The Punishment of Virtue (17 page)

The tale of one group particularly moved him. The delegation, led by an elder with a running sore on one hand, explained that their village, Akokolacha, was in ruins. Abutting the perimeter of the Kandahar airport, it had been caught in that last withering barrage of U.S. bombing that delivered the deathblow to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Of some thirty mud-brick houses, ten and the village mosque had been reduced to misshapen mounds of earth. Families had scattered to Pakistan or were doubled up with friends in nearby hamlets.

Ahmad Wali Karzai made the trip to Akokolacha, a half hour out the airport road, to survey the damage. He came back genuinely distressed, and mentioned the villagers' predicament to me.

There it was: a perfect project. Again I was reminded of Kosovo, where the rebuilding of houses the Serbs had trashed and burned in their final, furious bout of ethnic cleansing became the symbol of a new era. Within weeks of the Serbs' retreat, the defiant skeletons of dozens of new homes aimed their limbs at the sky, with, snapping from their roof beams, the black eagle of the long-banned Albanian flag splayed wide against a red ground.

I was surprised at the contrasting lack of attention in Afghanistan to “shelter,” as it is termed in the aid biz, especially given the staggering number of refugees who had been camped out in neighboring countries not for days or weeks, but for years. Rebuilding the village of Akokolacha would be an important symbol, I thought, and even more so if American soldiers, in uniform, were to do the work.

I thought about the marine I had interviewed in his foxhole on Christmas day. How eloquent a message, if Americans were to be seen repairing what Americans had destroyed. What better way of demonstrating that President George W. Bush's proclamation at the beginning of the bombing campaign was sincere: that the war was not against Afghans or Afghanistan, but against the criminal regime that had taken power there. Akokolacha's impoverished farmers, long-distance taxi drivers, or small-time mechanics, who had fled the deafening violence of the U.S. bombing, could surely not be held accountable for Usama bin Laden. If they could regain what they had lost in this latest Afghan regime change, maybe they would understand that this one was different from the others, promising a better future for all Afghans, not just those whom chance had tossed to the top of the pile.

That I had even conceived of such an idea, complete with U.S. soldiers armed with picks and shovels, indicates how removed I was from contemporary humanitarian theory.

In the ongoing international debate about “humanitarian intervention,” one of the arguments made by responsible aid organizations is that troops participating in an armed intervention—even if the military action is said to be motivated by humanitarian or human rights concerns—should not be involved in postconflict relief and reconstruction. As parties to the conflict, humanitarian theorists argue, soldiers have no business mixing with civilian humanitarians in the field. The lines inevitably become blurred, and the neutrality that is a credo of humanitarian action is cast into doubt. Soldiers should keep to soldiers' work: maintaining the security and freedom of access necessary for aid agencies to do their job, ministering to the people.

To me, I confess, these distinctions seemed a bit theoretical. I suppose my thinking was stuck in the past, tangled up in the legend of the Marshall Plan in post–World War II Europe. Moreover, I could not efface yet another memory from the Kosovo conflict. When, with explicit prior warning, the Serbs deported tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians to Macedonia as the first NATO bombs fell, the United Nations refugee agency was caught hopelessly by surprise. I stood in the NATO briefing room in Brussels gaping up in horror at a television set on a wall bracket, watching masses of wretched Kosovo Albanians corralled in the mud of a no-man's land just inside the Macedonian border, at the mercy of the Macedonian army.

Thousands of NATO troops were billeted right nearby. If they boasted no other skill, they certainly knew how to pitch a camp. “Why aren't the soldiers building tents for those refugees?” I would practically shout to my fellow reporters, gathered in a knot below the TV. I later learned that it was the humanitarians' refusal of assistance marred by military uniforms that had kept the troops away for several agonizing days.

In this matter as in others, Afghans for Civil Society was iconoclastic. We went right to the U.S. soldiers for help. We argued that rebuilding Akokolacha would enhance their image, and thus their security, just as I had told that young marine.

We could have saved our breath. U.S. Army Civil Affairs, the branch of the army charged with interactions with local civilians, and in this case, with any relief activity the army sponsors, does not actually perform any reconstruction itself. It pays local contractors, then monitors the work. And in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Civil Affairs was not contracting out the reconstruction of private property.

