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The Punishment of Virtue | 
 enlarge | Author: Sarah Chayes
Publisher: Penguin
Category: EBooks
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $6.01 (38%)
Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 5560
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 958.1047
ASIN: B000QUEHPI
Publication Date: May 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
A National Public Radio reporter covering the last stand of the Taliban in their home base of Kandahar in Afghanistan's southern borderland, Sarah Chayes became deeply immersed in the unfolding drama of the attempt to rebuild a broken nation at the crossroads of the world's destiny. Her NPR tour up in early 2002, she left reporting to help turn the country's fortunes, accepting a job running a nonprofit founded by President Hamid Karzai's brother. With remarkable access to leading players in the postwar government, Chayes witnessed a tragic story unfold -- the perverse turn of events whereby the U.S. government and armed forces allowed and abetted the return to power of corrupt militia commanders to the country, as well as the reinfiltration of bands of Taliban forces supported by U.S. ally Pakistan. In this gripping and dramatic account of her four years on the ground, working with Afghanis in the battle to restore their country to order and establish democracy, Chayes opens Americans' eyes to the sobering realities of this vital front in the war on terror. She forged unparalleled relationships with the Karzai family, tribal leaders, U.S. military and diplomatic brass, and such leading figures in the Kandahar government as the imposing and highly effective chief of police-an incorruptible supporter of the Karzai regime whose brutal assassination in June 2005 serves as the opening of the book. Chayes lived in an Afghan home, gaining rich insights into the country's culture and politics and researching the history of Afghanistan's legendary resistance to foreign interference. She takes us into meetings with Hamid Karzai and the corrupt Kandahar governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, into the homes of tribal elders and onto the U.S. military base. Unveiling the complexities and traumas of Afghanistan's postwar struggles, she reveals how the tribal strongmen who have regained power -- after years of being displaced by the Taliban -- have visited a renewed plague of corruption and violence on the Afghan people, under the complicit eyes of U.S. forces and officials. The story Chayes tells is a powerful, disturbing revelation of misguided U.S. policy and of the deeply entrenched traditions of tribal warlordism that have ruled Afghanistan through the centuries.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Losing Afghanistan . . . August 22, 2006
Ronald Scheer (Los Angeles)
58 out of 59 found this review helpful
This highly readable book is part memoir and part political analysis. The author, a former overseas NPR correspondent, describes her sojourn over the years 2001-2005 in Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, where she worked for an Afghan-based NGO and, as an instinctive investigative reporter, formed her own assessment of the political forces at work in that post-Taliban city.
Her conclusions are both alarming and disheartening. She comes to believe that Pakistan is the root cause of political instability in Afghanistan and that through its support of warlords it uses resurgent Taliban forces to manipulate and regain control of large parts of the country. More discouraging is the author's portrayal of President Hamid Karzai as an intelligent, gifted, and cultured man who is often ineffectual as a leader.
The book is framed by the account of an assassination of the Kabul chief of police, a man of unusual integritiy and ability (hence the book's title) and its subsequent coverup as a suicide bombing. Set against him is the power-hungry and corrupt governor of Kandahar, who has won the confidence of the Americans while secretly amassing a fortune that he uses to fund a private army, meanwhile working deals with Pakistan to keep alive the threat of Taliban terrorism that makes the Americans even more dependent on him.
There are large swathes of Afghan and Persian history woven into this modern-day accounting, which reveal patterns of political and cultural forces at play that go back to Alexander the Great. Vividly written, the book provides a disturbing portrayal of failed leadership on the part of both the U.S. and the current government in Kabul. Read it and weep.
is Pakistan playing the U.S. for chumps?? September 7, 2006
Richard Cumming (blue state)
24 out of 31 found this review helpful
NPR listeners will recall that Sarah Chayes filed some extraordinary reports from Afghanistan during the US invasion that followed 9/11. The Taliban were driven from power and Osama Bin Laden vanished into the mist along the border with Pakistan, our biggest "ally" in the region.
Chayes found that her bosses at NPR were censoring her. She wanted to break what she felt were the real stories. She says "my editors never really wanted me to do the breaking." She calls her editor an "ogre." NPR was a shameless cheerleader for the first Gulf War, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq. Neo-cons like to call NPR "liberal media" while those on the left feel they have sold out for McDonald's money and they are now National Pentagon Radio. But that's another story.
Chayes writes brilliantly and dispassionately about the Afghani people. They have suffered decades of war and she feels the entire nation is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress.
George W. Bush promised to rebuild the country. It hasn't happened. Chayes found most of the money went into the pockets of regional warlords and the rest went to the pending US invasion of Iraq.
