The most recent work that has come up in my Googling for Sarah Chayes may turn out her report on the Taliban's infiltration in the patch of Kandahar, Afghanistan out of which she has been working ("Shadow Government," March 2008).
For those unfamiliar with her work, here follows a few excerpts from her work as well as reference to examples of her work available on the web.
My introduction: the purchase of her book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.
As with Pervez Hoodbhoy, whom one might consider an opposed personality, empowered as he has been in Pakistan, Chayes in Afghanistan nonetheless similarly represents a person whose spirit soars beyond states and whose identity serves God and humanity universally.
Of course, in Chayes' land, there are many plainly empowered grifters, from the local big man who needing one well obtains two from sources approached separately (a tale out of The Punishment of Virtue), a behavior that is not "grift" but rather shrewd to USAID contractors collecting millions in fees, driving around in new SUV's, enjoying lunch out while soliciting, possibly carefully, infeasible proposals, and keeping the bar high (deliberately too high) for the possible in responsible, locally owned and operated business.
“Forgive me for not coming myself yesterday,” I opened, “but I didn’t want to cause you any difficulties.”
“No,” he responded with an entirely frank smile. “I wouldn’t give you permission to come.”
He is the second Arghandab village elder who has told me not to come to his village. The first one explained his refusal with a glancing reference to “those fairies who come around at night.”
Here's the kicker, all this from the Chayes' business page for the Arghan beauty products:
"The further problem is that the Americans, with this obsession, are proving incredibly hard of hearing regarding legitimate Afghan concerns. They don’t take on board the huge risk for Afghans even to meet or speak with them – don’t offer any kind of protection against potential retaliation, or any long-term relationship, except with bigwigs. The Americans show little interest in the gradually increasing presence of “Taliban” in districts all around Kandahar. They don’t react usefully to events like the murders of the few respected members of the provincial administration, or of Afghan humanitarian workers like the four doctors and a nurse killed on their way to a refugee camp earlier this month. Americans don’t react because those events aren’t the work of al-Qaeda or suicide bombers. But Afghans really don’t care very much about the ineffable al-Qaeda; they care about the corrupt officials we have helped bring to power and continue to empower, eg. through the recent parliamentary elections, supposedly to combat al-Qaeda.
They care about those "fairies who come in the night."
Not that Chayes has cause to dismiss the Taliban ("Tb"). This excerpt comes from "Shadow Government", an essay published in her Notes from the Field, as cited in the reference section:
"In Arghandab, in a village that has heretofore been calm, the pavement on the road that runs along the banks of a canal was broken up. The village fixed it. It was broken again, in two places, and a warning put out against whomsoever might fix it again. It lies broken, ready to receive an improvised bomb. The Tb. have issued warnings to the cell phone companies, to shut down service at night, because people were calling in tips to hot lines set up by the Canadians, and effective strikes were launched against Tb. groups. Dig it: the cell phone companies knuckled under. A couple of towers set alight, and now there’s no service outside the city at night."
Introductions to Sarah Chayes may practically write themselves, as she is fully present, I think, in her own writing. Here's a note from "Scents and Sensibility," published in The Atlantic, December 2007:
"Turn over a bar of luxury soap and read the ingredients; half of the items can be found in Afghanistan: apricot kernels, sweet almonds, castor beans, fragrant seeds like cumin and anise. There was a pomegranate craze on. Surely I could squeeze pomegranates into soap somehow … "
In the story of the startup, Chayes relates her efforts to obtain USAID funds directed to precisely her kind of entrepreneurial purpose. With good between-the-lines humor, she well illustrates how millions of dollars worth of development money turns into offices, SUV's, annual salaries hovering around $200,000 for the staff annointed, I mean "appointed", to getting that money into the hands of local entrepreneurs.
"Estimate is the word, a euphemism for “shot in the dark.” I was, like many business-plan authors, making it up. But by the end of June, I had submitted my 15-page document, and it included soap formulas, a list of raw materials and products, a description of likely markets and marketing strategies, and a schedule of production activities, both daily and seasonal. Its projections have proved quite accurate, at least in terms of raw-materials costs and margins. Even the monthly operating costs have checked out.
However, at my next meeting with the ALP/S team in Kabul, applause did not break out. “It needs more numbers,” commented one team member. I asked what kind of numbers; he could not specify."
Chayes knows juxtaposition, especially that between desire and disappointment, action and frustration, and living and dying. She's keen to lay out the best of realistic prospects for her own village-transforming enterprise and for Afghanistan at large, and she's been brave enough to observe and detail the clouds--government and other corruption and criminality, the Taliban, misdirected security operations, fumbling and greed-ridden bureaucracy, etc.--that come to smother dreams or sabotage them.
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Reference
Afghans for Civil Society: http://www.afghansforcivilsociety.org/
Arghan - Hand-crafted products from Kandahar: http://www.arghand.org/
Bulkley, Liz. "Sarah Chayes on Afghanistan." Interview. New Hampshire Public Radio, aired October 24, 2008, web rebroadcast and archive, February 28, 2007: http://www.nhpr.org/node/12374
Chayes, Sarah. Afghanistan Outside the Wire - SarahChayes.net: http://www.sarahchayes.net/
Chayes, Sarah. "Drawing Hope from History." A Voice from Kandahar. Blog. The New York Times, August 1, 2006: http://chayes.blogs.nytimes.com/
Chayes, Sarah. "Scents & Sensibility." The Atlantic.com, December 2007: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/afghans
Chayes, Sarah. "Shadow Government." Notes from the Field, SarahChayes.Net, March 15, 2008: http://www.sarahchayes.net/images/Shadow_government.pdf
Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.
Democracy Now! "Sarah Chayes on Life in Afghanistan After the Taliban and Why She Left NPR." October 10, 2006: http://www.democracynow.org/2006/10/10/sarah_chayes_on_life_in_afghanistan (The page includes audio files of an NPR interview with Sarah Chayes--scroll across about three-quarters of the play bar of the mp3 file to get to it).
Montagne, Renee. "Westerner in Kandahar: What Afhgans Want." National Public Radio, June 26, 2008: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91906479
Thompson, Bob. "A Voice in the Afghan Wilderness." The Washington Post, September 19, 2006: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091801402.html
Walsh, Declan. "American activist finds her calling in Afghan hot spot." The Boston Globe, May 9, 2006: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/05/09/american_activist_finds_her_calling_in_afghan_hot_spot/
Wikipedia. "Sarah Chayes". Viewed September 26, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Chayes