban might take us to Kandahar was dying hard, and my colleagues were determined to keep it alive. At the press conference the previous day, the spokesman had said our hosts would hold a meeting to decide. But now it was clear they wanted us to leave. “Expelled,” snarled some TV crews, furious that they wouldn’t get a shot at “the only story in town.” They proceeded to put the heat on, demanding the Taliban take us to Kandahar, or at least let us stay in Spin Boldak for a few days.

  The LA Times and I started packing. We called in the two closest Taliban contacts we had made, the security chief and a former deputy foreign minister, for solemn thanks, expressing our gratitude for the time they had taken with us, the hospitality they had shown under difficult circumstances—telling them it was a mark of their honor that they had done so much to protect us, that though our countries might be in conflict, as people we didn’t have to be, and similar well-intentioned efforts at bridging a gap whose contours we would never fully discern.

  Two more tenets of Pashtun Wali, hospitality and the protection of guests—be they mortal enemies—lie deep as bedrock among Pashtuns, as I came to understand fully in that improbable place. The deputy foreign minister was displaying unfeigned anguish at what he felt to be the poor welcome his Taliban had shown us, and at their inability to guarantee our safe passage to Kandahar amid the turmoil of a finishing war.

  To me it seemed fairly clear—after four journalists had been executed on the Jalalabad road—that if your hosts, with whom your government is at war, ask you to leave their care for security reasons, then you do so. You do not insinuate that they are breaking their word, or being frivolous, or that they merely have something to hide. In my group, we had an ear close to the ground, and knew just how dicey the situation had become. I told other colleagues I thought they were out of their minds even to contemplate doing anything other than leaving for Quetta.

  But the frenzy was on. I overheard journalists offering to pay drivers anything— a thousand dollars, five thousand dollars—to take them to Kandahar. Meanwhile, the crowd on the walls was getting hungrier and hungrier looking. We heard rumors they had been encouraged to loot. The previous night the Taliban had beefed up security to include a man with a rocket launcher posted near us. The LA Times and I loaded our cars.

  Then transpired an interesting scene. A tall black man—Nubian looking, from southern Egypt or Sudan, maybe—appeared from nowhere, sporting a belt bag emblazoned with the flame-shaped emblem of the Qatari cable television station Al-Jazeera. Immediately the Taliban crowded around him. A few minutes later we heard the final order for all of us to return to Quetta. The LA Times’s well-connected translator murmured to me, as we sat for a moment on a stoop taking in the scene, “Don’t look at the Al-Qaeda guy.”

  I jumped. “What Al-Qaeda guy? Where?”

  The translator discreetly eyed the black man. I said he looked like a Jazeera crew member.

  “Of course,” said the translator. “They support Al-Qaeda a lot.”

  The role of the Qatari station in the events following 9/11 was a running debate among journalists and the public at large, as the U.S. government lashed out at Al-Jazeera and pressured American news organizations not to air its footage derived from Al-Qaeda sources. Over several years, the station had earned respect worldwide as one of the only Arab news outlets with any independence, and its exposure of something other than the official U.S. line about this war was, I thought, useful. At the same time, Al-Jazeera’s degree of access to the Taliban regime and its status as the chosen recipient for Al-Qaeda videotapes did raise doubts about its affiliations.

  I only wished the debate over Al-Jazeera would draw a clearer distinction between its journalism, which hardly seemed to violate the codes of the profession, at least no more than Fox News did, and actions its management or staff might take to provide concrete assistance to one party to the conflict—such as what I witnessed in Spin Boldak.

  I later asked my driver: “Did you see that tall black guy working for Al-Jazeera?” He confirmed the Al-Qaeda connection. “He’s doing jihad,” he said. He had asked a Taliban counterpart about the man, and had been told that this “Al-Jazeera crew member” had called Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar on a satellite phone from outside our compound, and received the order to make us leave.

  We were given an hour and a half. I ambled over to the BBC, whose Adam Brookes was becoming a friend, to let him in on what I had learned. I was thunderstruck that he and his crew were even hesitating. When I explained about the Nubian man, they said: “Well that’s that, then,” and very efficiently set to breaking down their camp. At CNN, by contrast, the frustration boiled over like lye. The producer got on the satellite phone to Quetta to ask contacts among Pakistani Taliban to intercede with our minders to let us stay. What value any protection might have had if extracted under such duress apparently didn’t enter into his calculations.

