The Punishment of Virtue (19 page)

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.

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.

The governor was having his afternoon nap when we arrived.

We returned the next day. Given my mascot status with Shirzai's nappy fighters, who remembered me from the days of the capture of Kandahar, we were greeted jovially and offered plastic chairs under the crushing sun. But we had to keep the entrance clear: absolutely no one could see the governor till the next day.

“Just ask,” I cajoled, and someone disappeared inside the walls.

We used the wait to drink in the scene: open-backed trucks sporting bunches of rocket launchers in the latest fashion, ranks of soldiers shoving back the flock of petitioners. Despite the mistreatment, that midday crowd never drifted far, swinging as if at anchor and incessantly attracting the wrath of the soldiers. Curses and the butts of Kalashnikovs would keep the people back.

Such soldiers and their ostentatious guns are the unspoken threat that cows Afghans. More than any turban or title, these are the operative marks of power still. And in Afghanistan, the exercise of power remains personal. There are no institutions; there are only powerful men. This is why the aggrieved or the needy—the women in filthy
burqas,
the befuddled graybeards, the touchy young men—suffered the abuse outside the governor's residence that day. There is no alternative. There is no institution they can turn to for redress. Village and tribal structures have been neglected or overpowered, and the central government has not stepped in to fill the gap. The people are bound, like subjects rather than citizens, to the person and the caprice of the governor.

Eventually we privileged “guests”—read Americans—were let inside. We stopped at the office of the chief of staff, who had his own press of petitioners. One sinewy old man, trying to lean into his line of sight, was positively begging—kissing his fingertips and touching them to his own eyes in entreaty—saying he had come three days in a row, please give him his opium back. The official snapped, without a glance up from the sheaf of paper he was busying himself with, that opium is illegal.

“Why is it illegal for me and not for Hajji Abdullah?”

Hajji Abdullah was a wealthy businessman reputed at the time to be the biggest opium dealer in the province. He also owned a large money-changing/money-transfer business, and was buying up property in fantastically expensive Kandahar, building houses and selling them.

Hajji Abdullah was at that very moment in a meeting with Governor Shirzai, and would shortly be having lunch with him. Plates and trays of food—rice pilaf adorned with raisins and strips of candied carrots, tomato and okra stew, scallions laid in a row with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers and sprigs of fresh mint and cilantro—began arriving in the air-conditioned private quarters where we were ushered to await Shirzai. Servants silently arrayed them on a table, garishly ornate in a country where most people eat sitting cross-legged on the floor.

We declined an invitation to join the party and waited through lunch outside in the park. It was a cool oasis of green in dust-swept Kandahar. Rows of squat eucalyptus trees shaded the grass. To accent the medieval pageantry of the scene, a small antelope with horns that arched back from its brow in a graceful curve ambled near. Then a soldier struggled up with another in his arms, a young female. The governor of Urozgan Province had brought the pair down as a gift from his mountains to the north.

Sitting there, watching the antelopes explore the park, I felt as though I were merging into a timeless cultural continuum. It was as though I had just stepped into a manuscript commissioned by the Safavi shahs of Persia.

At length, Shirzai's luncheon guests emerged, led by Hajji Abdullah. He walked at a sedate pace and frowned at our stares. Shirzai welcomed us. He had exchanged his local clothes and turban for Western garb, his thick black locks sticking out from a white bandage wrapped around his head. He had been grazed by a bullet in a recent heart-stopping attempt on President Karzai's life. Karzai, in town for his brother Ahmad Wali's wedding, had been riding with Shirzai in a motorcade when one of the governor's private bodyguards had taken a shot at them. Investigation into the incident had broken down under mysterious circumstances, leaving us all aghast.

After a gush of friendly greetings, I brought up the question of the stone. I launched into an elaborate brief. “At the end of the war, the only thing the people of Kandahar cared about was reconstruction of bomb damage. Remember? Akokolacha is the perfect project to signal the dawn of a new era.”

Shirzai nodded at me kindly, his answer ready:

” We are making a cement factory,” he said. “You cannot have any stone.” He smiled broadly. “Let me give you some advice. Make your foundations from brick, with cement for mortar. It's much cheaper.”