The Punishment of Virtue (40 page)

“How's security?” Jalali asked.

I launched into my spiel about how “security” in Kandahar means different things for Afghans and for foreigners, and how the real security problem here—

“No,” the minister interrupted. “How's
your
security?”

“Oh…fine,” I managed, caught off guard.

“Well, if you ever have any kind of problem at all, here's your man.” And the minister poked a finger into Governor Shirzai's inviting belly. “He's responsible for you.”

I never received another threat.

SUMMER 2003

B
UT THEN WE
plunged into a truly hair-raising summer. As those dust-caked, bone-dry, hundred-twenty-degree months progressed, I did, at last, become alarmed. I can't put my finger on exactly what did it. Inexplicably, as though I had been brushed by a ghost, my hair stood on end.

With Ricardo Munguia's murder, a line had been crossed. His death was followed by the assassinations just outside Kandahar of two mullahs, religious leaders, who supported the new regime. At a mosque right in town—my favorite one, from Ahmad Shah Durrani's time, whose outlines are rubbed out against the sky in mud plaster—an explosion shattered the joint murmur of prayers, though no one was badly hurt. This time.

Worst of all for me was watching Akrem, one night over tea, count off the deaths on his fingers. He had lost an average of a man a day for a month, in attacks on police posts. Those fighters were his charges. What must it have done to him to watch them die?

We were at my house. He had shucked off his police uniform and was wearing Kandahar civilian clothes: a tunic just the peach-hued side of white, with a charcoal-colored vest over it, and a glimmering gray silk turban around his head. I had my camera. I was trying to lighten the mood by taking pictures. “No, forget about me. Keep talking,” I scolded when he posed face front with that stern glower on. Finally I got him, one arm resting on his raised knee, a glass of tea in his hand, the trace of a smile grazing his features.

When I look at that picture now, I am stunned by how young and gentle Akrem looks, two years before his death. His face was not yet hardened and darkened by the trials to come.

But it was a very bad night. We were talking about all the portents raining down on us. Akrem was deflated; there was no other word for it. None of his people wanted to work out in the districts anymore, and he did not know how to ask them to. “Poor Comandan Saab,” I remember Abdullah murmuring. “They will break his heart.” With the world closing in around us, we felt alone, hugging ourselves into a corner of my unmarked compound like beleaguered fugitives.

There had been another ambush on the road to Tirin Kot. A half dozen of the Urozgan governor's men had been shot. A driver for the aid group Mercy Corps had been killed with two others in an attack on a district office in Helmand Province. Whatever it was that was going on had gotten very violent, and Afghans affiliated with the new authorities were taking the brunt.

And yet this litany is a bit deceptive. It was not just an upsurge in the number of incidents that changed the background music, altering its key to ominous. It was the outlines of a progression that suddenly became discernible that summer, the way an image begins to emerge on photographic paper soaking in a chemical bath. Once a jumbled collection of disparate events, the insurgency was resolving itself into a series of inexorably intensifying stages. It was that night that Akrem sketched them out for me, bringing the pattern to light. It was the progression that scared me more than any of its individual parts.

The ballooning fear of ordinary Kandaharis, too, was catching. It was a mixture of breaking-point exasperation with the favoritism and arbitrary violence they continued to suffer at the hands of the governor's thugs—and exasperation with the Americans for not preventing it—and a new concern, voiced for the first time. Kandaharis were afraid they might undergo yet another change of regime: the Taliban might always come back.

That was a first.

Many sentiments found words for the first time that summer. “If things keep on this way,” I heard, “people will take up arms against the Americans as they took up arms against the Russians. And
everyone
fought against the Russians. Even doctors and engineers joined the jihad.” It seems incredible, given how often Westerners drew the comparison, and how afraid Washington was of following in Moscow's footsteps, but that was the first time I heard an Afghan mention the United States and the Soviet Union in the same breath.