As general policy, this made sense. Otherwise, there were bound to be inequities. The army might find itself obliged to drill a private well or build a house for every village chief as the price of permission to assist his people.

In our own view, Akokolacha hamlet seemed worthy of an exception, since its inhabitants had been rendered homeless as a direct result of U.S. action. And yet that fact seemed to make it even more taboo. Above all, a precedent must not be set, we were told. It must not appear that Washington was taking any legal responsibility for war damage, lest it be induced to pay compensation or reparations. We talked to USAID, the State Department's overseas development agency, which was spearheading the overall U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. We got the same answer. No precedents.

So we fell back on the goodness of ordinary American people. September 11 had unleashed such pent-up generosity and hunger to help, much of it frustrated; we hoped to tap into the receding tide.

In April, I returned to the United States from that quick Afghan trip for a period of intense, creative NGO conception side by side with my sister Eve. Some friends from the town of Concord, Massachusetts, Mary and David Clarke, had invited me to give a talk at the First Parish Church. In their farmhouse kitchen, familiar and comfortable to me as a pair of old jeans, Eve and I brought up the idea of rebuilding Akokolacha.

True to its central role in America's own founding mythology, Concord preserves the spirit of direct democracy and community involvement in public affairs that animated the Thirteen Colonies during the years surrounding the American Revolution. It is one of those places still governed by town meeting, a yearly gathering of all interested citizens to thrash out and vote on issues of municipal importance. In between, committees and forums marshal Concord residents' interest, energy, and money toward various worthy causes.

The Clarkes were enchanted by the Akokolacha idea, and went at it in their unparalleled way, mobilizing a whole network of Concord-and-beyond folks. A cabal of local activists (primarily women) dubbed themselves the Concord Friends of Afghans for Civil Society, and invited a select forty people to a fund-raising tea. The public middle schools joined in, holding a vote among the students on the slogan for T-shirts to send to kids in Akokolacha. “Concord and Akokolacha,” they chose. “We are the Bridge to Peace.” The declaration, traced in my laborious Pashtu, hung above an outline of the Concord Bridge where our own famous battle against the Redcoats was fought in 1775.

Struck by the similarities between the Pashtun tradition of the
shura,
or council of elders, and the selectmen who govern New England towns, the Concord Friends decided they wanted to send gifts and a letter from their selectmen to the Akokolacha elders. I called Ahmad Wali Karzai in Kandahar. He was thrilled and suggested sending radios. He said that when I came back we would go together to Akokolacha and convene a
shura
to explain the whole project and describe the special significance of Concord, and we would build a council room and name it the Concord Room.

I gave three talks in Concord in one day, the last one at the First Parish Church, which crowns the Puritan dignity of Concord's village square. As assorted Clarkes and Eve and I and a few other friends stood around the church basement wolfing turkey sandwiches, with Mr. Clarke enjoining me to “just relax,” I realized this felt like nothing so much as the frenetic, exhausting energy of a political campaign.

Something like two hundred people showed up that night. It was an exercise totally unfamiliar to me. As wide a public as I might have reached during my reporting days, I never had to
watch
the people listening to me. I filed my stories from the privacy of my Paris apartment, often from under my winter parka, which I tented over my head to dampen the echo.

But I could feel the people with me. In a way, they knew me personally, since most of them listened to National Public Radio. Some had probably endured my company while they brushed their teeth in the morning. That night had the sparkle and intimacy of addressing a family reunion. For a grand finale, one lady asked me to do my NPR sign-off: “Sarah Chayes, NPR News, Paris.” For some mysterious reason it captivated people more than my reporting ever had. Something to do with the final
s
being pronounced like a
z,
and the long
a
in the middle—the name rhymes with
haze.
I had never done this SOC-out, as it is called, for an audience, and it normally comes at the end of a story, not just hanging out there by itself. So to trick myself into it, I turned my back, solemnly read the last paragraph of one of our project proposals, and signed off, “Sarah Chayes, NPR News, Concord.” To roars.

“It just about killed us,” Eve told her daughter on the phone a few days later, “but we got the money.”

