The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  To consume this gargantuan feast, we were seven. Jalali and his wife, a tiny pistol of a lady, on her first visit from the United States since the Taliban collapse, dressed, the way I did in Kandahar, in an embroidered man’s tunic. I registered, with gratitude, a current of sisterhood. There was Jalali’s housemate, the deputy defense minister, revoltingly overweight. He would sit silently inside his rolls of fat, looking out like a malevolent Buddha. His wife was a Walt Disney witch, long fingernails filed to a tapering point and daubed with silver polish, face like a Venetian mask. There was another man, positively normal in this company, and Qayum, and me, Cassandra.

  I went on and on that night. I lectured them about the warlords, about Pakistan, about the mounting danger, telling Qayum and Jalali they didn’t know what they were talking about.

  That one drew an uncharacteristically harsh retort from Qayum: “After a year and a half here, you think you know more about Afghanistan than we do?”

  I did. Kandahar was burning, and they were enjoying their meal in a shaded back garden, oblivious. When they tried to jolly me out of it, their smug condescension only infuriated me more.

  There was one piece of business I had to conduct with Jalali. Akrem’s police force had gone unpaid for months. I had told the minister about this on an earlier visit to Kabul. The central government, I learned then, had been transferring the money to Governor Shirzai for distribution, but Governor Shirzai, naturally, was not passing it along to Akrem. Even that equation was a little theoretical, it emerged. Despite his promises at the big governors’ meeting that May, Shirzai was still keeping customs revenues for himself. So in retaliation the central government was sending little if any money to Kandahar. Shirzai was not the one who suffered. He made sure his private militiamen got paid out of the customs dues. It was Akrem who, starved of public funds, could cover the cigarettes his men smoked only thanks to contacts in the Alokozai business community. Akrem, and his police force, was living on donations again.

  I spelled all this out in front of the assembled company. I was stunned that Jalali didn’t understand why, given the context in Kandahar, the riches Shirzai was robbing from the Afghan state and people would never make it to the police department.

  When we returned home, Qayum gave me a dressing down. Jalali was my elder, and he was a minister, for God’s sake. It was unforgivable for me to behave that way in public. And another thing: hadn’t he told me not to breathe a word about Pakistan in front of the deputy defense minister?

  Oh? Did Pakistan control officials so high up? Even Qayum was cowed?

  The next day, I phoned Jalali to apologize. He accepted, gamely telling me to keep it up, he liked it. That afternoon, he called me back: he had checked the records; I was right; he would be sending the police salaries to Kandahar.

  I sat in on the distribution of some of the money. To my surprise, Akrem was not even present. He directed me to his finance department in a different building, and got on with the business he was attending to. I had assumed that he, like any other Afghan official, would want to bask in the glow that day, taking personal credit for the arrival of the money.

  I did not know Akrem well enough yet.

  Anyway, it did not matter much. I was about to lose the war over his future that I had been waging with Jalali all summer long.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE PROMOTION OF VICE AND THE PUNISHMENT OF VIRTUE

  AUGUST 2003

  AKREM WAS ON the phone. It was August 13, nearly noon. He had received a summons from the ministry; he had to go to Kabul. His voice was flat. He was calling because he wondered if I would mind checking if there was a flight on one of the planes that catered to humanitarians. The U.S. Army still occupied Kandahar’s civilian airport, and he could only fly if I got him a seat.

  Oh no. I knew what this meant. And I couldn’t keep the knowledge out of my voice. “Oh, Comandan Saab…” I stammered. He was silent. “Of course. I’ll call you right back.”

  “Salamat wosai,” he thanked me gently. He knew what it meant too.

  I looked at my watch. I knew there was no way, but I called the UN and the subsidized humanitarian airline anyway. If Akrem had to go by road, he would be driving all night. The thought of it, in my alarmed state, terrified me.

