Inside Afghanistan: A review of The Punishment of Virtue
January 3, 2007
Mike Thicke

The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, by Sarah Chayes. Penguin Press (2006).

Narrative journalism offers something of a paradox. Traditionally we expect journalists to be detached, objective. One of the criticisms of the embedded journalists program in Iraq is that it forces even the most well intentioned journalist to view events from the soldiers' perspective. If that criticism is valid, then it must apply to journalists who are embedded in any situation. So why would one give credence to any work that is deeply embedded in one segment of society? It can only provide us with a “warped” picture of the situation; it cannot be objective.

Sarah Chayes' The Punishment of Virtue is anything but objective. Not only did Chayes live with local Kandaharis while working as a correspondent for NPR during the initial stages of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but when her stint was over she came back as a director of an NGO run by Hamid Karzai's brother, “Afghans for a Civil Society”. What makes this book so special is its total refusal to attempt to even approach objectivity. It is an honest story about a female journalist who lives and works in a male-dominated world. (It is not only the Afghans who she interacts with who are overwhelmingly male, but the State Department officials, the Special Forces, and the foreign journalists.)

Chayes' title, The Punishment of Virtue, is taken from a division of the Taliban government called the “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice”. It was as part of this ministry that the religious police committed the brutality that has come to be one of the primary justifications for the invasion of Afghanistan. The title is also an apt summary of what Chayes observes in Afghanistan: the systematic punishment and marginalization of any people, whether they are Afghans or foreigners, who are honest and well intentioned. It is only the most corrupt and self-serving who are rewarded.

The principle character of the book is Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwai, who became the chief of police in Kandahar immediately after the invasion. The story is framed by Khakrezwai's murder in 2003 by, Chayes believes, the Pakistani secret service. Although Chayes initially viewed Khakrezwai as an antagonist who was an impediment to her independence, she came to view him as one of the only honest and competent people in a position of power in Afghanistan. It was for his honesty, his refusal to be bought off, and perhaps most of all his effectiveness, that Chayes believes he was murdered. Khakrezwai offered a vision of hope for Afghanistan, a vision of how the country could save itself, and this went directly against the interests of the local power structure.

The immediate antagonist for both Khakrezwai and Chayes is Gul Agha Shirzai, the local warlord governor. Shirzai is not politically motivated or ideological; he simply wants personal power and wealth, and is adept at securing what he wants.

Perhaps the most notable of Shirzai's achievements was his envelopment of the US Special Forces in Kandahar. The governor managed to arrange it so that all interaction between the Special Forces and Afghans was mediated by the governor's men. So whenever an American spoke to an Afghan, the translator was provided by Shirzai, and was presumably able to affect the conversation significantly, not to mention simply reporting back the Shirzai everything that happened. And it went much further than that. Shirzai provided nearly every service that the military asked for locally – from security to pickup trucks to crushed gravel. The Shirzais even once swapped marijuana to base soldiers in exchange for falsifying some fuel shipment records.

Chayes' relation of her conversation with an officer is particularly telling:

“The military is very pleased with him,” the officer was saying. Personally, he found him “the most helpful governor in Afghanistan.” His dealings with Shirzai were nothing but positive: every time he'd “asked for stuff, it's happened.”

The officer described a friendship that was thickened over frequent dinner's at Razziq's [Gul Agha's brother] compound, where the Afghan and American comrades in arms would sprawl out in front of DVDs, beers in hand. (This in Afghanistan, where alcohol is not just illegal but severely taboo.) Ahmad Wali Karzai, by contrast, with his formal elegance, irritated the officer. He was too “stuck up.”

It must be said that there is something of brilliance in Gul Agha's approach. He comes across as a brutish gangster, but it is apparent that he is extremely skillful in manipulating the perceptions of his American guests. Given Chayes' portrayal of the Pashtuns as extremely conflict-adverse, Agha's ability to associate himself closely with the Americans also no doubt also made him almost unassailable from the central government's (that is, Hamid Karzai's) perspective.