The Taliban were bad. At least they had laws, however strict. Now, it is anarchy and nobody feels safe.
Worst of all, Chayes thinks our supposed ally, Pakistan, is playing us for chumps. She says the war on terror is a charade when we are giving billions to a regime that is actually supporting it.
So, 5 years later, WHERE's OSAMA?? You must read this book.
A stunning read September 5, 2006
Empyjay
23 out of 24 found this review helpful
This book, readable as a mystery, is fueled by passion. It is really well written: direct, engaging, never leaving behind the reader who, like me, knows little or nothing about Afghanistan. Chayes's story is in Kandahar in the southern part of the country, where she arrived as an NPR reporter in late 2001. With an almost fictional immediacy she describes the situation she found and how she dealt with it -- she declined, for instance, to live in a hotel with the other foreign journalists and instead boarded with a family. She takes us with her into an increasing understanding of the tangled history that underlies Afghanistan, and particularly Kandahar, today. And she is both anguished and unsparing in her recounting of American cluelessness and misjudgments, which she sees as born of an inability to coordinate or take advantage of acquired knowledge on the ground, as US officials and military commanders are rotated in and out.
The frame of the book is the assassination of her friend Akrem, the Kabul police chief, the single best official she met in Afghanistan. It is publicly announced as the work of a suicide bomber. Chayes, who has by this time left NPR and returned as head of a private aid effort, investigates and disagrees.
A really valuable book. I read it pretty much straight through.
Beyond Comparison August 26, 2006
Ruth (Brooklyn, New York)
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
If like me you are a fiction maven who is likely to read only a couple of nonfiction books each year, do yourself the favor of making this year's pick "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban." Here's why: How often do you get to read a book by an author who is an accomplished historian, political analyst, humanitarian, philosopher, psychologist, and anthropologist - all rolled into one masterful storyteller? Indeed, Sarah Chayes is a gifted writer whose lucid and exciting prose radiates such originality that it simply could not have been crafted by anybody else.
Part memoir, part murder mystery, part history text, and part reportage with commentary on the politically charged process of nation building, this book invites readers along on a treacherous but extraordinary journey toward the creation of democracy in a country that for the past few decades has been ravaged by war, corruption, and brutal regimes. Ms. Chayes chose to remain in Kandahar after reporting for NPR on the fall of the Taliban there because she believed that the only way to reverse forces that conspired to create 9/11 and other similarly heinous events was to "get this right." And so, in an urgent act of faith and bravery, she traipsed across the globe, alone, to help run Afghans for Civil Society - an NGO founded by a previously exiled brother of the U.S. backed interim President Hammid Karzai.
After many months of tireless work under harsh conditions, the narrative tone shifts from idealistic and hopeful, to wary of a new government that relinquishes power to duplicitous warlords, to deep skepticism, to abject disillusionment, to a more personal and ultimate decision to persevere in the face of unyielding obstacles. All the while, however, her love for Afghanistan - its people, culture, history, and topography - illuminates page after page of this narrative banquet with the persistance of a desert sun. You can taste the apricots, smell the cumin, feel the bone-jarring potholes along the road to Kabul, and see the dust kicked up from arid soil. This book is beyond comparison to others of its so-called "kind" because there ARE no others like it. Best of all, "Punishment" was not written for democrats or republicans; it is for human beings who want to live in a better, more straight forward world.
A good read that will become essential September 13, 2006
James (Lincoln, NE USA)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
My wife and I were in Afghanistan in the early 1970s. We had just completed Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between" when we learned of Chayes' book.
Afghanistan is a mystery country to westerners. It houses beautiful mosques (look for Mazar-i-Sherif and the white doves/pigeons), photogenic people (think of the National Geographic picture of the young Afghan woman), and lost treasures (remember the Buddhist statutes destroyed by the Taliban in Banyan). Chayes goes beyond all this into the culture and soul of the country. She knows some of the languages of Afghanistan and can talk and, more importantly, listen to people. Chayes tells us the story of values, fate, and the mass of distinctions that the Mideast and Afghanistan force upon us.
This story of modern Afganistan after the Taliban helps the thinking reader see the variety in this desert landscape - the individual power cells, the memories, the hopes, the promises, the evasions, the frowns behind the smiles, the oasis in the wasteland.
Chayes finds good intentions everywhere, praise everywhere, lack of carry thru everywhere, and scorn everywhere. Everyone is everything! This is beyond current politicans. The Afghan situation requires vision and love and caring for the people.
Well written, well documented, and certainly passionate, "The Punishment of Virtue" captures a moment in time that is for all time. A good read that will become an essential read in the future.
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