Few men are brave or foolhardy enough to live among the warring Afghans, and even fewer women. Among the latter is journalist Sarah Chayes, whose recently published account is receiving critical acclaim. Anna Mundowreports
When Sarah Chayes gets discouraged she concentrates on soap. Exquisite soap made by hand from exotic fruits, nuts, flowers and herbs that have been cultivated for centuries around Kandahar, in Afghanistan. She thinks about sublime body oils laboriously extracted from wild pistachio, from apricot, almond or walnut kernels, from pomegranate seeds; oils with names such as Amandine, Anisette, Desert Fields.
Chayes is not pampering herself with rare beauty products. Spend even a short time in her company and you realise how ridiculous that idea is. No, Chayes is making the soap and oil alongside the handful of other workers in the Arghand co- operative, a community-development project she founded in May 2005 to encourage Afghan farmers to produce nuts, fruits, flowers and herbs instead of opium poppies. "I decided to take advantage of the explosion of desire to spend money on skincare," Chayes explains. "Rose oil, for example, is a very lucrative commodity, and only one variety of rose can be used to make it. Lo and behold, it is indigenous to the Kandahar area.
"I've always thought pomegranates, almonds, apricots and other native plants could compete with opium if you could find a way to expand the market and ship them. Extracting the oils seemed the perfect answer. And the product is fabulous."
Arghand is far more than an inspiring ecobusiness. It is the embodiment of Chayes's dedication to a country that she approached in 2001 as another war-reporting assignment but quickly became her vocation. The story of how that happened is thrillingly told in The Punishment of Virtue: Walking the Frontline of the War on Terror with a Woman Who Has Made It Her Home. Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, summed up the book this way: "Sarah Chayes has written what will undoubtedly be the definitive account of the fall of the Taliban . . . and she knows the country better than almost any journalist or diplomat over there . . . Every American who wants to understand why planes flew into buildings on September 11th must read this book."
Listeners to National Public Radio (NPR) in the US knew Chayes from 1996 to 2002 as the network's correspondent from Paris and the Balkans. Born in 1962 into a Massachusetts family with solid academic and political credentials - her father was a Harvard law professor and legal adviser to the Kennedy administration, her mother under-secretary of the US air force during the Carter presidency - Chayes initially became notorious in Afghanistan for dressing in traditional male attire. It was not a feminist statement.
"What were my choices?" she recalls of reporting from streets where women were usually absent. "I could wear a burka. Fat chance. Cargo pants . . . would draw gawkers to me . . . I decided to go for the optical illusion. If I wore men's clothes, I figured, then idle observers, from a distance anyway, would 'see' me as the man they expected and leave me alone. It worked more or less, and I could get on with my job."
Getting on with the job is, for Chayes, always the point. She dislikes press pools, pack journalism, professional rivalry, petty bureaucracy, anything that comes between her and her subject. On NPR's three-month assignment in 2001 to cover the war in Afghanistan, Chayes almost immediately went her own way. Instead of living on the US military base, she moved in with a Kandahar family and became one of the few observers who could report on the reality of life there. But reporting wasn't enough. "I had a growing feeling that it was almost a cop-out to keep talking without doing anything," she says. "It also felt a little parasitic; living off other people's drama. I needed to get deeper into something."
By 2002 Chayes had quit radio journalism and decided to stay in Kandahar. She intended to live there for two years, directing a non-profit agency newly founded by the brother of President Hamid Karzai. In those early days she helped to rebuild houses and set up a dairy co-operative, but as the Afghan warlords re-established their power, and as political corruption contaminated every level of daily life, Chayes became disillusioned with the Karzai organisation, from which she resigned, and with the Karzai government, which she continues to criticise. "I told him [ in 2006]: 'Mr President, quite frankly I can't go outside my door any more without seeing some piece of abuse perpetrated by a member of your government on one of your citizens, and it's making me sick.' "
By that time the violence had visited her personally. In June 2005 Chayes's friend Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal, the police chief of Kandahar and a potential political leader of the province, was killed alongside 19 others in the bombing of a local mosque.
The Punishment of Virtue opens with Akrem's murder. " 'There he is, your friend!' his brother had cried at me hoarsely as he pulled back the blanket to show me his face . . . A few minutes later we loaded him, limp and heavy, into the black van." Later that day Chayes heard Akrem's brother mutter " ' . . . completely in the way'. I know it. I'm in the way. I'm an eyesore. I shouldn't be here at all, in fact. Women don't attend funerals in Afghanistan. I am the only one. And the only foreigner."
Today Chayes recalls how unlikely her close working relationship with Akrem, a traditional Muslim family man, had been. "He was this larger-than-life Afghan veteran of 30 years of fighting, and I'm this American female stick figure . . . I don't want to get into hero worship. I'm sure he participated in activities I wouldn't have condoned. But he was someone who was consistently constructive during the time I knew him and who was willing to put very high-calibre people around him." Government officials declared it a suicide bombing, but Chayes conducted her own investigation and concluded that agents employed by Pakistan had most likely killed Akrem. Two years on, analysing the further destabilisation of Afghanistan, she identifies similar perpetrators: "Pakistani orchestration of the so-called resurgent Taliban and US unwillingness to call Islamabad on it; poor Afghan governance and international unwillingness to call Kabul on it."
Founding the Arghand co-operative was hardly a retreat from the public realm. In March, for example, Chayes and a dozen other civilians from Kandahar spent 10 days briefing the Nato officers who recently took over Afghanistan's Regional Command South on "everything from tribal relations to the electricity supply". Her book is now required reading for Canadian officers serving there, and an article she wrote in July for the New York Times - "Nato Didn't Lose Afghanistan" - reminded readers of US mistakes, starting with the Bush administration's rejection of Nato assistance immediately after the September 11th attacks. US commanders in Afghanistan were reportedly angered by Chayes's article, but they can hardly intimidate a woman who, during the 2001 campaign against the Taliban, hitched a ride across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on a motorcycle and who once found an explosive device in the drain outside her house. "That happened when I tried to make the truth about Akrem's death public," Chayes explains, "but I don't think it was actually rigged. It was just another version of the threat letters I receive."
Chayes has powerful enemies, but she also has courageous friends who refute the popular - and convenient - image of lawless, ungovernable Afghanistan.
"I joke with the three guys in my co-operative about what job each one will have when we collectively become mayor of Kandahar," she laughs. "One wants to be in charge of the cleanliness of public spaces; the next wants to be in charge of the register of deeds, so that land is not illegally granted to cronies; the third wants to be the official who verifies weights and measures in the market. These are semi-literate villagers, and they know exactly what's needed to properly govern their fellow citizens."
The Arghand website is www.arghand.org; The Punishment of Virtue: Walking the Frontline of the War on Terror with a Woman Who Has Made It Her Home is published by Portobello Books, £20 in UK