  I remember exchanging a couple of calls back and forth with him, asking what time he had been ordered to report, and waiting while he checked with the ministry. Ten tomorrow morning, came the answer. That settled it. There were no more flights that day, and the next day’s UN plane would get him there too late. He had no choice but to take that road. It seemed unfair. Governor Shirzai had been called to Kabul too; he had flown up that morning. Jalali could have had the courtesy to give Akrem the same prior notice.

  “Call me when you leave,” was all I could say.

  He did, his voice reaching me as if through water from his satellite phone, some ways outside Kandahar. It was around 5:00 P. M. I had never set off for Kabul later than dawn.

  The next morning, I started calling him as soon as I woke up. I couldn’t get him. I called some more. I imagined him meeting with the president, his phone turned off. I imagined a lot of things.

  Finally, in the early afternoon, I found out what had happened. It wasn’t as bad as some of the things I had conjured up, but it was pretty bad.

  On that impossible road, with the sine curves and the ruts carved into the hardened clay and the desert floor on either side split open by dry river beds, his bodyguards’ truck had tipped into a ravine. Fighters sit on benches fitted into the open backs of those trucks. One man was killed; another—slight, with a pointy face—suffered a compound fracture of the femur; and another whom I came to know later, who looks like a Mexican out of a television Western with his drooping mustaches and crossed bandoliers, broke his shin. There must have been a lot of other wrenches and bruises; I didn’t hear about them. Akrem had worked through the night at the crumpled wreck, calling for a car to carry the body back to Kandahar, and then rushing on to Kabul and the Emergency Hospital near Qayum’s house.

  And so Zabit Akrem arrived in the Afghan capital, his mind otherwise occupied, after his dismissal had been broadcast on the radio and TV.

  He and Governor Shirzai had both been removed. Shirzai was promoted to run the ministry of urban development. As had been suggested months earlier, his longtime confidante, Yusuf Pashtun—that same cabinet minister whom April Witt had quoted in her naughty article—was sent down to Kandahar to take over the governorship. And there was no job for Zabit Akrem.

  Why had I bothered meddling? Shirzai was now promoted. He was replaced in Kandahar by a fellow tribesman and intimate, a man who had served him faithfully for the past decade, only leaving his side when President Karzai had appointed him minister. Now, deprived of Akrem, Kandahar was at the complete mercy of Shirzai’s mafia. And the new governor, according to three separate sources, was not just some Pakistani sidekick, he was a close interlocutor of the intelligence agency, the ISI.

  My shocked and self-lacerating reverie was interrupted by a call from Dubai. It was my boss, Qayum Karzai, on his way to the United States. In other words, I suddenly realized, he and Jalali had bolted Kabul the minute they announced the shuffle. Well, well, well. How very brave.

  “So, how’s it going down there?” Qayum wanted to know.

  These big people—I was picturing it now—the president’s older brother and his pal the minister of interior, had been standing on the airplane steps when they fired their warlord. The steps had pulled back and the plane had whisked them off to safety, just in case anything went wrong. I was here in Kandahar, in the line of fire. And they wanted a situation report.

  The situation in Kandahar was flat calm, I informed Qayum.

  How very odd it was after all that effort. After all the hand-wringing and plan-making and climax and anticlimax, the decision, when it finally came, seemed almost offhand. Far from being consulted or asked for technical support, the Americans had not even been in
formed.

  In any case, the U.S. Afghan mission was back where it had started. Ambassador Finn was gone but not yet replaced, and the whole team I had come to like and rely on—Bill Taylor and Kurt Amend and one or two others—was back in Washington. Colonel Campbell had taken up a new post at the Pentagon. But his unit’s rotation in Afghanistan had been extended. The exhausted, homesick, disgruntled soldiers were on automatic pilot, while a three-month interim commander struggled to learn how to pronounce local place-names. There was no one home again in Fortress USA. It was just astonishing. It was as though President Karzai had made his changes in the dead of night, when no one was looking. And disaster had not struck.