And it went on like that. The people of Lincoln, Massachusetts, stepped up, in a neighborly competition with next-door Concord. Lincolnites turned out, another couple hundred of them, on a snowy Friday night at seven-thirty. I looked around the room, in wonder.
What are all these people doing here?
Like Concord's, Lincoln's commitment proved to be in persisting earnest. After a magic potion of a dinner Eve concocted one night, a brilliant, intuitive philanthropist named Greg Carr wondered if we could use an office in the middle of Harvard Square. He eventually funded the radio station we launched in Kandahar to the tune of $100,000.

We were stunned by the response we generated with our simple plea to do something concrete and direct and our promise that we would communicate our friends and donors about the fortunes of their project, in detail. We were not CARE or the American Red Cross, we promised. Contributors would not be receiving glossy self-congratulatory pamphlets in the mail. They would hear exactly what became of their money, personally, in the flesh. Suicidally, we promised that every single penny would go to project activities. We would find our overhead elsewhere. It began to dawn on me that I was offering myself up to donors as a kind of human sacrifice. Was there enough flesh and blood in me to satisfy them? As we registered people's hunger for this approach, we grew almost frightened. What were we unleashing? What kind of sacred trust were we taking on by inspiring people this way? It got so that we almost avoided telling the latest new acquaintance what we were doing, lest the person offer to help.

And so we glimpsed the precious well of civil society lying frustrated and untapped just below the surface of apparent U.S. indifference.

MAY–SEPTEMBER 2002

T
HE RULE FOR CASH IS
$10,000. If you're taking more than $10,000 out of the United States, you have to declare it to customs. But having worked in various places lacking banks in my day, I was yet to be convinced of the value—for me—of that particular formality. So with $18,000 of Concord's money secreted in various private places about my person, I returned to Afghanistan in May, just in time for the first offensive of summer heat.

Nothing came easily. I moved back in with my Achekzai family in the graveyard, which felt familiar, though the promiscuity and lack of a toilet were hard to contemplate as part of a permanent arrangement. With the windfall they had reaped from me and the NPR reporter who had replaced me, they had bought a television set and a dented satellite dish that they had anchored precariously to their mud roof. Now, of an evening, my
maelmastun
was filled will male neighbors glued, agog, to raunchy Bolly-wood images. Our card games were over.

It did not take long for Zabit Akrem to catch wind of my presence back in the house. He sent over a flunky this time, bearing a letter on provincial government stationery. I was still not allowed to live with a private family. My oldest host-brother and I went to see the big police chief in his office.

The meeting developed into an argument between the two men, which I did not entirely follow. It seemed that Akrem was telling my host brother that if he insisted on having me in the house, he would be responsible for my security. In Afghanistan, that is a heavy obligation. My host-brother retorted that security is the job of the police, and if Akrem was putting the family in charge of me, he should issue them some weapons. Not that he didn't already have weapons, as he hastened to show me when we returned home. But it was a matter of principle, and both sides dug in. Akrem dismissed us by turning and looking fixedly at the next petitioner. We had ceased to exist.

I was determined to fight this ultimatum, though I could feel my host-family cooling off.

Then one day I crossed paths with my new boss, Qayum Karzai, when he and his brother Ahmad Wali were on their way to a funeral. They wondered what on earth I was doing in that insalubrious place. “She lives here,” one of their men informed them. And that was the end of it.

“We're responsible for you,” they remonstrated, aghast. “You can't possibly live out there.” It was in fact they who were responsible for my security. By entering Qayum's employ, I had entered the Karzais' retinue, and overlordship in Kandahar bears certain responsibilities. For the Karzais' sake, I realized, for the sake of their reputation, I could not leave myself at such risk.

So I moved into a house on the other side of town with a big yard and three cows, which used to be Ahmad Wali's office back when he ran a local NGO. The chaotic months of U.S. bombing and its aftermath had scattered contents and occupants, leaving the place prey to friends and neighbors turned temporary looters. Abdullah, the Karzais' family engineer, lived there. But, as Ahmad Wali had often said, his habits were such as to render his own bedroom worthy of a UNDP-sponsored cleanup project. The place was a trash heap.

I spent the summer renovating, relegating myself to the roof in the process and spreading out my bedding and my nighttime effects each evening. We fixed the bathroom, laid tiles of local white stone in the hall, built, discarded, carpeted, and furnished. We hauled out all those books and papers of President Karzai's, which Abdullah had squirreled away, put the books on a shelf and sorted and filed the papers in a painted trunk. And then at last, we cleaned out a former storeroom to serve as my bedroom, and I could come down off my roof.

