The Punishment of Virtue Read Free

Akrem consulted with so often and so generously, nor the journalists who used to interview him. But his tribesman and successor as police chief of Mazar-i-Sherif in the far north is on his way. People from Mazar have been arriving all morning: Uzbeks with their bushy hair and angled eyes, Persian-speaking Tajiks, northern Pashtuns, grateful for the peace that Akrem achieved for them in that bitterly divided town. Mazar was supposed to do him in. But it didn’t. He won it over, with all its disparate people; he pacified it.
    The governor of Kandahar, Gul Agha Shirzai, is coming too. I am aghast. Shirzai is gloating over this death. I know it. My tuning fork hums with it. In Kandahar, Akrem stood up to Shirzai. Shirzai loathed him, wanted him out of the way. How can we tolerate Governor Shirzai here? What is this culture that makes the Afghans, the famously bloodthirsty Afghans, welcome their mortal enemies into their midst, and show them courtesy?
    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.

CHAPTER 2
COVERING CRISIS
    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