The Punishment of Virtue; Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban
Jeffrey L. Ward (Maps) New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [12], 386, [2] pages. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. An NPR correspondent presents an account of the return to the violence and corruption of warlord activity in Afghanistan after the displacement of the Taliban, revealing how the U.S. government assisted the return of corrupt militia commanders to the country. Sarah Chayes (born March 5, 1962) is a former senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former reporter for National Public Radio, she also served as special advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After covering the fall of the Taliban and the early weeks of post-Taliban Afghanistan, in 2002 Chayes decided to leave reporting and stay behind to try to contribute to the rebuilding of the war-torn country. Chayes lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009. Having learned to speak Pashto, she helped rebuild homes and set up a dairy cooperative. In 2010, Chayes became a special adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. In this capacity, she contributed to strategic US policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arab Spring. Sarah Chayes is a senior fellow in Carnegie's Democracy and Rule of Law program.] At Carnegie, Chayes has launched a corruption and security initiative, which analyzes the structure of kleptocratic governments around the world, the other risk factors with which public corruption is interacting in specific countries, the likelihood of a significant security event resulting, and potential approaches available to different local and international actors. Derived from a Kirkus review: A tale of good guys and bad guys in the Wild West of Afghanistan—save that “good” and “bad” are strangely fluid notions. Chayes, a onetime NPR correspondent, takes an anthropologist’s and historian’s view to explain how America got it so wrong following the post-9/11 invasion, and she is not shy of asking hard questions to make her point. For one, she asks, “Do we, as American citizens, wish to have the bulk of our foreign policy conducted by the Department of Defense?” United States military officers are doing just such work in Afghanistan, guided by supposed insiders who have axes to grind and enemies to dispatch—the very people, she adds, who convinced the Western press corps that U.S.-backed militias were fighting and winning desperate battles with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Sometimes they were; mostly they weren’t, though that didn’t keep dollars from flowing. Chayes served as a lecturer and informal advisor to American forces, and in that capacity, she has urged them to do a better job of backing the right horses, such as an anti-Taliban friend of hers, a police commander killed by a suicide bomber for his troubles. But finding those horses is a challenge, for the convenient designations do not apply, and in all events, Chayes writes, the Taliban enemy were in essence a creation of Pakistan, meant to serve its narrow regional interests, “pressing into service ambitious petty commanders from the anti-Soviet period and uprooted, madrassa-inculcated youth from the refugee camps.” And indeed, some of the Taliban she meets surely seem preferable to some of their supposed opponents, including one corrupt governor who emerges from these pages as the worst of a very mixed lot. Absorbing reading—necessary, even, for anyone posted to a place where our performance “will determine where a lot of people come down on the clash of civilizations.”. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Taliban, Terrorism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Al Qaeda, Mullah Omar, bin Laden, Kandahar, Civil Society, Zabit Akrem, Warlord, Mongol, Mazar-i-Sherif, Kabul, Suicide Bombing
ISBN: 9781594200960
[Book #58353]
Price: $45.00