A voice in the Afghan wilderness

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A Voice in the Afghan Wilderness
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 19, 2006; Page C01


Shortly after the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes found herself reporting a story she was sure had enormous implications for both that country and the United States. She couldn't get it on the air. Five years later, in her new book, "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban," Chayes returns to this unheard story. It's a starting point for a detailed, highly personal exploration of the enormous price she believes the United States is paying for a mistake now so widely acknowledged it has become a cliche: intervening militarily with "no concept" of how to "create a working society after the intervention."

It goes like this:

In December 2001, Chayes rushed across the Pakistani border in the company of a young fighter affiliated with the forces of Gul Agha Shirzai, a local warlord. Shirzai's militiamen had just taken control of Kandahar, the fabled southern city that had been a key Taliban and al-Qaeda stronghold. The takeover, Chayes knew, was in defiance of the orders of newly anointed Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who had designated another group to hold Kandahar. What Chayes didn't know was the role played by American Special Forces troops attached to Shirzai's militia. She imagined the Special Forces guys cursing the renegade warlord, then saying: "They're attacking, we'd better go along with them." But when she asked her militiaman escort, "This kid looked at me and said, 'The Americans? They told us to do it!' ". What a story, she thought: No sooner has the new central government taken power -- representing the promise of a better life for the long-suffering Afghan people -- than its authority is undermined by "American soldiers egging on a warlord to snatch Kandahar away from President Karzai."

For whatever reasons, her editors saw it differently. They told her it was nothing but "squabbling among the Afghans" and cut it from her "All Things Considered" report. Chayes, who grew up in Cambridge, Mass., is a slim woman in her mid-forties with an intense gaze and a deeply bicultural life. She left NPR in 2002, after her reporting tour in Afghanistan ended, and accepted an invitation from Karzai's uncle to help run a fledgling nongovernmental organization called Afghans for Civil Society. At a recent book party in Bethesda, she kept tugging at the straps of her little black dress as though it were an unfamiliar foreign garment -- which, in a way, it is. In Afghanistan, she has long dressed like an Afghan man, the better to move around in a male-dominated society.

Earlier in the day, she'd been asked to appear on PBS's "NewsHour." There had been a horrific bombing in Kabul, and the question of the hour, she says, was "Why this uptick in violence now?"

Her answer: Actually, Afghan violence has been spiking higher and higher since late 2002. "You guys have just started to notice it."

more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091801402.html