Book Review

Prospects for a wild country

The Punishment of Virtue

Based in Paris for America's National Public Radio (NPR), Sarah Chayes stuck her hand up for active duty after 9/11 and was smartly dispatched to Quetta, the hottest town on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in the weeks before the Afghan war started. I was there too; we must have stayed at the Serena Hotel at around the same time: hemmed in by Pakistani police, allowed to venture beyond the city only with permission and an armed escort, yet living in luxury and feeling in no real danger. In those days before the murder of Daniel Pearl, before the killing of Maria Grazia Cutuli and three other journalists on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul, those of us who claimed to know the subcontinent well felt that there was no great cause for alarm.

Then the bombing war started, the Taliban melted away and in no time Chayes found herself in Kandahar, the southern city that had been the Taliban's stronghold. If she had been like the vast majority of the huge army of journalists encamped in the region, she would have stayed to report the "end" of the Taliban, the arrival of the American forces, the first shy, hesitant steps by women towards emancipation, etc - then gratefully pulled out. Afghanistan is, was, and I fear for a very long time will remain the most testing place in Asia by a long way. You leave Afghanistan and the relief is enormous.

But Chayes stuck with it. The first thing to be said about her book is that it is testament to extraordinary courage and sympathy. Chayes had no prior knowledge of Afghanistan or South Asia - and it shows - but the Pashtuns of Kandahar won her heart. She decided to stay put. When NPR pulled her out, she came straight back, after a few weeks' brainstorming back in the United States, with her own NGO, Afghans for Civil Society. When that finally went bad on her - the process that is the main subject of this book - she went away and came back with a scheme to get these hard-bitten tribesmen making massage oil and perfumed soap.

And all this in Kandahar: not in Kabul, which, after the war was won, quite quickly turned into the sort of NGO-ville she rightly disparages, where "humanitarian organisations devise projects within driving distance of their spacious headquarters, and new restaurants open up to the foreign crowds". Chayes stayed in Kandahar because it got under her skin, but also because this prize-winning Harvard history graduate intuits that it is at the heart of the Afghan mess: the city that has always lived on the edge of two empires, the Indian and the Iranian, and has by turns grown rich and reaped the whirlwind from this double contiguity.

Sarah Chayes is far from the glamorous, grandstanding journalists of satellite news; she is more like the Victorian memsahibs who hacked their way through India or Africa. Chayes disdained to stay with the few other foreigners who call Kandahar home, instead finding an appalling billet with an Afghan family next to a graveyard. She spoke no Pashto at this point, but knew that there is nothing like going native for learning how places tick. And the main stumbling block to this project - the fact that she is a woman - she shrugs off as a matter of no importance. Very early on she decided to dress as an Afghan man. "The decision was based on a rudimentary notion of optics," she writes. "I decided to go for the optical illusion. If I wore men's clothes, I figured, then idle observers ... would ‘see' me as the man they expected and leave me alone. It worked, more or less."

Of course the main reason it worked was nothing to do with "optics" and all to do with the fact that she was a Westerner and an American, and was spoiled rotten by the Afghans. Imagine what ghastly fate would have befallen a Pashtun woman trying the same trick.

Like many before her, she fell in love with the wildness, and the warmth of Afghan society. But she aspired to do more than merely spend some time here, hanging out and "doing good": Afghanistan must change, and she is going to help make it happen.

Chayes finds Hamid Karzai "the most inspiring political leader I had come close to in my adult life" and felt that he held out a message of "inspired political leadership ... not just for Afghanistan. He seemed to be offering his vision to a cynical world - an example for us all: popular participation in a nation's destiny, individual freedoms, and steps towards healthy economic development ... Perhaps he was the spark that could jolt our stalled-out democracies back to life."

This is the first time I have encountered the idea that the success of Afghanistan is going to be such a stirring event that it will galvanise the attention of the world. This is sadly deluded. The most the outside world can dream of achieving for Afghanistan is, in the words of Professor William Maley's dry, useful little book, to "rescue" it - to save it from another convulsion of war and revolution; and the chances of our achieving even that seem to worsen by the day.

As Chayes painfully discovers, Afghanistan remains the victim of its powerful, unscrupulous neighbours, Pakistan above all. America does not appear to realise what is going on: by its own actions it is putting viciously corrupt warlords back in power. People remember the old regime and begin "harking back to the Taliban peace with some nostalgia".

Not surprisingly, Chayes' political dreams for Kandahar come to absolutely nought. When the police chief she idolises as the symbolic Good Afghan is assassinated, the book's journey from illusion to disenchantment is complete.

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