The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  But five centuries later, that lesson was lost on the international proponents of nation building in Afghanistan. Once I asked a USAID official what was holding up the project. She said, “If we financed that road, it would use up all our money. We could hardly be doing any other work in Afghanistan.”

  It would have been a better investment, I believe. That road was worth a thousand QUIPs.

  If it had been tackled in a timely fashion, the road would have energized the new Afghanistan. It would have helped ignite the economy of a whole region, as canny entrepreneurs like those tribal elders with their grapes spontaneously renewed their activity, reviving old patterns of trade and inventing new ones. It would have tapped into the immediate post-Taliban enthusiasm for the new order, vivid but fragile, and converted its potential before it soured into disappointment. A fast road would have eased the isolation of the Afghan south—an isolation bound up with reactionary Taliban ideology. Encouraging travel and communication among estranged provinces, the road would have helped cauterize the wounds left by two decades of war and mutual grudges. It would have enhanced security by increasing traffic and speed of access. It could have served as part of a program to disarm the gunmen who had reinfested Afghanistan. Platoons of young men, organized into a kind of Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps, could have taken pride in their new role reconstructing their homeland. Such an undertaking would have redounded to the credit of the fledgling Afghan government. And it would have redounded to the credit of the United States. Only a project of this magnitude, in Afghan eyes, was worthy of such a superpower. Village schools, while needed, seemed beneath American dignity.

  Work on the road finally did begin in the summer of 2003, a year and a half after the Taliban demise. Though welcome, it was very late. By then, enthusiasm for the new regime had died down; the people were disillusioned by yet another exercise in rhetoric. Resurgent Taliban had already regrouped. They turned the long, lonely construction site into a duck shoot, killing and kidnapping workers. Rather than serving as a means of demilitarizing gunmen, the construction work necessitated the arming of new ones. A private security firm, staffed by Afghan fighters, was set up to patrol the road.

  I was at a loss to understand what it was that had kept this manifestly vital project in abeyance for so long.

  Years later, a State Department official suggested an explanation. “Craig Buck,” he emphatically replied to my still-unanswered question. Dour Buck was head of USAID Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. “Craig said, ‘We don’t do roads, the World Bank does roads,’” recalled the State Department official. This sounded just like Buck, as I had experienced him at a meeting that verged on the insulting at the U.S. embassy.

  According to normal decision-making procedures, the main lines of U.S. policy in a context like postwar Afghanistan should be defined on a political level, at the State Department, for example. Subordinate agencies like USAID would be expected to carry out their activities in support and furtherance of the policy goals set above their level. But in the case of the road, according to this State Department official and others I asked, the policy vacuum allowed the local USAID representative to make the effective policy decision himself—with dramatic consequences. It took the direct intervention of President George W. Bush, a year on, to reverse it.

  There was another reason, as we discovered later, why the great machine that was supposed to deploy on all fronts churning out reconstruction for Afghanistan failed to gear up. The war in Iraq.

  Many people asked me what impact the opening of hostilities in the spring of 2003 had on the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. Was there a visible difference? Did the money gushing into Afghanistan suddenly dry up? The truth, as usual, proved to be unsimple. In terms of manpower, the Iraq effect was dramatic. Overnight, in early 2003, every one of our interlocutors at USAID was abruptly reassigned to Iraq. And yet that phenomenon does not fully explain the conditions we encountered. Off the cuff, my answer to the questions was different, challenging the assumption that underlay them: “What gush of money?” I wondered aloud, bemused. We never saw it on the ground in Afghanistan. It simply never materialized. Throughout that summer of 2002, we kept wondering what all the big players were waiting for. We would come up with different postulates. Later, information from officials on the ground as well as reporting in the United States indicated that resources were sucked away from Afghanistan before they even made it there. “As early as February 2002,” the same State Department official recalled to me, “assets were being pulled off of Afghanistan in preparation for the war in Iraq.”4

  Eventually, USAID did get back to us about our well. The project we were proposing seemed to fit all the QUIP criteria. And given Akokolacha’s specific plight, we believed, it would send a strong signal as to U.S. intentions in Afghanistan; it enjoyed unique backing from a local community in the United States. It was exactly the kind of hearts-and-minds project that USAID should fall all over itself to support. We were sure of it.

