The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban

Chayes is a brilliant writer, and, more importantly, a trenchant observer of truths that are reported nowhere else. She has chosen to live in Kandahar, a much more dangerous place than Kabul, where other Western observers are clustered. She speaks and reads the language and is embedded with the Afghan people, not with the American military and derives her insights on the ground, not from diplomats.An amazing, fascinating read.

My wife and I were in Afghanistan in the early 1970s. We had just completed Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between" when we learned of Chayes' book. Afghanistan is a mystery country to westerners. It houses beautiful mosques (look for Mazar-i-Sherif and the white doves/pigeons), photogenic people (think of the National Geographic picture of the young Afghan woman), and lost treasures (remember the Buddhist statutes destroyed by the Taliban in Banyan). Chayes goes beyond all this into the culture and soul of the country. She knows some of the languages of Afghanistan and can talk and, more importantly, listen to people. Chayes tells us the story of values, fate, and the mass of distinctions that the Mideast and Afghanistan force upon us. This story of modern Afganistan after the Taliban helps the thinking reader see the variety in this desert landscape - the individual power cells, the memories, the hopes, the promises, the evasions, the frowns behind the smiles, the oasis in the wasteland. Chayes finds good intentions everywhere, praise everywhere, lack of carry thru everywhere, and scorn everywhere. Everyone is everything! This is beyond current politicans. The Afghan situation requires vision and love and caring for the people. Well written, well documented, and certainly passionate, "The Punishment of Virtue" captures a moment in time that is for all time. A good read that will become an essential read in the future.

This book, readable as a mystery, is fueled by passion. It is really well written: direct, engaging, never leaving behind the reader who, like me, knows little or nothing about Afghanistan. Chayes's story is in Kandahar in the southern part of the country, where she arrived as an NPR reporter in late 2001. With an almost fictional immediacy she describes the situation she found and how she dealt with it -- she declined, for instance, to live in a hotel with the other foreign journalists and instead boarded with a family. She takes us with her into an increasing understanding of the tangled history that underlies Afghanistan, and particularly Kandahar, today. And she is both anguished and unsparing in her recounting of American cluelessness and misjudgments, which she sees as born of an inability to coordinate or take advantage of acquired knowledge on the ground, as US officials and military commanders are rotated in and out. The frame of the book is the assassination of her friend Akrem, the Kabul police chief, the single best official she met in Afghanistan. It is publicly announced as the work of a suicide bomber. Chayes, who has by this time left NPR and returned as head of a private aid effort, investigates and disagrees. A really valuable book. I read it pretty much straight through.

If like me you are a fiction maven who is likely to read only a couple of nonfiction books each year, do yourself the favor of making this year's pick "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban." Here's why: How often do you get to read a book by an author who is an accomplished historian, political analyst, humanitarian, philosopher, psychologist, and anthropologist - all rolled into one masterful storyteller? Indeed, Sarah Chayes is a gifted writer whose lucid and exciting prose radiates such originality that it simply could not have been crafted by anybody else. Part memoir, part murder mystery, part history text, and part reportage with commentary on the politically charged process of nation building, this book invites readers along on a treacherous but extraordinary journey toward the creation of democracy in a country that for the past few decades has been ravaged by war, corruption, and brutal regimes. Ms. Chayes chose to remain in Kandahar after reporting for NPR on the fall of the Taliban there because she believed that the only way to reverse forces that conspired to create 9/11 and other similarly heinous events was to "get this right." And so, in an urgent act of faith and bravery, she traipsed across the globe, alone, to help run Afghans for Civil Society - an NGO founded by a previously exiled brother of the U.S. backed interim President Hammid Karzai. After many months of tireless work under harsh conditions, the narrative tone shifts from idealistic and hopeful, to wary of a new government that relinquishes power to duplicitous warlords, to deep skepticism, to abject disillusionment, to a more personal and ultimate decision to persevere in the face of unyielding obstacles. All the while, however, her love for Afghanistan - its people, culture, history, and topography - illuminates page after page of this narrative banquet with the persistance of a desert sun. You can taste the apricots, smell the cumin, feel the bone-jarring potholes along the road to Kabul, and see the dust kicked up from arid soil. This book is beyond comparison to others of its so-called "kind" because there ARE no others like it. Best of all, "Punishment" was not written for democrats or republicans; it is for human beings who want to live in a better, more straight forward world.

This highly readable book is part memoir and part political analysis. The author, a former overseas NPR correspondent, describes her sojourn over the years 2001-2005 in Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, where she worked for an Afghan-based NGO and, as an instinctive investigative reporter, formed her own assessment of the political forces at work in that post-Taliban city. Her conclusions are both alarming and disheartening. She comes to believe that Pakistan is the root cause of political instability in Afghanistan and that through its support of warlords it uses resurgent Taliban forces to manipulate and regain control of large parts of the country. More discouraging is the author's portrayal of President Hamid Karzai as an intelligent, gifted, and cultured man who is often ineffectual as a leader. The book is framed by the account of an assassination of the Kabul chief of police, a man of unusual integritiy and ability (hence the book's title) and its subsequent coverup as a suicide bombing. Set against him is the power-hungry and corrupt governor of Kandahar, who has won the confidence of the Americans while secretly amassing a fortune that he uses to fund a private army, meanwhile working deals with Pakistan to keep alive the threat of Taliban terrorism that makes the Americans even more dependent on him. There are large swathes of Afghan and Persian history woven into this modern-day accounting, which reveal patterns of political and cultural forces at play that go back to Alexander the Great. Vividly written, the book provides a disturbing portrayal of failed leadership on the part of both the U.S. and the current government in Kabul. Read it and weep.