The Punishment of Virtue (2 page)

Someone shouts something at me. Angrily. Pointing. He won't be quiet. I retort, temper flaring. Someone else turns and makes a gesture to calm us down. It is a gesture of prayer. I am ashamed. I have overstepped myself. I am a woman, and my presence in line will render the collective prayer unclean, unacceptable to God. That's what the man was shouting at me. Nastily, insultingly. I drop it and stand aside—coming apart. I go to the black van, empty now, slide back the door, and sit inside. There is a small puddle of blood on the floor.

After the prayer I can return. The men hand the body into the grave. Two of them climb down and start bricking him in. It is an oddly physical labor. They work like master masons, slapping on mud to caulk the joints. I help pass the big flat bricks down to them. Then, when they are done and have climbed out, younger men take turns with shovels. When the earth is filled in and piled up, we begin choosing stones to stud the mound from a heap behind us. Two cut saplings are anchored at head and foot. Someone loops the thin strip of cloth that had bound the body around the saplings, and ties it off. And it is done. He is really, truly gone.

I pick up a stone from the mound and put it in my pocket.

General Muhammad Akrem Khakrezawal, chief of the Kabul police, was forty-six years old. Barely two months in office in the Afghan capital, he was already loved by the population, gruff Pashtun from Kandahar though he was. Akrem was, bar none, the most able public official I encountered in Afghanistan.

And he was my friend.

I don't know if I will ever be able to find out who killed him. But I will try. By God, I will try. And the obvious way to start is to determine who did not.

1990S–2001

W
HEN
A
KREM WAS KILLED
, on June 1, 2005, I had been living in Kandahar, with a few interruptions, for almost four years. The place had drawn me into its entrails, snapping me out of a disturbing malaise.

I had arrived there in late 2001 as a reporter for National Public Radio. The identity was one I had come to by accident, but it seemed to fit, for a while. Years before, I used to inflict NPR on my evening customers when I was working at a cheese shop to put myself through grad school. NPR was this crazy experiment in public radio financed by you or people like you who actually wrote out checks and sent them to their local stations. It was a main source of news for the community I grew up in—more intellectual, a little quirkier than most others. But I never dreamed, when I was cutting Stilton or offering customers a taste of torte mascarpone with one ear cocked to the radio, that my voice would be coming out of that box one day. And then, in a violent allergic reaction, I abandoned grad school and groped my way to journalism.

I reported for NPR from Paris through the late 1990s, gradually being folded into the lineup of “smoke jumpers”: foreign correspondents flung at crises wherever they arose. I had a long and rich stint in the Balkans, watching as the splintered peoples there tried to get out from under the wreckage of their savage post-Communist downfall. I covered the evolving international consciousness that grew out of that trauma, including the proceedings of the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. When this run came to an end in 2000, I found myself back in Paris, reporting on food. Perfect, no?

Not for me. I had never felt entirely at ease in Paris. I was always struggling over the sense in what I was doing.

For some years, I went for the lowest common denominator. I convinced myself—in the desert of international coverage that the U.S. media had become—that just
being
a foreign correspondent was a kind of salutary subversion. I followed issues in France that had resonance in the United States: labor conflicts at a time when globalization was displacing industrial jobs, struggles over society's investment in public services like railroads and the post office, day care for working women, a big protest by undocumented immigrants in 1996. I wanted to show how the solutions that Europeans reached to these familiar problems differed from America's. I told myself that just convincing some Americans that the United States was not the only country in the world would be a service.

But once I was plunged into the center of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, reporting day and night from NATO headquarters and later from the ground among the devastated refugees, questions about the value of my work were suspended for a time.

I stayed in the Balkans, crossing and recrossing the Serbia/Kosovo divide, later adding Bosnia to the territories I explored in my rented Yugo. At length, I returned to Paris and spent a year covering ethnic conflicts that I could not take seriously, like Basque separatists or Corsican politico-mafia insurgents, and filing a seemingly endless series of food stories. I chronicled how bakeries were turning into fast-food joints, serving sandwiches to lines of Parisians who no longer took two-hour lunches—a story that was at least ten years old. I did a piece on a three-star restaurant that had switched to an all-vegetarian menu, a sacrilege in carnivorous Paris. And then the mad cow crisis. I went to a slaughterhouse for that one.

