The Punishment of Virtue (12 page)

I am impressed with the collection. All six volumes of the
Cambridge History of Iran
are there, and several of the authorities cited in Karzai's books. I trail my fingers along the spines, turning my head sideways every now and then to read a title.

Then I find it:
Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi
(
The History of Ahmad Shah
). The volume I excitedly pull down and start leafing through is a glossy-paged facsimile of an eighteenth-century manuscript, written, I find in the brief English introduction, by Ahmad Shah Abdali's own court historian. The book was published in Moscow. That makes sense, after a second. The Soviets were always rather utilitarian about their scholarship, and Afghanistan was clearly on their strategic radar. I check the date. 1974. How interesting. Almost six years before their invasion, the Soviets were already investing in this kind of research.

It takes some begging to get the librarian to let me carry this book out of the building. It is against the rules. But I have to make a copy. I leave him my U.S. passport as collateral. An insane risk.

The book is written in Persian, naturally, which I don't speak. And the Russian critical apparatus is just as unintelligible to me. I inform one of my employees that he is going to be helping me on this. And every single day for the next two weeks, I drag him through the translation. It is interesting to watch. An educated man with loudly opinionated views about his country's history, very conversant with the 1970s and 1980s period, he is at sea with this story, key though it is to the Afghan national identity. And he keeps whining about the difficult eighteenth-century Persian.

The book is everything I was hoping for. Ahmad Shah's historian, who may have heard a firsthand account, describes the assassination of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah in riveting detail.

It happened, he writes, when “the velvet of darkness” had settled on the shah's camp. One of the conspirators penetrates the sanctum of the royal sleeping tent. A guard, an African, rears up before him. The white globes of his eyes, piercing his inky face, pierce the night. “Who are you!” he snarls. “Where did you find the courage to place the edge of your
foot
inside the Shah's tent at this time of night? I think you are sick of life!”

The assassin laughs and strikes a heavy blow on the chamberlain's shoulder, and strides past. Nadir Shah has heard the noise; he's awake, he's grasping a torch to see by. “Ungrateful!” he shouts at the conspirator, his erstwhile friend, “What do you want?”

“I am the Angel of Death,” the assassin answers. “I have come for your soul. Speak no more; your appointed time is done. Put out your neck for cutting.” And he brings his sword crashing down on the shah's helmet, cutting into his skull bone. Nadir Shah falls to the ground, stunned but not dead. The killer plops down on his chest and hacks his head off.
²⁵

At dawn on June 20, 1747, the shah's bloody torso is discovered. All the accounts speak of stark pandemonium in Nadir Shah's camp after the murder. Then the scene in Karzai's books skips to Ahmad the Abdali and several thousand horsemen breaking from the camp at a gallop and heading for Kandahar.

It is perfectly possible—though no historian suggests it—that the young Afghan cavalry captain knew about the caravan of treasure making its way at that very moment toward Nadir Shah.
²⁶
Its load of coin and goods would have made a cogent argument for the Abdalis to abandon the royal camp and its strongboxes to the squabbling nobles. Otherwise, given the Abdalis' description as the cream of Nadir Shah's forces, it does not make sense that they would just give up their share of the loot.
²⁷

But leave they did. The account of their trip to Kandahar in the facsimile manuscript indicates the kind of chaos that was reigning in those days of the dissolution of empires. That route that had made Kandahar's fame, once studded with caravansaries and dependable wells for the benefit of long-distance traders, innocent of robbers or freelance tollbooth operators, had been the pride of the Safavi nation builders. But Ahmad Shah's troop keeps encountering bands of thugs perched in forts above the road, poised to rob travelers.
²⁸
Just like the twentieth-century gunmen who mercilessly harried truck drivers during the “
mujahideen
nights.”

The scene of Afghanistan's founding myth unfolds at a shrine just outside Kandahar.
²⁹
I heard this famous tale when I first arrived in the city: the story of the
jirga,
or council meeting among the elders of all the Afghan tribes, called to settle the matter of their leadership. You can practically smell young Ahmad taking his seat, the sweat of the road barely scraped off his skin, his horsemen spread out in the surrounding fields.

