The Punishment of Virtue by Sarah Chayes Page B

lived in Morocco as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1980s, and it never occurred to me that I should not do so again, as a gesture of respect for the culture I was working in. But I was the only journalist who did, and it made the Taliban, to my astonishment, adopt me. Najibullah, head of security for the event, invited me to break fast with him. A scraggly bearded young Talib solemnly presented me with me his Parker fountain pen. Another came to me during the night, as I was sitting under the one electric light writing my story, bearing a precious apple.
    The best were the cooks: two Tajiks from the cosmopolitan northern town of Mazar-i-Sherif who were desperate to go home but couldn’t, because a front line cut the road that leads that way from Kandahar. They took me under their wing, made me sit in their warm kitchen, gave me their bed—a stack of mattresses in an alcove in the wall—and served me endless cups of hot green tea all through the night. I slipped them dried apricots for the predawn meal, as the Taliban filed in to take away dishes of rice amid a din of clanking pots and clattering plates I was too tired to get up and record.
    So there was I—an American female—the pampered pet of the Taliban during the death throes of their regime.
    The final day of this bizarre jaunt was a textbook study in what is wrong with journalists. The rumor that the Taliban might take us to Kandahar was dying hard, and my colleagues were determined to keep it alive. At the press conference the previous day, the spokesman had said our hosts would hold a meeting to decide. But now it was clear they wanted us to leave. “Expelled,” snarled some TV crews, furious that they wouldn’t get a shot at “the only story in town.” They proceeded to put the heat on, demanding the Taliban take us to Kandahar, or at least let us stay in Spin Boldak for a few days.
    The LA Times and I started packing. We called in the two closest Taliban contacts we had made, the security chief and a former deputy foreign minister, for solemn thanks, expressing our gratitude for the time they had taken with us, the hospitality they had shown under difficult circumstances—telling them it was a mark of their honor that they had done so much to protect us, that though our countries might be in conflict, as people we didn’t have to be, and similar well-intentioned efforts at bridging a gap whose contours we would never fully discern.
    Two more tenets of Pashtun Wali , hospitality and the protection of guests—be they mortal enemies—lie deep as bedrock among Pashtuns, as I came to understand fully in that improbable place. The deputy foreign minister was displaying unfeigned anguish at what he felt to be the poor welcome his Taliban had shown us, and at their inability to guarantee our safe passage to Kandahar amid the turmoil of a finishing war.
    To me it seemed fairly clear—after four journalists had been executed on the Jalalabad road—that if your hosts, with whom your government is at war, ask you to leave their care for security reasons, then you do so. You do not insinuate that they are breaking their word, or being frivolous, or that they merely have something to hide. In my group, we had an ear close to the ground, and knew just how dicey the situation had become. I told other colleagues I thought they were out of their minds even to contemplate doing anything other than leaving for Quetta.
    But the frenzy was on. I overheard journalists offering to pay drivers anything— a thousand dollars, five thousand dollars—to take them to Kandahar. Meanwhile, the crowd on the walls was getting hungrier and hungrier looking. We heard rumors they had been encouraged to loot. The previous night the Taliban had beefed up security to include a man with a rocket launcher posted near us. The LA Times and I loaded our cars.
    Then transpired an interesting scene. A tall black man—Nubian looking, from