  The answer was no. The big public donors had jointly decided not to finance any more wells. An overall water strategy was needed first for drought-stricken Afghanistan.

  That smacked of planning, and we approved, in theory. We had seen how wells drilled at random—without reference to the water table, local water-use patterns, or the needs of neighbors—could upset the economies of entire villages. The future of the Afghan south would clearly depend on how it allocated its water.

  There were just two difficulties with USAID’s argument. One was that the urgently needed strategy was not on anyone’s drawing board. We had just approached the same Craig Buck at USAID with a plan to conduct a thorough interdisciplinary study of the Kandahar-area aquifer. We offered to develop a detailed map of the region’s water inputs and outputs, geological projections as to where untapped resources might lie, and recommendations on how to enhance existing sources of water, as well as draft regulations governing water prospecting and use, and materials for a public information campaign on water conservation. “I’m not funding any studies,” Buck had snapped at us. “I want to feed hungry children.” Where was the water strategy USAID was waiting for to come from?

  The second difficulty with the major donors’ well moratorium was that it was undifferentiated. No one thought about examining the specific circumstances of different villages and giving exemptions to those that might fail without water and expel their residents into the tide of returning refugees and other displaced people already surging into Afghan-istan’s towns.

  At a get-together with resourceful U.S. Army hydrologist Ben Houston and his Civil Affairs team, we poured out our woes. Houston repeated the stories of their experience with irrigation wells: generators breaking down, rich families who paid for the fuel monopolizing the water, children throwing stones down them for laughs and breaking the submersible pumps. He suggested we drill a hand-pump well. It wouldn’t water crops, but it would keep people alive. He thought it would cost about a thousand dollars.

  A thousand dollars, we thought; that’s cheap. We could get a thousand out of our Concord money. We wouldn’t have to ask for outside help.

  We drove to Akokolacha to look for a site. Several village men generously volunteered their own land. Avoiding that trap, we chose a place near the dry canal where villagers were used to going to collect water anyway. In an impromptu ceremony, one of the elders balanced a forked stick in his hands as a divining rod and, following its indications, pointed out the spot for digging.

  We hired a two-man crew, equipped not with a drill—no such thing was available in Kandahar—but a great length of steel pipe five inches across, some cables, and a rusty generator-powered engine. The men erected a tall metal tripod and suspended the pipe vertically from its center, like a pendulum. Then, with the aid of the engine and a simple gear contraption, they would hoist that pipe up and let it drop down with a resounding clang, like a pile driver. Thus was the well “drilled,” or rather, punched into the earth. When water was struck
, it manifested as rich mud oozing up around the pipe as it was heaved out of the ground.

  We would go out almost every day to inspect the work, and encourage and cajole the two-man team tending the machine under the blazing sun. The job was almost complete when we noticed a pair of awfully familiar-looking tripods in the central part of the hamlet, right outside the chief elder’s house, and hardly a hundred yards apart. What on earth? We ambled over to the driver of a white car marked with a local contractor’s logo, and wondered who was financing these other two wells.

  “The Americans,” said the driver, Kandahar’s term for the U.S. troops.

  Surely not. Hadn’t Ben Houston explained to us that Civil Affairs wasn’t paying for wells? Wasn’t he the one who told us to drill our own? Didn’t he know that we had diverted some of our precious building funds for the purpose?

  On our next visit to the U.S. base to see the Civil Affairs team, we put it to them: “Why did you guys finance two wells in Akokolacha when you told us you couldn’t do wells?” The CA officers swore they weren’t working in Akokolacha. We shrugged, bemused.

