The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes Page A

Kosovo war, where the TV folks in the four-by-fours they rented for $250 a day would get stripped to the bone by highway robbers. For $7 I would take the minivan the locals ride up to the Kosovo border, to the delight of the (all male) passengers, who would teach me Albanian and make me drive the tortuous mountain road when they discovered that I—a woman!—had a license.
    But it was impossible to address these safety concerns my way. NPR had already informed me that if I crossed the border illegally, or alone, I was fired. It was the convoy or nothing.
    So I teamed up with the Los Angeles Times . Afghan and Pakistani formalities finally complete, the whole herd of journalists and their retainers charged for the border on the morning of November 21. My team of three—my interpreter, my driver, and me—suffered a single bad moment just as we crossed into Afghanistan. A crowd of yelling, kicking, stone-throwing men arrayed themselves in a gauntlet that we had to gun through, ducking our heads uselessly. A well-aimed blow shattered the back window of our yellow taxicab, and I felt sorry for my funny, streetwise, dignified—but sticky-fingered—driver. “My poor car,” he lamented, with a pantomime-mournful face. I more than made it up to him.
    The convoy turned in at a former UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) compound, where the BBC, CNN, and others had already staked out their ground: tents pitched, cases of bottled water stacked like earthworks, satellite dishes in parallel rows pointing south, and flies buzzing absolutely everywhere. There was no electricity, not really any water, no shelter for sleeping. The first priority was to stake out some space to spread our bedding—such as it was—and send our staff to the bazaar to buy extra blankets. The Los Angeles Times ’s Tyler Marshall was at first authorized to go out with a guard, but fifty yards outside the gate the Taliban turned him back for “security reasons.”
    In itself I found this a telling sign. The Taliban, fabled authoritarians, could no longer cow the people? Crowds of locals would jump up on the compound walls and squat there like great carrion crows, staring and mocking us. Our hosts sent fighters around with sticks or lengths of thick rope to chase them off, but they kept coming back.
    Word coming from locals we sent our staff out to interview was equally telling. One prominent doctor said he was feeling so insecure he slept in different places every night, just as he had during the chaotic time after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan a decade before. But this sense of danger made him happy, he claimed, because it was a portent of changes to come.
    The promised press conference finally took place the second day. Much of what was said was false, much of it disingenuous. For example: “Forget about September 11. That doesn’t have anything to do with this.” But the spokesman—a poised twenty-five-year-old who spoke in English, in unswervingly measured tones despite the often hostile nature of our questions—laid out some of the recent history of the region. He explained the bloody chaos ushered in by the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, when for several years, the former resistance factions turned their unspent rage on one another. And he argued that the Taliban had taken power only because people outside the south wanted their lands pacified too.
    Despite the self-serving aspect of his version of events, I was not unim-pressed with the performance. I wondered how many Americans his age would have been able to handle an equivalent situation with such aplomb. As I persisted in asking questions, I got looks of frank, but smiling, astonishment from the Taliban, who had probably never seen a woman participate in a public event.
    The most stunning part of the trip, for me, was what happened when word got out that I was fasting for Ramadan. I had kept the month-long dawn-to-dusk fast when I