WALTZING WITH WARLORDS

On a dimly lit road in Wazir Akbar Khan, the Upper East Side of
Kabul, a couple of street kids gesture toward an unmarked iron gate
behind which they assure us we can find what we are looking for. An
Afghan guard gives us a wary once-over and opens the gate onto a dark
garden at the end of which a door is slightly ajar. I open it and
step into a world far removed from the dust-blown avenues of Kabul,
where most women wear burqas and the vast majority of the population
live in grinding poverty.

At one end of a long room is a well-stocked bar tended by a Chinese
madam who assesses us with a practiced calculus.

In front of her are more than a dozen scantily clad smiling young
Chinese women sprawled over a series of bar stools and couches.

Adorning the walls are red lanterns and large posters of Bruce Lee
and Jackie Chan. Nestling next to the prostitutes are several
mustached, glaze-eyed Afghan men who occasionally take unsteady steps
onto a makeshift dance floor to bust some surprisingly graceful
traditional moves.

A couple of the women titter as they gamely join in. Welcome to
Kabul, as David Lynch might imagine it.

Our party of four is soon joined by several of the women, who try to
make conversation, most of which consists of "Me no speak English."
Conversation is not really the point here when $60 will buy you more
stimulating forms of intercourse. One of the prostitutes whispers in
my ear, "You guys worry about the attacks?" She's referring to a
massive car bomb that had blown up a day earlier a couple of hundred
yards from the US Embassy, killing two American soldiers, one of them
a 52-year-old female reservist, and more than a dozen Afghan
bystanders. I arrived at the scene shortly after the attack and found
body parts that looked like fried pieces of meat and bone scattered a
couple of blocks away from where the bomb had exploded.

Kabul 2006 has a distinctly fin de siecle air. The hotel I stay at
plays loungey house music at night and serves beer discreetly. It
also has a makeshift bunker surrounded by sandbags in the event the
hotel is attacked, a reasonable precaution given that in May an angry
anti-American mob shot out the ground floor windows of another Kabul
hotel. Suicide attacks are now weekly events in the capital, while an
economy steeped in corruption and driven by the heroin/opium trade
and foreign aid enriches an elite who party into the night, taking
advantage of new freedoms that under the Taliban might have earned
them a reprimand from the religious police (listening to music);
landed them in prison (drinking alcohol); or had them stoned to death
(sex outside marriage).

The Taliban owe some of their renewed strength to the fact that they
can play on the fears of a generally conservative population who
worry about corrupting foreign influences exemplified by the new
brothels in Kabul. A hundred miles to the south of the capital, for
instance, the Taliban have recently appeared in force in nearly half
the districts of Ghazni province, which sits astride the key road
between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. Around Kandahar this
past summer fierce battles raged between the Taliban and NATO forces,
who encountered much stiffer resistance than they anticipated. In
September I embedded with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division at
a fire base on Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. The
Taliban launched rockets at the base on an almost daily basis, and
foot patrols were regularly encountering Taliban forces.

Three years earlier, when I was embedded in the same region with
soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, their main complaint was
how little action they were seeing.

Between the rising Taliban insurgency, the epidemic of attacks by
suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and
spiraling criminal activity fueled by the drug trade, Afghanistan
today looks something like Iraq in the summer of 2003, when the
descent into violent conflict began.

As a former senior Afghan Cabinet member told me in September, "If
international forces leave, the Taliban will take over in one hour."

A year ago there was still some real optimism about Afghanistan's
future based on President Hamid Karzai's popularity both at home and
abroad, the flood of returning refugees and the millions of girls and
boys starting school for the first time. That optimism is
evaporating. In December 2005, 77 percent of Afghans polled by ABC
News said their country was going in the right direction.

When asked again one year later, only 55 percent felt the same way.

What went wrong?

The books under review supply pieces of that puzzle. Former British
diplomat Rory Stewart describes his epic walk across Afghanistan in
the winter of 2001, American author Ann Jones recounts the time she
spent living in Kabul as an aid worker following the overthrow of the
Taliban and American journalist turned aid worker Sarah Chayes writes
of the years she lived in Kandahar following the American invasion.

Chayes arrived in Afghanistan as an NPR reporter covering the war
against the Taliban. She became disillusioned with the timidity of
her editors and decided to embark on a new career as field director
of an aid organization, Afghans for Civil Society. It was an often
frustrating job: "The whole of Afghan society was suffering from
collective PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)." The result, she
says, was "an inability to plan for the future.

Inability to think beyond one's own needs, excessive guile."

Settling in Kandahar, Chayes lived a critical part of the Afghan
story often overlooked by international journalists and aid workers,
who tend to have an insular, Kabul-centric view of the country.

As Chayes explains, foreigners generally settle in the capital and
"live apart from Afghans in guarded compounds.