But all the while I had a sense of foreboding. I felt I was marking time as the world was heading toward a perilous turbulence. It seemed the precepts I believed in, the principles I thought my society was founded on, were fading. Instead of the struggle for justice, knowledge, good neighborliness at home and abroad, we seemed to be taken up with entertaining ourselves and amassing fortunes, no matter what the cost to the planet or human dignity. America and Europe seemed to be missing something basic. Something was wrong, and nothing I was doing was helping to right it.

Then September 11 crashed into the world. It snapped everything into a shocking light. This was it, I thought. Like so many others, I was instantly sure the moment was a watershed. As I joined millions of people watching those Manhattan buildings sink down in a horrendous, helpless, inexorable curtsy, it was clear we had come to a turning point. This was one of those moments that define their century. It was as though the plate tectonics of history were shifting.

September 11 shattered me, in ways that took me by surprise. Reporting on the ceremony at the centuries-old headquarters of the French National Police, with the great, booming bells of Notre Dame Cathedral throbbing in the background, I found myself weeping, out in the open, unable to wipe my eyes because I had to hold my microphone. I was so grateful to the French for just dropping all the contentiousness that has characterized our peoples' long and intimate partnership. For days, they waited in line outside the U.S. embassy to pay their respects. Conversations struck up during those days between Frenchmen and-women and Americans were profound. I began to feel—but the thought took days to surface—that the horror that had befallen us might just hide a miracle. It might shock the United States awake, get us to adjust our course. It might goad us to go to work again, to
be
what we kept saying we were: the champions of human dignity, the exemplars of public participation in government, of government acting in good faith, the mentors of peoples struggling to be free.

Or it might not.

For there was something about the reaction to 9/11 that disturbed me. Along with the new openness, the self-questioning in America—the e-mail messages people were sending around and reading aloud to their friends, the searching conversations between strangers—another tendency was emerging, and it was gaining emphasis. It was a reflex to divide the world in our hearts into two opposing blocs: We the West versus Them, now embodied by Islam, which had suddenly appeared on the world stage to fill the role left vacant by the vanquished Soviet Union. The shorthand term for this notion, taken from the title of a book, entered our vocabulary: the clash of civilizations.
¹

It was clear to me that the Al-Qaeda terrorists who flew their planes into those enormously symbolic American buildings were trying to force people everywhere into splitting apart along these lines. Quite aside from the terrorists' use of mass murder, it was this intent that made them abhorrent to me.

But some of us seemed to want the selfsame thing. And some of our leaders seemed to be showing the way, deliberately blurring all the myriad distinctions that gave our world its depth and richness. Suddenly the world was being described in binary terms, and instinctively I knew that was wrong. An us-versus-them reaction may be normal in humans who are attacked, but is it accurate? Is it productive? Is it the reaction that those to whom we look for guidance should be bringing out in us? Is this the best we can do?

I don't think so. I don't believe in the clash of civilizations. I believe that most human beings share some basic aspirations and some basic values: the right to participate in fashioning the rules that govern them, accountability, access to learning, and the reasonably equitable distribution of wealth, for example. The extent to which different peoples have been able to achieve these things depends a lot on what has befallen them over the course of time—not on some irrevocable cultural difference.

And so it seemed urgent to me at that assumption-shattering moment—that moment full of potential and peril—to counteract the tendency to caricature, to help bring out the human complexity of this new exchange. My background and abilities equipped me. I could talk to people on both sides of the alleged divide. I could help them hear each other. This was a way for me to serve.

I called my NPR editor: “If you need me,” I told him, “I'm yours. I'd like to make a contribution.”

So he sent me to Quetta, Pakistan, exactly where I wanted to go. Considered the most conservative and anti-American town in all of Pakistan, it had been the cradle of the Taliban movement. It was from Quetta that the Taliban, a reactionary group that used a radical reading of Islam as the basis for the world's latest experiment in totalitarianism, had set off in 1994 to capture nearby Kandahar—to widespread indifference internationally. A few years later, Usama bin Laden joined the Taliban leadership there, as their welcome guest. In return for financial and military assistance in their effort to conquer Afghanistan, the Taliban offered Bin Laden a haven where he could nurture and develop his Al-Qaeda network. Kandahar became the base from which the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces took over ever-larger amounts of Afghanistan, until an opposing militia called the Northern Alliance was left clinging to only a tiny sliver of the country in the far north.