Now those fields are a haunted landscape of ruined
kishmish khanahs.
Fortlike buildings of mud brick, their walls are scored with rows of window slits, like the ones for protecting medieval castles. Here they pierce the thick baked mud to allow air inside to dry grapes into raisins. Most of the arched roofs are blown off, and the low-slung domes that capped end rooms are shattered. Anti-Soviet mujahideen used to camp out in these structures, and the Communists shelled them. The fields around are dried out; just the earthen walls where the grapevines once spread their tendrils testify to a forgotten abundance.

According to the story, the
jirga
at the holy precinct lasted for days, for none of the chiefs would give up his own claim to lead. Young Ahmad the cavalry captain is depicted as a proper Afghan youth, sitting silent in the presence of his elders.
³⁰
A holy man was there, a
darwish,
a kind of half-coherent itinerant hermit who decks himself with amulets and utters prayers as he begs his way from here to there. Nowadays, one of these men stakes out a spot on the seamed concrete road by the turn-off to Khakrez. He is so hilarious as he calls down God's munificence on my head that I never fail to stop and give him money. The eighteenth-century
darwish
is said to have ended the argument at that founding
jirga
. Drifting off from the fringes of the group, the story goes, he broke a sprig of wheat from an adjacent field, then pushed through the circle of elders to young Ahmad Shah and slid the green blade among the folds of his turban, “crowning” him.
³¹

Thus was the Afghan nation born.

Ahmad Shah was a member of the Popalzai tribe, like President Hamid Karzai. Reading the accounts of this story, I notice that his prime competitor for power was Hajji Jamal Khan, the chief of Governor Gul Agha Shirzai's Barakzais.

Well, that explains a lot.

Here then lay the roots of the rivalry played out at that tense meeting at the governor's palace 250 years later—a rivalry in which I will soon be caught up.

Ahmad Shah Durrani, as he called himself after that day, was a consummate politician. His first recorded deed after gaining leadership of the Abdalis, or Durranis as they are now known, was to parcel out positions in a Persian-style bureaucratic government to the chiefs of the various tribes, finding something for everyone.
³²
His reign lasted twenty-five years. He expanded his new kingdom of Afghanistan northwest as far as Mashad in Iran, and southeast beyond the Indus River. He raided the Moghul lands nine times. Throughout, he consulted regularly with his
jirga
of tribal elders.

Thus does Ahmad Shah Durrani appear to combine the contradictory Afghan tendencies toward
qanun,
government under some kind of national law, and
yaghestan,
dissolution into tribal units whose vertical ties are reinforced by the distribution of booty.

As Michael Barry analyzes it, leadership among Pashtuns is acquired by a pretender's ability to extract wealth from a lowland power in one of those three familiar forms—plunder or tribute or subsidy—and distribute it among his men.
³³
Ahmad Shah's ability in this regard was undeniable. That was the significance, the coded meaning, of capturing the caravan.
³⁴
By the same token, in early-twenty-first-century Kandahar, Governor Gul Agha Shirzai's visible proximity to America—the lowland power of the day—and his ability to spend American money on his followers, is what allowed him to solidify his power at the expense of Hamid Karzai's central government.

Ahmad Shah Durrani's other key move was to establish Kandahar as his capital. He broke with the timeworn tradition of tribal marauders who, like cuckoo birds, loved to nest in the capitals of the great empires they brought down. Ahmad Shah did not covet either Isfahan, the blue-domed Safavi capital, or Moghul Delhi. Instead, in what is now described as the first stirring of an Afghan national consciousness, he founded a new capital in his tribal stronghold, Kandahar.

Ahmad Shah's city is the Kandahar I have come to know. And, by laboriously tracing and absorbing this long story, I begin to sense just how this Kandahar is coequal with the genesis of Afghanistan as a modern state.

It is a state founded not on a set of thoughts held in common and articulated through texts and institutions, but rather a state founded on the strategic nature of its territory—the crux between empires. It is a state founded on a fluid and tenuous interaction between collective structures, structures of nation, of tribe, of family, and a highly developed sense of freedom, a violent aversion to submission.