It felt as though I were—figuratively as well as literally—constructing the floor I was standing on, hopping on one foot while I laid down a few boards to put the other down on. Kandahar's telephone lines had been shot to hell, and the Internet was several centuries away. I had to go to a public call office or rely on the expensive foldout satellite phone I had used as a reporter to stay in touch with Eve. She heroically held fast to the other end of the tenuous rope I clung to, grounding me, protecting me ferociously, and constantly reinspiring me.

For comic relief, there was Wooly and Big Dog.
¹
Big Dog, a mournful German Shepherd, was manifestly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. When I first moved to the house, he would slink off with his tail tucked in and his head hung below his sloping shoulders if you ever penetrated his consciousness. I decided he needed some pet therapy. So I bought a lamb, named Wooly. I won't go through the complicated trilingual pun, via Albanian, which led me to
that
original name. The two became inseparable, Wooly first trying to nurse from Big Dog and later trying to mount him. Harried Big Dog cheered up.

An early trip to our project site, the bombed out village of Akokolacha, was obligatory. It lies just off the main road to the airport, about the only stretch of asphalt in the province at the time, and cars still had to swerve to avoid old shrapnel scars and the twisted carcass of a tanker-truck. All around lies the stark, dun-colored wasteland of rock and clay, hardened by the punishing sun. Only a fleet of nappy-haired camels, nomads' patchwork tents, some sheep spread out in a row to comb the stubble of a parched field, break the monotony. Scattered villages, camouflaged against the dirt they are built from, appear and disappear into its unremitting surface. At Akokolacha, the clods of the former huts were already blending back into the stony-hard earth.

My idea was to rebuild the houses just as they had stood before the bombing, never imagining there would be any trouble recreating the layout. A half hour clambering over the piles of clay shattered that happy presumption. The village men knotted themselves around us, famished half smiles playing on their faces. One so exactly resembled the Big Bad Wolf that the nickname stuck.

“I had nine rooms,” the owner of one mound told us as we climbed atop, eyeballing it at about eight yards by four. “And there was a bathroom with every room.”

Incredulous, I turned to the other villagers for a backup chorus of ridicule.

“It's true,” they nodded gravely. “And I had seven rooms,” someone else said.

I realized we would never know what the village had looked like. We were facing a conspiracy of exaggeration. No villager would expose another's lie for fear of losing his own chance at an American-financed mansion.

I was crushed, and immediately faced with a moral dilemma. What to tell Concord? If I described the scene accurately, all those wonderful people would regret their contributions and good wishes, I was sure. But could I possibly lie, or gloss it over: tread on the slippery slope that led to such cynicisms as—in one example I had heard of—an aid agency photographing gifts unloaded in Somalia, for the donors' benefit, then carting them off to the beach for burning?

I grappled for an explanation for the villagers' bald, ungrateful, un-apologetic greediness. My own heart needed it as much as the Concord donors did.

What I came up with had to do with Big Dog's ailment: posttraumatic stress disorder. After twenty-three years of nonstop civil war, the whole of Afghan society was suffering from collective PTSD, I was coming to understand. I cataloged its symptoms: inability to bond emotionally, inability to plan for the future, inability to think beyond one's own needs toward a collective good, excessive guile.
²
People like the Akokolacha villagers had so often seen their destinies—appalling or miraculous—visited upon them from the outside, with no apparent reason or consistency, who could blame them for grasping at whatever they could obtain right now, and damn the future? What ever lasted into the future anyway? And then there was the matter of power. It is not especially empowering to be helped. And so, perhaps to try to redress the imbalance, proud beneficiaries make strident demands.

It seemed the very conception behind our Akokolacha project was out of sync with the Afghanistan of this particular juncture. Never mind, I thought. At least we'll get the houses built.

All of these deductions were valid. But what I did not thoroughly understand at that point was how my actions and those of ACS fit into the age-old Afghan pattern of extracting and distributing subsidy. This pattern went back at least to the days of the Great Game and the early Afghan amirs like Abd ar-Rahman Khan.

Back then Britain was the wealthy empire paying out the subsidy. But when Indian independence ended the Great Game, London turned off the faucet. A few years later, during the Cold War, the United States took up Britain's contest with Russia—by then the Soviet Union. Then, its cold war over, Washington, too, cut the Afghan subsidy. Now, in the post-Taliban era, the United States was paying out again.