  It took Ben Houston’s return from leave some weeks later to clear up the mystery. The well moratorium had been lifted. The village where the two wells were dug was indeed Akokolacha. But it had been identified to the CA team by a different name, to induce confusion. With a skill honed over centuries, our villagers had successfully played the foreigners for an increase in their subsidy.

  Never mind. Akokolacha hamlet now has three wells.

  CHAPTER 15

  SHOWDOWN WITH SHIRZAI

  OCTOBER 2002

  I TOOK A running leap up the mound of one of Akokolacha’s former houses, with a clap of my hands. Scrabbling for balance, I dug an undamaged mud brick out of the dirt. “Kushnian-o!” I called to the children. “Rassi! Come here!” A little boy with a smile that hovered between timid and entranced trotted up to the base of the mound and stretched out his arms. “Rmm…Rmm…,” I mimicked a bulldozer. I loaded up the little boy with two mud bricks and sent him off.

  Work had at last begun at our building site, and we were sorting, for nothing is wasted in Afghanistan. We were going through the debris, piling up usable mud bricks and leaving the hopelessly broken ones impacted in the mounds of clay that would later be removed. The children quickly got into the game. Even Hajji Baba, the crotchety old man the village chose to receive the first house, would urge me to pile yet another brick onto his spindly limbs. Though the kids, unused to this sort of attention, got a frenetic, shrieking kick out of it, and though the pace of work definitely picked up when we arrived, the village men kept their distance, squatting on the broken walls, smirking.

  Progress was steady. Soon the new houses were laid out with string and wooden pegs; then lines were scratched into the ground and foundation trenches dug. Then one day the Karzais’ family engineer Abdullah, now my de facto deputy, came into my office: “There’s a problem with the stone for Akokolacha.”1

  Abdullah was a case. He was one of the pieces of broken wreckage thrown on shore by Afghanistan’s twenty-five-year storm. His excessive generosity and attentiveness were beguiling. He was protective, funny, and indispensable. But his heart was corroded by anger and contempt for his fellow Afghans. “An atom bomb,” he swore, was the only solution for Kandahar. And for the Hazaras, a minority ethnic group. And for residents of Wardak or Farah provinces. “If I were in charge,” I later found out he had told the residents of Akokolacha, “you would never get new houses.”

  With unerring precision, Abdullah embodied exactly those caricature Kandahari traits he held up to me as objects of revulsion. He stole from Afghans for Civil Society, inflating receipts or skimming bills out of petty cash. But daily—hourly, often—he accused some local contractor or shopkeeper of theft. He tyrannized the staff, calling them names, withholding their money, and firing them if they dared speak up. But with the powerful, he hung his head and followed orders on the bound. This, he told me many times, was what was wrong with Kandaharis: they cowered at force and terrorized the weak. He ventured confessions about his sex with adolescent boys—“a lot,” he beamed once, shyly, “five or six times a day”—while loudly condemning Kandahar society for enshrining this ancient habit. His was an elaborate double life, his deeds an almost perfect negative image of his words.

  To my discredit, it took me fully two years to figure all this out. My judgment impaired by isolation, by my aching need for someone to talk to—someone to trust—I made excuses for his behavior, and I empowered him. Precisely the same way, I realized later with a gasp, that the U.S. military persisted in empowering the warlords.

  This delayed epiphany gave me some insight, anyway, into the Americans’ weakness for local allies who provided them with whatever they needed—trucks, gravel, “intelligence”—and who convinced them that everyone else was a lethal and cunning foe.

  It was one September day, well before these things came clear, that Abdullah announced: “There’s a problem with the stone for Akokolacha.”

  “What problem?”

  “Gul Agha’s soldiers stopped our tractors. They need the stone for themselves.”

  I ceased what I was doing: “What do you mean, they need the stone for themselves?”

  Abdullah shrugged.

  In this measure does relief work in Afghanistan resemble reporting: no truth is discernible at a distance; no one’s word conveys the circumstances with meaningful accuracy.