Ahmad Shah Durrani laid out his new city just east of the ancient fortress his master Nadir Shah had razed nine years earlier. British Envoy Mountstuart Elphinstone, writing in 1810 (about a city he asked travelers in Kabul to describe for him), lists four main bazaars, meeting at a covered point called to this day Chahar Sou, “four ways.”
³⁵
My favorite mosque in town is one of Ahmad Shah's, on the street lined with sellers of used goods that leads southward from this same Chahar Sou. The low, sand-colored dome of this mosque is framed by four minarets, the whole softened by coats of mud plaster smoothed over the bricks, as though the artist who drew it had, with a thumb, rubbed away the sharpness of his penciled line.

It was in this mosque that Zabit Akrem was murdered.

DECEMBER 2001–JANUARY 2002

F
OR SEVERAL DAYS
after I arrived in early December, Kandahar remained as it was: drawn tight into its shell, playing dead. On the lumpy streets that make up the city's bazaar, almost all the shops were shut. Corrugated metal barriers were pulled down and padlocked to the ground, wooden shutters closed and barred. Just a few hardy exceptions proved the rule: some wooden vegetable carts, a few fabric shops with multicolored bolts of cloth stacked against the walls, and stalls that stock the sparkly local caps set with chips of glass that young Kandahari men adore. The month-long Ramadan fast was almost over, and Afghans celebrate its end with new clothes. These few merchants were catering to preholiday customers.

The opium bazaar was also busy. In a small, dead-end warren, narrow stalls with heavy wooden doors stand a few inches up from the curb. Customers step out of their shoes and sit cross-legged on a carpet. The only furnishing is a small locked counter with a brass scale on it and a telephone. The walls are daubed with brown smudges, where people have tested the quality of the opium paste then wiped their fingers off.

Except for the pickup trucks packed with fighters cruising around as if they owned the place, the streets were empty. At night there was a curfew. To get past the ropes slung across the road and manned by flashlight-toting adolescents, you had to know the password. We would pick it up from Mahmad Anwar. I still have the folded-up paper he wrote it on one night: “rocket,” with the reply: “radar.”

Slowly, like some great beast shaking itself awake after hibernation, Kandahar came to life. It was the music shops that marked the change, tiny stalls that drew crowds of men straining over one another to lay their hands on a cassette. A few great buses and trucks began making their appearance in the streets, piled high with bales and bundles and crammed with refugees returning home.

For me the most moving symbol was the kites: bright-colored squares of tissue paper stretched on curved bamboo ribs, which blossomed on the folded-back doors of market stalls or hung in rows from their awnings. The Taliban had banned kite flying in their drive to stamp out not just idle pleasure, but also gambling. Kandaharis pit their kites against one another and bet on them, sometimes gluing ground glass to the strings for sawing another's asunder during airborne battles. Now, like sparks and flecks of ash above a fire, the kites danced back into the air, darting and bobbing like swallows. As a silent tribute to freedom and newfound joy, I couldn't imagine a better emblem.

On the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, Kandahar erupted in earnest. All the new clothes came out, and clutches of little girls, decked out in matching magentas or peacock greens, fluttered like confetti through the streets. There was even an amusement park of sorts. Ferris wheels made of wood and pushed by hand hoisted squealing children a few feet into the air. After the communal prayer at a sky-blue mosque on the edge of town, there were horse trials, for the first time in six years. Chargers with high saddles and tassels hanging from their bridles flung their legs out across the plain.

The other high point of adult entertainment was the hard-boiled egg matches. Two contestants would buy ten eggs, judiciously testing each one against their front teeth for shell density before choosing it. Then one man would clasp his egg in a fist, with the domed end peeking above his curled thumb and forefinger. The other man would tap his egg against it, and the one whose egg cracked first lost it to his opponent. This riveting sport drew crowds of forty and fifty spectators in amusement-starved Kandahar during those early post-Taliban days.