  Over the next day or two, the significance of this event I had so urgently desired sank in. And I was devastated.

  In effect, Shirzai had not been removed at all. His brother remained at the airport in charge of outer rim security, reaping the attendant benefits. A henchman of his and of Pakistan’s was now effectively running the police department, so all of the brutal petty commanders still held sway at their checkpoints from Kandahar to the border. Factotum Khalid Pashtoon had swiftly transferred his allegiance to the new governor. My friends the unsavory but sometimes usefully insubordinate Achekzais were being cleared out of their positions on the border. Ties to Pakistan at the top of the provincial administration were even stronger than before. And the best official I had encountered in Afghanistan was unemployed.

  Everything, in other words, was the opposite of what was being described in the press, and to and by the international community in Kabul: applause for the arrival of a qualified technocrat to replace the warlord Shirzai.

  For two full weeks, I turned the facts over and over in my mind. How could my friends the Karzais possibly be so stupid? How could these mature Afghan government leaders not see the implications of what they had done? A great service to Pakistan and to the cause of corruption in the Afghan south.

  And then it hit me: a blow to the gut that left me struggling for air and on the edge of tears for days. Maybe they weren’t being stupid. Maybe they had made their move this way on purpose. Maybe they had been conniving all along with the forces they claimed so loudly to be combating.

  It was the only thing that made sense.

  And I realized something else: the forces at work were more powerful than I could ever get a purchase on. The people I had believed in must be compromised in ways I could never understand. I was going to have to part company with them, I realized—though it would take some time and some sorting out of my deeply conflicted feelings in order finally to disengage.

  Somehow, it was the president of the Ghiljai elders’ tribal council who continued to host Gul Agha Shirzai’s farewell lunch. Bustling with busy energy, he met us at the gate of the hotel he had reserved for the purpose. He showed us to the verandah, where the drivers and bodyguards were seated. Abdullah and I looked at each other. We looked at the French windows opening onto the hall where the guests of honor were arriving. And we made for the windows, pushing through the seated servants.

  The whole cast of characters was present. Gul Agha Shirzai was wedged on a couch next to his original rival for the governorship, Mullah Naqib. I greeted Ahmad Wali Karzai and the new governor, Yusuf Pashtun, under his shaggy, glowering eyebrows. And, opposite me at table, next to his weak-faced replacement, sat Zabit Akrem. He didn’t speak. He was just murmuring under his breath as he fiercely fingered his string of green stone beads. I later learned that the Ghiljai council president, whose steadfast benefactor Akrem had been, had asked him to leave. Gul Agha Shirzai had threatened not to come if he was there. Akrem was feeling homicidal. He was saying prayers to hold himself back.

  The Ghiljai council president, who in private had flung at Shirzai every insult he could conjure, delivered an orgy of praise as a welcome speech.

  At the end of the meal, when the guests were collecting in a clot at the door, Shirzai, the freshly appointed minister of housing and urban development, called me over. He called loudly, so everyone would hear.

  “Sarah,” he said. “I’m giving up warlordism. I’m going to Kabul to be a minister.”

  “That’s good,” I replied—still, at that stage, excavating some humor in the thing. “It’s my turn. I’m going to be a warlord now.”

  CHAPTER 28

  MAZAR-I-SHERIF

  SEPTEMBER 2003–SEPTEMBER 2004

  AFTER AKREM’S REMOVAL had been announced and everyone was back in Kandahar, his loyal, hotheaded Alokozai tribesmen thronged to him. “This is an outrage,” they would cry, seated in his receiving room. “What should we do?” Akrem would take a breath, then raise a hand to quiet them. “I work for the central government of this country,” he would say. “And this is the central government’s decision. We have to respect it.” He told his men to go back to their barracks and their checkpoints, and to give their obedience to the new chief of police.

  I was impressed. In his shoes, I could never have come up with that.

  Then Akrem returned to Kabul, to await the pleasure of President Karzai.