It was the first time that women told me, with regret, that they would rather I did not come to their homes. People were beginning to take precautions, to avoid marking themselves out from the conservative norm. They were beginning to hedge their bets.

In deference to the women's unease, I took to wearing not exactly a
burqa
—I tried on half a dozen for size and Abdullah, with his wickedly accurate sense of lampoon, informed me that I looked like a telephone pole—but a head-to-toe black wraparound garment typically worn by wizened crones. I still looked quite a bit like a telephone pole.

The men's fear got to me just as much, because it contrasted so poignantly with the hard-boiled image they liked to project. One of Ahmad Wali Karzai's bodyguards bought a car. His explanation was: “We're all going to get killed soon anyway, so I may as well live it up till then.”

Many people I knew who were aligned with the Pax Americana began wondering out loud where they would be able to run this time. “We can't go to Pakistan; we can't go to Iran,” Abdullah blurted out shakily one evening. “Everyone will kill us.”

For Akrem, the menace was growing precise. This was when that messenger brought him a threat, from a notorious ISI colonel in Pakistan, a former classmate of Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf. The message was a bit cryptic, phrased almost like a charade. “When you become a refugee this time, where will you run?” the man recited his memorized question to Akrem. Another line: “The ground you are standing on will soon be Pakistan.” And a few more provocations in this vein.

Akrem wondered if he might send a message back to the ISI colonel. “I am a student of history,” he parried the second barb. “And history tells me that Afghanistan has existed for a thousand years, but Pakistan for only fifty-six. I think that we will outlast you.” To the first question he replied: “My next refuge, should I need one, will be the graveyard.”

I was distraught. It had been months since our first meeting, when he had had news of Pakistani army officers ordering Shirzai: “Make problems for Zabit Akrem. Kill him.” And here we were still? No further along?

There were vaguer and more primitive portents. A dust storm, which lasted almost a week. The sky descended, weighing down on our shoulders. The air turned to mustard. It lashed us. It wasn't the wind, day and night, it was the whole universe, blowing. The mulberry tree in our yard was lost to us. Big trees on the streets, when they swam forward through the muddy air, were bent over, begging with outstretched leaves. Dust—not particles, just an opaqueness—would sift inside the house. By the end of a day it would relinquish the air and be transformed into a solid, settling, covering the white stone floor and drifted up against the walls in little snow banks of brown powder.

Women started remembering the last storm like it: when Prime Minister Daoud Khan was murdered in 1974. It was weather for revolutions, the women said.

To make everything worse, my fight with Interior Minister Jalali over Akrem's job was not finished.

I didn't have the heart to repeat the terminology of this battle to Akrem, or tell him of its intensity. He was dealing with enough disillusion as it was.

Each week, it seemed, the ax was going to fall. I pleaded. I parried. I argued. I raged silently and not so silently. I demanded proof of Jalali's assertions that Akrem was corrupt. Once, the minister showed me a letter, supposedly from the pen of a Taliban insurgent, denouncing evil deeds by Akrem's men.

An anonymous letter? Anyone with any agenda could have written it!

“You only see things on the surface,” Jalali snapped another time, exasperated. “I know what's going on beneath.”

I
lived
in Kandahar. What could Jalali possibly see that I couldn't?

I knew, at best, I was helping delay the inevitable. It added to my sense of encroaching doom. If the Afghan government I supported couldn't even get this right, the whole venture must be hopeless.

The clammy ghost had dragged its finger across my skin, leaving me almost trembling with nerves, when I was invited out to the U.S. base for a meeting with the individual known as the PolAd—the political adviser to the commander of Coalition forces in Afghanistan. This was the civilian whom many military men believed really called the shots when it came to strategic decisions in Afghanistan, the one who, when the generals did something stupid, had made them do it.

I do not remember much about that meeting. I remember the one right afterward, with a different man. It was dressed up as just a casual get-together with a high-ranking officer who had accompanied the PolAd down from the Baghram base near Kabul.