But this was anticlimax. For we journalists—all of us—had missed the story. After our strident, petulant, ground-pawing rush to get to Kandahar, Kandahar had abruptly ceased to be a story. We hid from this truth, busying ourselves anyway. We chased around importantly, finding features to write. But the key moments in the drama had taken place well out of our line of sight. The visit by Taliban leaders to President Karzai in his shattered encampment and the surrender deal struck there—that was the story. Or, the same night at the hospital, the Al-Qaeda trucks swooping down to gather up the wounded; the congratulatory visits to the new president; the ceremony with the Taliban boy soldiers—those things were the story. The story was the meeting at the governor's palace, and the Americans enthroning Gul Agha Shirzai as governor. The story had gone unwitnessed.

I spent the month left in my rotation obediently—ignoring, as I had been ordered, what seemed to me to be the only other story: the palpable return of warlordism to the city's packed earth streets. My reporting fell into clichés that appealed inexhaustibly to my ogre of an editor: human rights abuses committed by the Taliban, resistants to the Taliban regime inside Kandahar, a merry chase behind a convoy of U.S. and British Special Forces who were scouring caves for terrorists, the inevitable Christmas with the marines.

On that one I got into another argument.

At the U.S. military base now established at the airport, I stopped to chat with a group of marines draped over the sandbagged rim of their foxhole, which was dug into the hard dirt near the airport terminal building. They shared their MREs, ripping open the heavy plastic envelopes and leaning the main course up against the sandbags to let the chemical heat do its work. It was pretty chilly out there.

One of the marines, a thoughtful twenty-two-or three-year-old from Ohio, turned the tables on me.

“You live right in town?” he started questioning. I allowed as how I did.

“Tell me something. How dangerous do you really think things are out there?”

The answer was, they were not.

Kandahar, in those days, shimmered with a breathless hope. Afghans, even there in the Taliban's former den, were overcome by the possibilities opened up by this latest “revolution,” as they referred to it. They were in a rush to get their children educated, to have competent people in charge of them—officials who wouldn't pocket all the public funds that were supposed to be devoted to reconstruction, and who could hold their own with foreign governments. They couldn't wait to see the ruins of their city fixed up, to have some roads laid down under the tortured tires of their trucks. They were hungry to participate again in the shaping of their national destiny, the way they had back in the golden age before the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion.

I remember a discussion with a dozen petty opium dealers who had invited me to break the Ramadan fast with them. I asked to see some of their wares, and they obliged, fetching four and a half kilos of pure opium paste in a plastic bag. It smelled a little sweet, like new-mown hay. Microphone cocked, I had them put it on a brass balance and comment on its quality, so I could use the sound for my story.

Once I had wrapped up my formal interviews and we were sipping our after-dinner tea, we began talking about the future. The dealers said they would love to have a school right there in their neighborhood. They wanted “the foreigners” to build them one. I cut the fantasy short, lecturing: “You know what? The Americans are not going to drop a fully formed education system out of some helicopter like they dropped their bombs. It's just not going to happen that way. If you want foreigners to help you, you are going to have to take some initiative. If you start something, then they'll help you finish it. Why don't you get to work on that school yourselves?”

To illustrate this apparently alien notion of pitching in, I found myself describing Work and Play Day, a tradition at my own elementary school back in Boston. On the last day of the year, we kids would be assigned to different classrooms and spend the morning doing heavy cleaning for the summer. The afternoon was a schoolwide game of capture the flag. We looked forward to it all year long.

It took some talking to get my point across, but eventually the Afghan opium dealers warmed up. One thought that maybe there was room for that school on the roof of his own house.

Such conversations were infectious; I found myself having them again and again.

The point is that this was Kandahar, yet there was no hostility to the American presence. On the contrary, Kandaharis were looking to the Americans for help. They expected the Americans to help them gain their country back, help them rein in their own leaders' well-remembered corruption, help them come up with a new version of
qanun,
of law and order, which would be a little less oppressive than the Taliban's rendition. Help them start making something of themselves.

I told this to the young marine. I told him U.S. soldiers were in zero danger. They were seen as Kandahar's ticket out of backwardness.

