The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes

not just kill their countrymen and fellow Muslims. They cooked them alive in cargo containers; they hanged them till their limbs started twitching, then let them down to catch their breath and hoisted them into the air again, and cheered when they finally died.
    This behavior was not prompted merely by some innate evil lodged in those who perpetrated it. The cause also lies in the wounds to the spirit many of these fighters suffered during the prolonged anti-Soviet war—a war that shattered every notion their traditions had bequeathed to them about how honorable war should be fought. It was a war whose primary victims were civilians, women and revered elders and toddlers whom the humiliated fighters were powerless to protect. Now we have put a name to the psychological anguish these fighters suffered afterwards: we call it post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
    Combat veterans afflicted by this psychological aftereffect of the hell they have been through typically remain in “combat mode,” often turning to criminal activity. It is a kind of self-medication. The skills they acquired during wartime find a purpose that way, and the unaccountable rage they experience finds an outlet. Former soldiers caught in this particular trap of PTSD are incapable of achieving what they so desperately desire: a homecoming to peace. 2
    But only sophisticated psychological analysis can reveal these underlying explanations of the 1990s mujahideen behavior. For ordinary Afghans who had suffered ten years of Soviet violence, to suffer likewise at the hands of their own Afghan champions was a betrayal beyond words. Even a decade later, in 2001, Afghanistan remained profoundly traumatized. And most Afghans did not want these former resistance commanders rehabilitated; they wanted them tried and executed for war crimes.
    But gentle, conflict-averse Hamid Karzai was different. Not only was he remarkably cultivated, he seemed uniquely devoid of brutality and arrogance. One shrewd former Communist government minister praised his style to me this way: “When he came, he was in our local dress, with a turban. He would introduce himself to the people, saying: ‘I grew up in your land. I am the son of Abd al-Ahad Khan; I am the son of you.’ Because of his dress and his speaking our language, and because he was speaking simply, the people found a place in their hearts for him.”
    In another conversation, an ordinary Kandahari—a small-time opium dealer, in fact—described how Karzai’s radio broadcasts during the U.S. anti-Taliban bombing campaign had helped him process information he had been taking in for years, but had never fully understood. It was as though, during that earsplitting, terrifying month of November 2001, Karzai provided the Kandaharis with a new and wider context in which to place their recent Taliban experience.
    â€œWe saw the Arabs,” the dealer told me, referring to followers of Usama bin Laden. “We saw them even more than the Taliban. Our government was not in the hand of the Taliban as much as it was in the hand of the Arabs. And we were not allowed to be with them in their council meetings. But still we didn’t understand.”
    They did not understand, this dealer was trying to tell me, that their country had been hijacked, wrenched from the grasp of ordinary Afghans and put to ideological purposes beyond their ken. Lapsing into the sort of poetic exaggeration Middle Eastern languages delight in to convey emphasis, he tried to spell it out: “We didn’t know that twelve hundred countries and fifteen hundred countries were interfering in ours. Only now we came to know it. Now we came to know that there were foreigners and terrorists going around. Now we came to know that our country had dark nights.”
    Surely the dealer could not have been so naive. After watching neighboring Pakistan expend itself without counting for two decades to achieve control over