The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes

commits a crime—steals an animal or kills someone—a meeting is called between respected relatives of the two parties. These elders talk the matter out. They get the animal back; they negotiate a fine; they pressure the victim’s family to forgive; they obtain women from the killer’s family for marriage into the victim’s family. (This solution, which women abhor, has the double advantage from the male perspective of saving the victim’s kin the prohibitive cost of brideprice, and healing the wound between the two families by joining them.) If all else fails, the elders deliver the murderer to the revenge of the victim’s family.
    During these parlays, however, the criminal is protected. The honor of both families depends on it.
    This custom might explain a lot, I realized. Thinking of the Taliban as criminals in the eyes of other Pashtuns—criminals with ancestral rights to such protection while the elders deliberated—I began to understand the apparent lull we were experiencing, while much tea was drunk late into the Ramadan night.
    Two main sticking points were obstructing the progress of the parlays. One was the fate of Taliban trapped in Qunduz, a city near Afghanistan’s northern border with Tajikistan, which had fallen to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. The Taliban in Kandahar rightly feared their friends trapped there would be massacred, and wanted to hold out for their release and safe passage. The other issue was the intransigence of the Al-Qaeda Arabs. They had nothing to gain in a postwar settlement and were, more than any Afghan, motivated by a radical Islamist ideology with pretensions to universality. The Al-Qaeda Arabs and a small core of Taliban close to the head of their movement, Mullah Muhammad Omar, were gunning for a fight to the finish.
    On November 20, 2001, these unconditionals made a last-ditch effort to impress the foreign press corps. They invited us all to a press conference in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan. It was, bar none, the most surreal experience of my reporting career.
    We suffered through an exaggerated version of the usual ordeal to obtain our Pakistani authorization for travel to the border, and worse for the coveted Afghan visa. None of us found it worthy of mention that though Kabul had fallen a week before, the Taliban consulate in Quetta was still manned and functioning.
    The rumor that this consulate was issuing visas was only vague—no one knew for what, for where, or how long. Yet we would turn up and wait aimlessly. I predicted we would get to go to Spin Boldak for a briefing on the hard-line Taliban position, period. This was not a popular forecast. The action-starved newshounds, whose colleagues assigned to the Northern Alliance had been whooping it up during the fall of Kabul, were salivating to reach Kandahar for a scoop of their own. I confess I let the Los Angeles Times ’s endlessly patient Alissa Rubin do much of my waiting for me. It is thanks to her that I was along on the venture at all.
    I was feeling some foreboding. Soon rumor had it that the visa would be an open one after all, good for the whole country, and we would be able to travel to Taliban-held Kandahar. But, even in “liberated” territory around Kabul, conditions were hardly safe, let alone in this lair of die-hard fanatics. A few days earlier, four journalists traveling in a convoy to Kabul from the eastern city of Jalalabad had been pulled from their cars and shot. “If I were Al-Qaeda,” I pontificated to my colleagues, “I would post some artillery on the hills overlooking the road to Kandahar, and take out a hundred foreign journalists. If you want to go out with a bang, what better way?”
    I am not inordinately fearful, but I believe in calculating risks and reducing them where possible. In my view, a reporter’s safety in such circumstances lies not in numbers, but in discretion. I kept remembering Albania during the 1999