“That's really interesting,” the marine replied. “I had a feeling that's how things were. See, they keep giving us these briefings about the situation here, and I've been wondering if they're bullshitting us. They keep saying this is a combat mission. ‘Combat?' I'm saying. ‘What combat?' There's nothing happening out here. I'm feeling pretty dumb in this hole in the ground. And I'm getting a little ticked off too. I think they're taking advantage of us. I feel like we're just a symbol—like a great big American flag stuck in the dirt out here. What's the use of that? I'd like to do something real. I'd like to get out there and start building that road.”

I wanted to throw my arms around the kid. “And you know what?” I said. “If you built the road, it would do more for your security than another thousand guys out here in foxholes. The Afghans would protect you. If they saw you helping them, they would take care of you.”

I had this entire conversation down on tape. It was going in my story. Because, like the tale young Fayda had told me on the way to Kandahar a couple of weeks before, it seemed to hold the crux of what was already going wrong.

But my editor nixed it. She said there was nothing new or interesting in this conversation. Soldiers are always disgruntled. This marine was just the same as every other grunt.

Looking back, I wonder what I had left to put in my marines at Christmas piece after she chopped that conversation.

I made a second lifestyle choice after a week or so in town, next to which my decision to wear men's clothes seemed positively mainstream. I decided to take up quarters not with the rest of the journalists at the one hotel, but in a private home, with a family of Achekzais.

I was guided in this choice partly by my sense of security—a hotel full of Western journalists felt like a target to me—and partly by my irrepressible reflex to get down on my hands and knees and roll around in stories I was covering. The company of fellow journalists always seemed to be too distorting a lens through which to observe a foreign culture.

I asked Mahmad Anwar if he could possibly find me a place to live. The same afternoon, he signed my driver to insert our yellow taxi into his convoy, and he led us up a stony road to the dodgy north side of town. Across a small bridge and to the right between a baker and a vegetable stall, and then abruptly left, our cortege emptied out into a graveyard.

It had to be the loneliest place I had ever laid eyes on. It was not set up like Western cemeteries, with headstones in rows, or funerary sculptures, or lovely landscaping, or marble mausoleums. It was bare ground. The graves were body-length mounds of stones, sometimes marked with a pole at head and foot, and decorated with scraps of cloth. To signal the resting places of heroes or saintly men, these slender poles were hung with flags, usually green or black.

About a hundred yards ahead, across this eerie landscape, stood my new home. Its impassive walls hid a mud-brick compound, the typical Kandahar construction, half underground, with a room for receiving visitors, the
maelmastun,
and separate family quarters where women could walk unseen.

There were twenty-two of us in there, counting a dozen kids, not counting the cow and her calf and two oversized brown Turkmen sheep. We had no running water, but we did have our own well and good reliable electricity, pirated off the city mains. I spent the nights with my driver and my youngest host-brother, in the public part of the compound, the
maelmastun
. We slept on the cotton-filled mattresses that hugged the four walls, doubling as seating during the day and bedding at night. A window niche was my desk; I kept my computer there, and an English-Pashtu dictionary that would lead me on tortuous quests, and the digital decoder that sent my stories out in crystal quality across a satellite link to Washington. The livestock and the well and latrine, and the small room we used for washing with a bucket of water heated over a fire, and a vegetable patch, were all back in the private quarters where the women lived, separated from the
maelmastun
by a narrow, low-roofed corridor.

Deprived of the services of my male translator when I was back there, I never really got to know the three young wives of the married brothers. I did not even learn their names. The only females who could cross back and forth to the
maelmastun
or stray outside like men were the little girls, and occasionally
Mur,
the family matriarch. For one fattish girl who was reaching puberty, it was already becoming a problem. At about thirteen, she was no longer allowed outside.

In the evenings, the brothers and their gleefully foul-mouthed father would gather for card games, slapping a winning card down with a triumphant
thwak,
and keeping up a running commentary. (A scant two weeks before, even such an innocent vice as this was punishable by beating.) My driver would join in, or some male friends or relatives who had stopped by. I would play too sometimes, or butt into the conversation with one of my laboriously acquired Pashtu words.