Not until we sat down did this colonel tell me I was the main reason he had made the trip. He wanted, it came out, to make a deal. “If I were to ask you to take a vacation for a little while, would you do it?” His reasoning was deliberately unsentimental. “I don't know you, so I can't pretend it would be a personal blow to me if you got killed. But it would set back the work we are trying to do here by about a year.”

I knew exactly what he meant. After Ricardo's death, if another international aid worker were assassinated, just about every foreigner in Kandahar, UN included, would pack up and lock up. Head offices would review all the projects they had scheduled for the Afghan south. Dozens of Afghans would be put out of work. It would be a mess. And it would look very bad. The officer explained he wasn't telling me to leave right then; he was trying to open up a communications link, in case such a time did come later.

I liked his directness—and I returned it. Before agreeing, I said, I would have to be sure that he would not become an inadvertent channel for people who merely found me inconvenient—Governor Shirzai, for instance, not to mention Americans who might not like my style. Shirzai had learned how to exploit the Americans' blind faith in his judgment, and their knee-jerk sensitivity to anything that could be described as a terrorist threat, to neutralize people he didn't care for. I alluded to the way the CIA had passed along, without scrutiny, news of an “active terrorist cell” planning to kill me.

The officer followed my gist, and provided some precise assurances that he would not let himself be so used. As the conversation continued, I found that what I really liked about him was the courage of his frankness.

He told me flat out that the recently launched war in Iraq had stretched military resources in Afghanistan beyond their capacities. “We simply don't have the men to do the job here,” he said. After the first wartime rotation in 2001, the B team had been sent in to relieve the troops in Afghanistan; but now the B and C teams were tied up in Iraq, and the United States was dredging the bench for something like the D team to cover in Afghanistan. “There are reservists doing military intelligence here,” he said, without further elaboration as to the absurdity of this, given Afghanistan's ongoing strategic importance to U.S. national security. His opinion was evident in the tone of his voice.

Drawing a pie chart on a scrap of paper, the officer explained the doctrine of military deployments. It jibed with what I had learned in the Balkans. “Normally, a government wants about a third of its active-duty troops deployed in theater,” he shaded in part of the pie, “a third resting up from deployment, and a third training to go back out. Right now…?” He looked up, locked my eyes. “The United States has fully two thirds of its soldiers on active deployment overseas.”

The colonel indicated that he thought the focus of U.S. military attention in Afghanistan was misdirected.

Steady fighting—skirmishing, mortar rounds, night raids—had kept U.S. troops busy since spring at a string of firebases along the Pakistani border in eastern Afghanistan. These almost daily firefights hardly penetrated our consciousness in Kandahar, for the details were kept shrouded and the stakes seemed minimal. No one lived out in that wild border country. The U.S. troops there were not protecting any Afghans. And most of the serious incursions by militants were happening farther south, in Zabul Province. The U.S. outposts up by Gardez seemed to serve little purpose other than to mark the border. News of the skirmishing out there seemed of no more consequence to us in Kandahar than the distant sound of yelping from a dogfight. But this was where most U.S. military attention was focused that spring, because there was “contact.”

The officer agreed with my unvoiced sense of priorities. “Gardez and all that stuff on the border?” he said. “That's a distraction.” The real battleground of this conflict, he believed, was in Kandahar. I could discern memories of Vietnam between the lines of his prediction: “Here, we won't know it till they're all around. We'll realize what's going on when we can't find workers to come out to the base anymore, when we can't buy vegetables in the market.”

And I suddenly glimpsed a nightmare scenario.

I had never believed the September 11 terrorist attacks were designed “merely” to cause the death of three thousand Americans. The point of those attacks, as their breathtaking symbolism indicated, went far beyond. It was to help bring to fruition some version of the “clash of civilizations.” Those attacks were an effort to force people—Muslims as well as Westerners—to withdraw from contact and exchange with each other, and to acquiesce to oppressive policies at home and bloody ones abroad that they might not really approve of, because the situation seemed to warrant them, and because the other side no longer seemed to be composed of human beings.