Sarah Chayes: The Punishment of Virtue — Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban

From 1997 to 2002, Sarah Chayes served as an overseas correspondent for NPR, reporting from Paris and the Balkans, as well as covering stories in Algeria and the Middle East. When the war began in Afghanistan in 2001, NPR sent her to report from Quetta, Pakistan, and then from inside Afghanistan, based in the southern city of Kandahar, as the Taliban fell.  In 2002, she left NPR to take a position running a nongovernmental aid organization, Afghans for Civil Society, founded by Qayum Karzai. Now she has launched her own artisanal agribusiness, called Arghand.

"The most gripping, sensitive, funny, perceptive... beautifully written book you will ever read on Afghanistan, US policy and nation building." – Ahmed Rashid