Because of this foothold, it was in the north that most of the U.S. bombing had been concentrated after 9/11; and it was to the north that flocks of journalists had been dispatched. For the story most Americans seemed anxious to hear—of relieved Afghans welcoming American liberators—could be most plausibly reported from the north.

The south was different. Well after the start of the war, U.S. planners were still struggling for a similar scenario there. They were looking for local insurgents, like the Northern Alliance, that U.S. bombing could be said merely to support. But it was harder to find them in the south. Seen as hostile and dangerous, shrouded in a darkness to match the Taliban's black robes, home to the core of the elusive Al-Qaeda network, the Afghan south seemed impenetrable.

But it could not be ignored. Kandahar had been the first capital of Afghanistan, and it was still the marrow of the nation's bones. And now, after 9/11, it was the antipode, the very place where the attacks had been planned. Quetta, Pakistan, with its promise of Kandahar once the Taliban fell, proposed just the challenge I hungered for. I arrived in the last days of October 2001.

As expected, it proved a difficult time and place to be an American journalist. But not for the reasons I had foreseen. The difficulty lay not in local hostility, but in reporting back to a traumatized nation.

“The worst period in my entire career,” a friend and revered colleague confided to me as we compared notes afterward. He sent me a list of story ideas that his editors had rejected. “Our people simply didn't want us to do any reporting,” my friend, a Pulitzer Prize winner, complained. “They already knew the story they wanted, and they told us what it was. We were just supposed to dig up some stuff to substantiate their foregone conclusions.”

A CNN correspondent told me that she had received written instructions not to film civilian casualties. And I remember a confab in the marbled hall of the Quetta Serena Hotel with BBC reporter Adam Brookes in mid-November 2001, the weekend Kabul fell, listening to how he'd had to browbeat his desk editor to convince him that Kandahar was still standing.

It was as though, because the 9/11 attacks had taken place in New York and Washington, the American nerve centers, they had blown out the critical-thinking apparatus in the people we have always trusted to have one: the editors, the experienced journalists.

National Public Radio was not immune, though my one civilian casualty piece did enjoy the full support of my editors, to their credit. It was a story that simply had to be reported, for the Afghan refugees I interviewed every day could think and talk of nothing else. Their hearts shattered by decades of gunfire and explosions, these refugees had seen nothing like the bombs that were ploughing up their country now. With no experience of precision ordnance, they were almost mad with fear, as their imaginations overloaded their fragile mental circuitry with remembered images of carnage. That U.S. bombing
was
accurate was an important point. But that the bombing was traumatizing the Afghan civilians whom it was supposed to be liberating was just as true. The anguish I heard every day—the pleas to tell President Bush, for the love of God, to stop the bombing—was not an act; it was real. And it seemed important to expose Americans to the psychological impact that this war was having, not the least because it might have future repercussions. Ideological movements like Usama bin Laden's are rooted in collective psychology just as much as in matters more concrete.

So I did the story, visiting a hospital ward in Quetta, where most of the patients were children. I chose one small boy to open my report—at random really, because doctors were just coming in to examine him, and their activity would give me some ambient sound to record, the kind that radio reporters are always looking for to set their scenes. The boy was terribly injured; I wondered how he had ever survived the drive from Kandahar. It was so bad that I decided to censor myself. I took out the reference to the gash across his back—he had just had an operation for something torn up in there. On top of his other wounds, it would just seem too much. Even so, my story drew vituperative reactions from listeners. One said he was so angry that he almost had to pull his car off the road to vomit.
²

My editors never even questioned me about it. But as time went on, I began to sense a certain impatience in Washington with my reporting. That same period between the fall of Kabul and of Kandahar, when the BBC's Brookes had trouble with his desk, a senior NPR staff member whom I deeply admired wrote me an e-mail message saying, in effect, that he no longer trusted my work. He accused me of disseminating Taliban propaganda: I, like Brookes, was reporting that Kandahar was still in Taliban hands. He called my sources “pro-bin Laden,” for why else would they be leaving Afghanistan at the very moment that the Taliban were losing control and anti-Taliban Afghans were celebrating?