- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Paperbacks; 1 edition (Jun 26 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0143112066
- ISBN-13: 978-0143112068
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.8 x 2.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 381 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#239,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #54 in Books > History > Australia & Oceania > New Zealand
- #83 in Books > History > Asia > Central Asia
- #98 in Books > History > Australia & Oceania > Australia
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy, and intimacy takes time," writes Chayes, a skilled but increasingly frustrated journalist, whose determination "to grasp the underlying pattern" during and after the toppling of the Taliban in late 2001 chafes against her editors' post-9/11 comfort zone. With keen sympathy for Afghanistan's indomitable people, Chayes eventually swaps NPR and its four-and-a-half-minute slots for an NGO, becoming "field director" of Afghans for Civil Society, spearheaded by Qayum Karzai, the president's brother. ACS's humanitarian work, which includes rebuilding a bombed-out village, brings Chayes into direct conflict with the warlords with whom U.S. policy remains disastrously entangled. This is the point of her engrossing narrative, which begins in Pakistan, inside the U.S.-backed Afghan resistance pushing northward to Kandahar, and is framed by the 2005 murder of police chief Zabit Akrem, a key ally in the fight against Kandahar's corrupt warlord-governor. Throughout, Chayes relies on exceptional access and a felicitous prose style, though she sacrifices some momentum to cover several centuries of Afghanistan's turbulent past in an account that adds little to those by Ahmed Rashid and others. However, her hands-on experience as a deeply immersed reporter and activist gives her lucid analysis and prescriptions a practical scope and persuasive authority. (Aug. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
Former NPR Correspondent Sarah Chayes's timely book details political and human conditions in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Skillfully weaving regional history into a back story of the country's tapestry of religions, tribes, and loyalties, she delivers a riveting and troubling message. Initially, Renee Raudman's uneven inflections may distract the listener. Her soft voice, however, is clear and ultimately equal to the intensity of Chayes's writing. Raudman's somewhat irregular phrasing and pacing also make it difficult for the listener to relax into the book's flow. This may be calculated since the overall picture presented and its implications for American foreign policy are not intended to comfort. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must Read,
By
This review is from: Punishment Of Virtue (Hardcover)
I couldn't put this book down. suspenseful, brave and very insightful. If you want to understand why Afghanistan is full of corruption and who is really to blame, this book will provide many answers.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Courage to Speak the Truth,
By
This review is from: Punishment Of Virtue (Hardcover)
Sarah Chayes courageously addresses the failures of Afghan reconstruction policy in Kandahar in "The Punishment of Virtue". Corrupt warlords continue to bring a reign of terror and fear upon the Afghan people. These were the men who killed 50,000 people in Kabul alone during the Afghan civil war.
Pakistan, the main supporters of the Taliban, quietly funds the Taliban insurgency on one hand and demands more money from the United States on other hand while strategically release an Al Qaeda suspect every 3 months to appease American politicians. As a result, the courageous American soldiers tasked with defending and rebuilding Afghanistan are left as vulnerable as the Afghan civilians to the growing insurgency. I am married to an Afghan and will tell you that any policy that strenghthens Pakistan and the corrupt Afghan warlords is bound to fail.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.6 out of 5 stars (39 customer reviews) 94 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Losing Afghanistan . . .,
By Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Punishment Of Virtue (Hardcover)
This highly readable book is part memoir and part political analysis. The author, a former overseas NPR correspondent, describes her sojourn over the years 2001-2005 in Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, where she worked for an Afghan-based NGO and, as an instinctive investigative reporter, formed her own assessment of the political forces at work in that post-Taliban city.
Her conclusions are both alarming and disheartening. She comes to believe that Pakistan is the root cause of political instability in Afghanistan and that through its support of warlords it uses resurgent Taliban forces to manipulate and regain control of large parts of the country. More discouraging is the author's portrayal of President Hamid Karzai as an intelligent, gifted, and cultured man who is often ineffectual as a leader. The book is framed by the account of an assassination of the Kabul chief of police, a man of unusual integritiy and ability (hence the book's title) and its subsequent coverup as a suicide bombing. Set against him is the power-hungry and corrupt governor of Kandahar, who has won the confidence of the Americans while secretly amassing a fortune that he uses to fund a private army, meanwhile working deals with Pakistan to keep alive the threat of Taliban terrorism that makes the Americans even more dependent on him. There are large swathes of Afghan and Persian history woven into this modern-day accounting, which reveal patterns of political and cultural forces at play that go back to Alexander the Great. Vividly written, the book provides a disturbing portrayal of failed leadership on the part of both the U.S. and the current government in Kabul. Read it and weep. 37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunning read,
By Empyjay - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Punishment Of Virtue (Hardcover)
This book, readable as a mystery, is fueled by passion. It is really well written: direct, engaging, never leaving behind the reader who, like me, knows little or nothing about Afghanistan. Chayes's story is in Kandahar in the southern part of the country, where she arrived as an NPR reporter in late 2001. With an almost fictional immediacy she describes the situation she found and how she dealt with it -- she declined, for instance, to live in a hotel with the other foreign journalists and instead boarded with a family. She takes us with her into an increasing understanding of the tangled history that underlies Afghanistan, and particularly Kandahar, today. And she is both anguished and unsparing in her recounting of American cluelessness and misjudgments, which she sees as born of an inability to coordinate or take advantage of acquired knowledge on the ground, as US officials and military commanders are rotated in and out.
The frame of the book is the assassination of her friend Akrem, the Kabul police chief, the single best official she met in Afghanistan. It is publicly announced as the work of a suicide bomber. Chayes, who has by this time left NPR and returned as head of a private aid effort, investigates and disagrees. A really valuable book. I read it pretty much straight through. 30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Comparison,
By Ruth - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Punishment Of Virtue (Hardcover)
If like me you are a fiction maven who is likely to read only a couple of nonfiction books each year, do yourself the favor of making this year's pick "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban." Here's why: How often do you get to read a book by an author who is an accomplished historian, political analyst, humanitarian, philosopher, psychologist, and anthropologist - all rolled into one masterful storyteller? Indeed, Sarah Chayes is a gifted writer whose lucid and exciting prose radiates such originality that it simply could not have been crafted by anybody else.
Part memoir, part murder mystery, part history text, and part reportage with commentary on the politically charged process of nation building, this book invites readers along on a treacherous but extraordinary journey toward the creation of democracy in a country that for the past few decades has been ravaged by war, corruption, and brutal regimes. Ms. Chayes chose to remain in Kandahar after reporting for NPR on the fall of the Taliban there because she believed that the only way to reverse forces that conspired to create 9/11 and other similarly heinous events was to "get this right." And so, in an urgent act of faith and bravery, she traipsed across the globe, alone, to help run Afghans for Civil Society - an NGO founded by a previously exiled brother of the U.S. backed interim President Hammid Karzai. After many months of tireless work under harsh conditions, the narrative tone shifts from idealistic and hopeful, to wary of a new government that relinquishes power to duplicitous warlords, to deep skepticism, to abject disillusionment, to a more personal and ultimate decision to persevere in the face of unyielding obstacles. All the while, however, her love for Afghanistan - its people, culture, history, and topography - illuminates page after page of this narrative banquet with the persistance of a desert sun. You can taste the apricots, smell the cumin, feel the bone-jarring potholes along the road to Kabul, and see the dust kicked up from arid soil. This book is beyond comparison to others of its so-called "kind" because there ARE no others like it. Best of all, "Punishment" was not written for democrats or republicans; it is for human beings who want to live in a better, more straight forward world. |
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