The slightly less immediate antagonist is Pakistan, and particularly the Pakistani ISI. From operating the only internet café in town, to harboring the Taliban, to assassinating her friend Khakrezwai, the ISI is a pervasive, though always just out of sight, presence. On the Taliban:

It was a nuisance deliberately stirred up across the border. This was evident to us in Kandahar because no effort was made to hide the fact in Pakistan. Taliban, advertising their affiliation by way of their dress or their explicit self-identification, were given privileged treatment at the border in Chaman; they paraded around Quetta; they carried guns and weapons-authorization cards issued by the Pakistani government; their offices and lodgings were located in a well-known Quetta neighborhood, previously provided to the anti-Soviet mujahideen. These insurgents were not squirreling themselves away in warrens in Afghan mountains or the supposedly uncontrolled tribal areas of norther Pakistan, as the Pakistani government artfully persuaded the West. They were manufactured and maintained, housed, trained, and equipped by stubborn, shortsighted officials in that very Pakistani government. Our allies.

Chayes explains that Pakistan's interest in Afghanistan has no deep geopolitical roots – Afghanistan is seen as a local strategic asset that, among other things, gives the country “strategic depth” in a possible conflict with India.

Although Chayes is certainly an activist – few could be more active - her background and perspective is not that of a typical social justice advocate. One officer in the US military, recommending her as a speaker, wrote in an email “She's like no journalist you've ever seen. She's a hawk!” This is a fairly accurate portrayal. She does not view the foreign presence as imperial, and throughout the book she attempts to work with the armed forces and the US government. She also relates her attempts to work with the National Endowment for Democracy without mention of the NED's dubious history. Her main problem with these organizations is their lack of activity. She takes a very pragmatic perspective, views the situation as solvable by practical means, and is bewildered by the lack of effective action taken by her country.

Chayes does not view the situation in Afghanistan as having any kind of ideological roots. On the contrary, she views the Pashtun culture, which has a long history of invasion by the empires that have surrounded it for thousands of years, as immune to fundamentalist ideology. The Taliban was able to seize power because they were in many ways less corrupt than their predecessors, not due to any sympathy to their beliefs. Neither of Chayes' principle antagonists, Shirzai or Pakistan, are viewed as operating with any kind of religious or political ideology, beyond selfish pragmatism. The failure in Afghanistan is thus seen not as something preordained and inevitable, but as caused by incompetence and mismatched goals. This is a story that has become very familiar in criticisms of US and Canadian operations in the country.

This has led Chayes to an impasse in her thinking. In a talk this September she said,  “If I were to do a prognosis, I can't see this turning around.... Everything that's happening now in Southern Afghanistan, I've been watching it arrive for the past four and a half years. And I have not seen anything turn around.” Chayes has not left Afghanistan; she has started some small-scale cooperatives there, for example a soap-making coop, but views the situation as hopeless. She describes her continued efforts as irrational, but says, “You know this old adage, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again'? I think it's wrong. I think it's, 'Even if you know you're not going to succeed, you have to try.' We don't have the right to abandon this struggle.” The meaning of this statement depends crucially on who you take “we” to refer to. If it is Americans, or the West, then it could be a direct quote from Stephen Harper. And of course, that would lead us to question what “succeed” means. If we take it to mean social activists, or Chayes and her close associates, then the statement takes on a whole new meaning. I think part of Chayes' conundrum in The Punishment of Virtue is that she is so reluctant to see that there is a difference between these two senses of “we”. The actions, and lack of action, that exasperate her so are only incomprehensible when it is assumed that her goals are aligned with those of the powerful.

Of course much of The Punishment of Virtue is a documentation of ineptitude on the part of various people and organizations, and thus it would be wrong to attribute the situation to some sort of well-orchestrated plan, but there are many instances where the only conclusion to be drawn is that those who Chayes appealed to for help simply did not want to help – they did not share her goals. Whether or not Chayes recognizes this, she does not come out and say it, though I got the sense that her thinking was going in this direction as her relationship with Hamid Karzai deteriorated.

Objectivity is a myth. Rather than something gained, it represents something lost. Facts become objective by losing their context. We do not see the fact's history; how the journalist first heard a rumor, then checked it, which sources the journalist trusted, which she did not, and why. While this loss clarifies the world for us and makes it comprehensible, it at the same time necessarily disempowers us and destroys our ability to dispute. Narratives such as The Punishment of Virtue restore agency to the reader through their transparency, by allowing us to see how the author arrived at her conclusions, and to make our own judgments about what to believe. So although readers of a website such as Seven Oaks may find themselves questioning some of Chayes' biases, I see that as a strength of the book. The personal and subjective nature of The Punishment of Virtue is exactly what makes it essential reading.

-Mike Thicke is a member of the Semantics Media Collective, which publishes The Knoll, a student journal at the University of British Columbia.

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