  I made a several trips up to the capital that fall. Qayum was back from the United States, and we were wrangling about our organization, Afghans for Civil Society.

  “What about Mazar-i-Sherif for Zabit Akrem,” he put to me, during an early visit. We were sitting in the shade of his verandah, admiring the ripening grapes that dangled from the small arbor.

  Mazar-i-Sherif is an absolutely beautiful town, clear across Afghanistan from Kandahar, over the towering Hindu Kush range, part of the central Asian steppe culture beyond it that created the marvel of Samarqand. Mazar-the-Holy is named for its ancient turquoise-tiled mosque sanctuary. During the Taliban war to take over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, Mazar had been the last major holdout. Battles there, in 1997 and 1998, were the very worst of the war. First the Uzbeks, under their charismatic, double-crossing leader, Rashid Dostum, handed the Taliban their most devastating defeat to date: more than six thousand “religious students” were killed, wounded, or captured, including a harvest of seasoned officers and hundreds of Pakistani “advisers.” A year later, the Taliban took their revenge. The killing spree, when they captured cosmopolitan Mazar, went on for two full days. Using local Pashtuns as guides, the Taliban hunted down members of northern ethnic groups for a triple-tap execution: head, heart, and genitals. Prisoners were packed in cargo containers and left out in the desert.1 Now, with the tables turned again after the Taliban demise, Mazar was taking it out on local Pashtuns.

  Mazar? God, no. It’s a death sentence. I tried to persuade Qayum out of it.

  Confabbing in the living room of the house a friend had loaned Akrem, or in Qayum’s patch of garden where I could host him in a bit of style, or over the phone when I was in Kandahar, Akrem and I would size up cities. “Farah is way too small,” our chats would go. “What about Herat?” And we would analyze the political situation in Herat. As we went over and over the possibilities, I gradually came to roost on one: Kabul. Zabit Akrem would be the perfect police chief for the Afghan capital. I told Qayum. I told Akrem’s boss, Interior Minister Ali Jalali. Jalali laughed at me.

  And so we kept configuring. Akrem was doing the same thing with other friends, with his tribal elders in Kandahar, with his family. Always, Mazar wound up on the bottom of the list.

  Akrem would speak in these terms, weighing preferences and disadvantages, with me and others close to him. But not with President Karzai when the president summoned him to the Palace. With President Karzai, Akrem played it gruff: “I am a soldier, you are my commander. Where you order me to go, I go.”

  Once, he invited me to dinner. It was a gesture, a wordless sign of gratitude for my devotion. And it embarrassed me. I knew he didn’t have the money.

  In Afghanistan, guests of note are invited to occasions along with their friends and retinues. It would never occur to a host to plan for his honored guest in the singular. Akrem planned for a company. The tiny high command of A
CS was in Kabul for a showdown with Qayum. Even Amir, our Iranian-born U.S. coordinator, had flown over from Boston. Akrem looked the four of us up and down, and wondered where the rest of my followers were.

  He was greeting us at the steps of the Iranian Restaurant, one of the classiest in town. It is built in the round and furnished inside like a tent, tapestries circling the walls. We had a private room with a table eight feet long, covered in food. It seemed like ostentation until I thought for a moment—and I understood that this was just the loudest way Akrem could think of to say thanks.

  I don’t remember what we discussed that night. I remember Akrem and Amir locking on to each other, pulling their chairs back into a corner after we were done eating, leaning into each other’s conversation. Those two deep men found solace in each other. Each had been a refugee—the fact had conditioned their lives—one fleeing to the other’s land, Iran, the other away from it. They spoke in Persian, Amir’s Iranian accent sounding oddly effeminate to me, Akrem’s voice, still clumsy with Pashtu intonations, hewn out of rock.

  Akrem and I had time that autumn to indulge in quiet reflection between our sizing up of cities. “Do you think the war on terror is real?” I asked him one October day as we sat on Qayum’s back porch.