  “Zu,” I said, pushing back my chair. “Let’s go.”

  We swung aboard the ponderous black Toyota Land Cruiser that Ahmad Wali Karzai had donated to Afghans for Civil Society—a piece of Taliban booty, like Mullah Omar’s cow, black and lyre horned, who lived behind the house. We left our compound and entered the fray that is Kandahar traffic.

  Impatient white station wagons push past former Taliban pickup trucks; two-wheeled taxi wagons drawn by tasseled horses stop for passengers; minivans with children clinging to the roof racks among the bales and bundles, overloaded donkey barrows, similar barrows bearing similar burdens heaved along by men instead of donkeys, wheeled fruit stands, wheeled popcorn and ice-cream stands, bicycles bearing turbaned elders—all of these jostle for room on the lumpy roads. And like shiny dung-beetles, the brightly painted three-wheeled rickshaws tootle over, around, under, and through all the various obstacles. There is something joyous about this riot, and given Kandahar’s small size, something inevitably sociable. Lights are flicked in greeting to friends in oncoming cars; hands are raised and conversations pursued regardless of honking tie-ups on either side; and, in my case, frequent traffic jams are caused by friendly cops at intersections loping over to shake my hand. I must be the first female they have ever seen behind a wheel.

  Past the double gates that mark the edge of the city, where the jingling transport trucks line up to pay their tolls, it abruptly thins out. The confusion of the town is replaced by a silent, brown expanse.

  Only one line of hills troubles the becalmed topography along the road that leads out to Akokolacha, and the airport and Pakistan beyond. The rock teeth of these hills, jutting up from gums of scree, close in on the road from the right, lifting it over a small saddle, then ebb away to its left. These are the hills that feed the stone quarry.

  We turned up a sandy track to a rough cavity and called to the quarryman’s son. In the amphitheater created by the gouging out of the stone from the hills, the workers gathered around us. “A totally bad person,” their spokesman told us, had come the previous day with a Kalashnikov-toting tough, twisted a fistful of collar up under the young man’s chin—he mimed the gesture—and warned that no one, but no one, was to take stone from the quarry.

  The “bad person” in question was Razziq Shirzai, the brother of Kandahar governor Gul Agha.

  Tires ground gravel as I wheeled the truck around to go see the quarryman, seated in a straw-thatched lean-to at the gas station he owns by the road. He is a smiling, portly man who leans back
slightly, as though to accommodate the thick beard fanned out upon his chest.

  The Shirzais were opening their own gravel and cement plant right next to his operation. They had imported Punjabi labor from Pakistan. Workers who did not even speak the local language were building the installation. In the meantime, the Shirzais had arrogated the quarryman’s contract with the U.S. military base for the tons of gravel and stone it required. When they were not able to keep up with demand, they would buy gravel from this man at market rates, about $8 a tractor load, and then resell to the Americans for more than $100.

  Now the Shirzais were forbidding him to sell any uncrushed stone at all. Nor could anyone else drive a tractor up to the exposed bone of a hill and break off rocks for personal use. At a time when reconstruction was Afghanistan’s top priority, it was illegal, by government fiat, to obtain the raw material to lay the foundations. The symbolism of it almost felled me.

  The quarryman’s twangy voice startled me out of my swirl of righteous anger. “In Islam,” he was saying, “the mountains belong to everyone. No one can call them his private property. But they showed me papers they brought from the ministry in Kabul.”

  It was the old practice of looting turned inward, I mused: Governor Shirzai, unable in this day and age to sally forth to India in search of plunder, was plundering the resources of his own province and constituents.

  The only way around the ban, the quarryman was telling us, was to bring a written order from the governor himself.

  “Zu,” I said to Abdullah. “Let’s go see the governor.”

  The ancient governor’s palace, the one built by Ahmad Shah Durrani, was being renovated according to Shirzai’s taste. His temporary residence was in New Town, a quarter mile outside the invisible gates to the old bazaar. It is set behind high concrete walls in the middle of a park.