Writing Wrongs

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rnalists covering devastated corners of the globe are often torn between the desire to stand back and observe or to jump in and help. After three months reporting on the fall of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, National Public Radio's Kandahar correspondent, Sarah Chayes, had had enough of watching the broken country stagger to its feet and decided to lend a hand. Donning the turban and long tunic of Kandahari men (the better to escape attention), she plunged into a new life helping the people of her adopted home. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban is her riveting story.

Optimistic at first, Chayes joins forces with the family of future President Hamid Karzai to run an NGO dedicated not just to physical reconstruction, but to mending relations between Muslims and the West. "The window of opportunity seemed unparalleled," she writes. "Here was a Muslim country that had twice in two decades rid itself of tyranny thanks to U.S. assistance ... Afghanistan might be the place where some of the damage could be repaired." But with mounting frustration she chronicles the mistakes of U.S. officials who had no clear vision for the country once the Taliban were defeated. Promised reconstruction projects such as schools, hospitals, wells and roads were put on hold while the Americans focused on the hunt for remnants of the Taliban. Locals grew resentful of a continued U.S. presence that seemed to offer no benefits, paving the way for the antigovernment insurgency that continues to this day.

Haunting and passionate, Virtue is a disturbing read. With the benefit of hindsight Chayes makes it clear that many of Afghanistan's current problems have their roots in these misguided postwar policy decisions. As a result, warlords, drug smugglers and human-rights offenders crept back into power—the same forces that drove the nation to civil war in the '90s, and now threaten to do so again.