The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes Page A

Afghanistan, after watching Usama bin Laden cruise the town in a heavily guarded motorcade behind darkened windows, surely this streetwise dealer could not have thought the Taliban were wholly home-grown. His explanation was a self-serving whitewash, more than likely.
    Still, Karzai offered his touchily proud countrymen that: He offered them a face-saving way out.
    Most important, for nearly all the Afghans I interviewed at the time, was Karzai’s emphasis on negotiation. “He was telling the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to hand over power peacefully and not to destroy the country,” the dealer told me. “From that we came to know he is a good person. By negotiations and by the help of the tribal elders and their councils, he came into Kandahar. With the people’s consent, that’s how he came. He did not enter Kandahar by force.”
    During the days of pandemonium that immediately followed the Taliban flight, with the shoot-out over the cars by the almond merchants’ warehouses, and the tug-of-war for the injured at the hospital, and looting all over town—humanitarian offices turned inside out, cars stolen, papers strewn, furniture carried off—Karzai’s soldiers were praised for their comportment. They acted like public servants, people said, assisting the frightened population, refraining from pillage and theft. They seemed to represent the new Afghanistan the population so fervently desired.
    America’s other group of proxies, by contrast, Gul Agha Shirzai and his gun-slinging acolytes, embodied precisely the kind of violent chaos Afghans dreaded.
    Shirzai was also from a Kandahar family. His father had a reputation across the province as a champion dogfighter. He poured much of his energy into this passion, breeding the barrel-chested fighting dogs local nomads keep, organizing matches, tallying bets. In a country where a man is known by his lineage, by the deeds of his forebears, these were not auspicious roots for Gul Agha Shirzai.
    When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Shirzai’s dog-fighting father also joined the resistance, calling up tribal followers and marshaling them into a rebel force. But according to the word spread by many in Kandahar, the Soviets lured him secretly to their side, and he served as a spy for the occupiers while pretending to fight against them.
    Such betrayals and counterbetrayals were a feature of that bitter war. Pakistan, which had the most to lose from a Soviet victory, according to the Cold War calculus of the day, and invested heavily in the Afghan resistance, wanted the elder Shirzai assassinated, the story goes. He died of sudden, violent stomach cramps.
    Gul Agha Shirzai is a great hairy bear of a man, with legendary rough manners. Stories about his wiping his mouth on his turban, or squatting to pee in the street, abound. Yet these things matter not at all to his constituency. There is a populist charm to him, something refreshing, almost endearing, about his in-your-face directness. And—key attributes—his generosity, his loyalty and kindness to underlings win wistful praise even from the liege men of his opponents.
    It was not until 1992, two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the holdover Communist governor of Kandahar was finally driven out. He was a member of Gul Agha Shirzai’s tribe, and to ease the transition, Shirzai was invited to take over the reins of the province in a power-sharing deal with Mullah Naqib and other key leaders. Most Kandaharis remember him as a weak figurehead, presiding over that awful civil war—the goriest, most rapacious, and chaotic period in living memory.
    â€œHe was governor in the governor’s palace,” says Hayatullah, a happy-go-lucky man with a lion’s mane of curly hair, who was a bus driver at the time. “He was governor in the palace, but nowhere else. If you had five men, you were governor on your street