They do not walk about, but are driven by chauffeurs." Chayes, by
contrast, lived with a local family, learned Pashto, kept a
Kalashnikov by her bed and "loved the place." If this is cause for a
smidgen of self-congratulation, Chayes is entitled to it. Kandahar,
located in the middle of a desert that broils in summer and freezes
in winter, is a deeply boring, ultraconservative Afghan city that is
now quite dangerous for foreigners. For most of us a week's visit
would suffice.

Chayes lived there for four years.

A key theme of Chayes's angry, very well-written book is her gradual
disillusionment with President Karzai, who early in the narrative is
portrayed as a possible savior of Afghanistan, "remarkably
cultivated" and "uniquely devoid of brutality and arrogance." The
villain of Chayes's story is the uncouth Gul Agha Shirzai, who became
governor of Kandahar with US support in December 2001. Once in office
Shirzai built his "personal power base" with no regard for anyone
other than his own tribe, which received the choicest American
contracts, and he would allegedly bump off perceived rivals on occasion.

Yet much to Chayes's frustration, Karzai seemed unable or unwilling
to rein in warlords like Shirzai. "Instead of protecting the people
from the warlords, curbing them, or removing them from office, Karzai
seemed to be waltzing with them." In January 2003 Chayes, who was
close to the president's brother Qayum Karzai, hammered out a plan of
action about how to rid Afghanistan of the warlords.

Item one of Chayes's plan, which she submitted to President Karzai,
was: "Begin with Gul Agha Shirzai." Nothing happened.

The Punishment of Virtue is bookended by the murder of Chayes's
friend Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal, a police official who was killed in
Kandahar by a supposedly random suicide bombing in June 2005. For
Chayes, Akrem's murder crystallized all that is wrong with the country.

He was the polar opposite of the warlords, a police chief who had
served in a number of major cities around Afghanistan, who tried to
work for the common good and was "the most able public official I
encountered." After conducting her own investigation of Akrem's
murder, Chayes concludes that it was not a random suicide attack but
a targeted assassination. The murder remains unsolved, and we have to
take Chayes's word for it that Akrem was the selfless patriot she
paints him to be. It is a bleak ending to a bleak story.

Ann Jones, an American author who has written a number of books about
women and violence, arrived in Kabul in the winter of 2002: "Kabul in
winter is the color of dust...dust fills the lungs, tightens the
chest. Lies in the eyes like gravel, so that you look out on this
obscure drab landscape always with something like tears." Like
Chayes, Jones has written an angry book about Afghanistan and, also
like Chayes, she writes evocatively to illuminate another
little-known world, that of poor, marginalized women in Kabul.

Unfortunately, Jones's reading of recent Afghan history is sometimes
marred by a tendency to see sinister conspiracies where they don't
exist. She writes, for instance, that the United States was initially
willing to play ball with the Taliban in the mid-1990s because of
energy interests eager to build a pipeline across the country from
the gas fields of Central Asia and withdrew its support only because
the Taliban could not provide "security" for such a project, rather
than acknowledging the real reasons the United States turned against
the Taliban, which were their antediluvian treatment of women and
harboring of Al Qaeda. The one thing the Taliban did provide was
security, which is why they had legitimacy and popularity when they
came to power.

And today, five years after the occupation of the country by the
United States, there is still no pipeline across Afghanistan because
it just doesn't make any economic sense to build it.

Jones also recycles the trope that the CIA trained and funded the
"Arab Afghans" to the tune of $800 million during the 1980s war
against the Soviet Union, when, in fact, as journalist Steve Coll has
shown in Ghost Wars, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of American
involvement in Afghanistan, there is no evidence that the agency had
any direct dealings with Osama bin Laden and his crew of foreign fighters.

Where Kabul in Winter begins to take off is in Jones's devastating
critique of American aid to Afghanistan, which is consumed all too
often by foreigners, evident in the fleets of Land Rovers and Toyota
Land Cruisers that choke Kabul's smog-filled streets.

Jones wryly observes: "Afghanistan, we learned from TV, had been
'rebuilt' thanks to millions of dollars of international aid pouring
into the country. Where was it?" In a conversation with an American
education expert Jones receives a depressing answer to that question.

The expert explains that 80 to 90 percent of American aid goes to US
contractors to cover overhead for back offices in the States as well
as housing and office space in Kabul, and perks such as drivers, R
and R, imported food, furniture and alcohol.

Jones points out that in contrast to countries like Sweden, which
allocates only 4 percent of its aid costs to "technical assistance"
that goes back home to pay Swedes, "eighty-six cents of every dollar
of American aid is phantom aid" that will line American pockets
rather than go directly to Afghans. According to Jones, only France
has a worse record in this area.