  At length, more or less on schedule, we decamped. I gave my driver my French jackknife, and he tenderly took the compact disk bearing a traveler’s prayer that hangs from his rearview mirror between thumb and first finger. “It’s like you people cross yourself,” explained my interpreter. I didn’t need it spelled out. And we roared out of the gate, in a cacophony of beeping horns. Three truckloads of stick-wielding Taliban preceded us to scatter the crowd. Najibullah, the black-haired, bespectacled security chief we had gotten to know, kept driving up and down the length of the convoy like an anxious herd dog. And he posted himself, radio in hand, at the border crossing to see us through.

  The exercise was an empty one, of course. No matter how stiff a front the hard-liners tried to put up, their regime was disintegrating. This was the third week in November, 2001.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN

  DECEMBER 2001

  BY EARLY DECEMBER, the two anti-Taliban proxy forces stood poised on each side of Kandahar. Future President Karzai had set up a base camp in a village about an hour’s drive to the north of town, and Shirzai and his patchwork troops were dug in at that strategic pass on the road to the south, ready for the American command to move in on the airport. The Al-Qaeda Arabs had retreated to hardened shelters there, where they were being subjected to an earth-gutting pounding by U.S. bombers.

  Under pressure of this persuasive variety, the drawn-out negotiations inside the city of Kandahar were finally bearing fruit.

  The man Karzai had chosen to lead these talks was Akrem’s tribal elder, Mullah Naqib. That’s the Mullah Naqib who posted himself at the left turn in Arghandab waving our funeral cortege on. The same Mullah Naqib who had permitted the Taliban to seize Kandahar in the first place in 1994—over Akrem’s furious opposition. How these bewildering reconfigurations came about is part of the underlying pattern of events in Kandahar. Not for months did I begin to perceive it.

  Without contest the most celebrated resistance commander locally, credited with driving the Soviets out of the region all the way north to Urozgan Province, the leader of one of the most populous and warlike local tribes, Mullah Naqib is an important power broker in Kandahar. And yet he is a curious rendition of a fearsome Afghan gun lord. He greets you enthusiastically, an irrepressible grin splitting his oval, bushy-bearded face. In a country where shrewd lying is the accepted mode of communication, Mullah Naqib is guileless, if prone to exaggeration. I gave him a small pocketknife once, on my return f
rom a U.S. trip. He treated it like the Hope Diamond, turning it over and over in his hand, showing it off to his son, and proclaiming that if he had been to the United States himself and looked in all the stores, this was the very knife he would have chosen. Even in the thick of bitter factional fighting in 1992, when a rival group rocketed one of his trucks and killed all thirteen fighters inside, Mullah Naqib refused to seek retribution. He was just back from a pilgrimage to Mecca. “I can’t be killing Muslims now,” he told his angry men.

  To put together my puzzle of those late November days of 2001, the final spasms of the Taliban regime, I needed Mullah Naqib’s account too. And he, a year and a half later, was happy to oblige.

  “Three days after President Karzai went inside,” he told me, “he sent me a satellite phone.” By then Mullah Naqib had withdrawn from Kandahar proper to his tribe’s heartland just to the north. Leafy Arghandab is blessed with a river. Tangled orchards, like unkempt forests inside their earthen walls, could hardly offer more of a contrast with dun-colored Kandahar. When the farmers flood their land to let the trees drink, you have to pick your way through the groves on small raised paths, or sink ankle deep into the muck. Mullah Naqib was living in the fort he built to direct the anti-Soviet resistance.

  “The Karzais’ man brought a satellite phone to me in Arghandab,” he remembers. “He said Mr. Karzai wanted to talk to me. So we called the president, and he asked me: ‘What do you need? Money? Guns?’ I told him, ‘Both!’”

  From then on, the two friends talked every day. “I was giving Karzai advice on tactics,” Mullah Naqib grins. “I’d say, ‘Do this, now do that’ because he doesn’t know anything about fighting. And he told me to try to separate the Taliban from Mullah Omar.”