In other words, the Afghan tribes have grown accustomed to receiving subsidy. It is a mark of their geostrategic importance. As such, it is not an embarrassing handout, but a badge of honor, a perfectly dignified way of making a living. Obtaining subsidy can even be seen as a mark of superiority vis-à-vis the lowland empire that has to cough it up.
³
The leader who distributes it commands his tribesmen's loyalty.

In this traditional dynamic, I was playing the role of the representative of the foreign power, coughing up the subsidy. All of our lofty words to the Akokolacha
shura
about Concord, and democracy, and citizen participation, and cultural exchange were, in this context, meaningless. What we were doing fit too closely with the familiar pattern for the villagers to see anything distinctive in it.

In the perception of these Popalzai villagers, Ahmad Wali Karzai was the tribal elder who had secured the subsidy and distributed it to them. He had visited them, eaten their food, and then produced a foreigner to rebuild their village. They took it for granted that I was bound by his pledges. Ahmad Wali had told them the village would get a council room, a promise construed by the village chief to mean a
maelmastun
attached to his house. To this head elder, it was an obligation. Never mind that the project was about replacing bomb-damaged houses only. My protestations that Ahmad Wali had no operational involvement in the project were simply unintelligible to the villagers. This was a misunderstanding that was to dog the work for its duration.

While we were deliberating over dimensions and floor plans for the new houses, another problem cropped up. Akokolacha's water supply went dry. The hamlet is built on the banks of a canal, part of a 1970s irrigation system that diverts water from the Arghandab River. A drought, so severe it had killed off most of the fruit trees not already splintered by Soviet shelling, had the region in its grip for the sixth straight year. The gates to the reservoir on the Arghandab River that fed the canal were closed. Akokolacha residents had to go to a neighboring village to collect water in plastic jerricans and lug it home.

A village well, we thought, is not private property. Here was something the American troops could do.

The U.S. Army Civil Affairs team, led by a tall redheaded hydrologist named Ben Houston, was refreshingly enterprising and practical. In those early days, when we humanitarians were still getting our feet under us, the Civil Affairs team was out there doing stuff: overseeing the building of schools and, yes, the drilling of wells.

But not one for Akokolacha, they regretted. They had had some bad experiences with villagers sabotaging expensive new wells, so they had called a temporary moratorium. Why didn't we try USAID?

The United States Agency for International Development is the arm of the U.S. State Department charged with distributing America's public foreign assistance around the world. As such, it was supposed to spearhead the effort to reconstruct Afghanistan. Behemoth USAID wields a budget of some $10 billion per year, and is staffed by two thousand men and women, half of them posted in the field, and fully half housed in the Reagan Building, a giant airless glass cube in Washington.

We had had interactions with a variety of USAID officials in Washington, at the newly reopened U.S. embassy in Kabul, and with an assessment team that had come to Kandahar for a week. I brought two of its members over to my house in the graveyard for dinner with my Achekzais. I introduced them to a group of prominent local women to discuss priorities. Our USAID contacts were friendly and enthusiastic, full of encouragement and promises: “Don't worry. I'm setting aside $70,000 for your radio station, whenever you're ready”; “A vocational school is a great idea—I'm sure we'll fund it”; and so on. The Akokolacha well request, backed as it was by support from private U.S. donors who had promised an ongoing commitment to the village, reaped a similar response. I wrote up a formal proposal for a $10,000 drinking water and irrigation well, complete with submersible pump. “A shoo-in,” we were assured.

So we waited. And waited. I was reluctant to pester the USAID people, knowing how harassed they must be. When I finally did inquire about the status of our proposal, or of any of the other proposals we had submitted, I found that the person we had been working with was back in Washington; his or her replacement had just arrived and would be on it right away. Often his or her replacement would be unable to locate the file and would ask us to drop off another copy of our proposal at the U.S. embassy up in Kabul.

Such was the merry-go-round at USAID—and the U.S. embassy as a whole—those crucial first months after the fall of the Taliban. In the entire U.S. delegation, only one diplomat spoke an Afghan language, learned when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran thirty years before. Called up out of retirement, he stayed at the embassy a record six weeks. Everyone else was on a two-to three-week “hardship” rotation.