The heart of Jones's book is her deeply reported description of her
work trying to improve conditions for women prisoners and female
hospital patients in Kabul. Dickensian is far too mild an adjective
to describe the conditions that she encounters:

In the dirty emergency room...lies a young girl. Perhaps sixteen....
The head nurse stands at the foot of the bed and outlines the case
dispassionately, as if the patient were not there.

This girl was made to marry an old man, she says. Then he accused her
of adultery because a friend of his saw her talking to a boy in the
street; he told her to return to her father's house.

She hadn't wanted to marry this husband, but to go back was to spread
shame on her family, like a stain.

She was afraid her father would kill her to wash it away. In this
crisis, she went for advice to her neighbor, who said: Why don't you
burn yourself? So she did. She drenched her body in diesel fuel and
set herself alight. The flames burned 90 percent of her skin and
spared only her head, which lies now on a tear-drenched pillow in a
kind of separate agony of consciousness and pain.

Jones explains that Afghan customary law, which treats women as
property, underlies the self-immolations and honor killings: "Afghans
themselves have a saying that names the three sources of social
discord as 'zan, zar, zamin'--women, gold and land. When Afghans name
threats to social order, they name women first." Afghan customary law
is not about justice as it is understood in the West but about the
restoration of social order, an order that is entirely dominated by
men. And so, in disputes about family honor involving women, it is
invariably a woman who ends up paying the price of restoring the
social order either by being killed or committing suicide.

In the western city of Herat, for instance, there were an estimated
190 self-immolations in 2003.

Herat is where Rory Stewart began his walk across Afghanistan, a
country that is "an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humor, and
extreme brutality." Any British writer who writes about walking in
Afghanistan does so in the shadow of the great British travel writer
Eric Newby, who died in October and whose 1958 book A Short Walk in
the Hindu Kush is a minor comic masterpiece, the foreword of which
was written by Evelyn Waugh. A Short Walk describes how Newby, who
toiled unhappily at a fashion house in London, left for Afghanistan
to climb a 20,000-foot mountain in Nuristan after training for only
four days by climbing rocks in Wales. Suffice to say that many things
went wrong during his expedition.

Five decades later Stewart, a worthy successor to Newby, decided to
walk across Afghanistan as the Taliban were falling during the winter
of 2001. He chose to take a route across central Afghanistan, a
region so inhospitable to outsiders, isolated and impassable that
only one imperial power in history, the Ghorids in the twelfth
century, seems to have bothered to secure the region. (At one point
on his trip Stewart even stumbles across the remains of the lost
Ghorid highland capital, the Turquoise Mountain, which was being
systematically looted by locals.) Stewart takes a "long walk" in the
Hindu Kush so fraught with danger that at one point he bumps into a
contingent of British Special Forces who call him a "fucking nutter."
Stewart, correctly, understands this to be their highest form of praise.

Although Stewart's beautifully written book is in a lighter vein than
those of Chayes and Jones, underlying his picaresque stories of
adventure on the road is a critical point that is often overlooked by
Westerners with dreams of transforming Afghanistan into a place where
women enjoy equal rights, "capacity building" creates viable stable
government institutions and the power of warlords crumbles with the
spread of "civil society." Such dreams rarely survive contact with
the religiously conservative, tribal, rural, not infrequently
xenophobic societies where most Afghans live.

Stewart, a former British diplomat who served as deputy governor of a
southern province of Iraq following the US-led invasion of the
country, is skeptical of Western efforts to transform countries like
Afghanistan into societies in our own image, a principle espoused by
neoconservatives and liberal internationalists alike:

Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages
where 90 per cent of the Afghan population lived.

They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal
traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate
projects on urban design, women's rights...and to speak of a people
"who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a
centralized multi-ethnic government." But what did they understand of
the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wife, who had not moved
five kilometers from her home in forty years.

Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the
way they carried briefcases?

This is a pessimistic view of what the West can achieve in
Afghanistan (not to mention Iraq), but it's a view that is informed
by Stewart's erudite knowledge of Afghan history and his extensive
travels in the country, and by what has actually taken place in
Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Afghanistan remains one of
the poorest countries in the world; the government barely functions,
local warlords have the run of the place and much of the country is
racked by violence.

The best that can be said of Afghanistan is: At least it's not as bad
as Iraq. And even that could change.

The United States' experience in both countries calls to mind Kant's
observation: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight
thing was ever made." Perhaps in coming years we will learn a little
humility and patience about the efficacy of the wholesale export of
Western democratic values and institutions into countries with very
different social mores and political structures. Those Western
exports have now beached on the shoals of reality from the Tigris to
the Kabul River.

[Sidebar]

Reviewed Here:

The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban by Sarah Chayes

Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan by Ann Jones

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart