Rory Stewart: The Places In Between

Rory Stewart's The Places In Between (2004; paperback, 2006, Harvest Books) is nominally a travel book, but you can just as well file it under shaggy dog stories. (Hint: a large dog is a prominent character here.) Stewart's idea was to walk from Istanbul to Nepal, or something like that. Due to political exigencies, he skipped over Afghanistan, then decided to fill it in after the Taliban scattered in late 2001 -- or fill some of it in, specifically the stretch from Herat to Kabul. It was winter, which gave him a notable predecessor: Emperor Babur, ruler of Kabul, made the same trek in 1504, describing it in a diary that provides a reference point here.

On a press conference with Ismail Khan, the warlord who took over Herat following the fall of the Taliban (pp. 53-54):

"I would like to say," said Ismail Khan, "that before we came there was no furniture here -- the Taliban was against furniture. We've bought all this furniture in the last two weeks."

Ismail Khan disagreed with the Taliban more about furniture than about Islam. He believed in the jihad and hated atheist foreigners interfering in Afghanistan. He had encouraged women to return to schools but believed they should be well covered and should not speak to men to whom they were not related. He was about to order new "vice and virtue" squads to raid the arcades I had seen and burn the DVDs. He had implemented laws requiring women to wear head carves and forbidding men from wearing neckties. Women who met men to whom they were not related could be forcibly examined in hospitals to determine whether they had recently had sex. But I was not sure how many of the people in the room understood his vision of an Islamic state. He was certainly not going to share his views on women with the reporter from Television France 2, who had not covered her blond hair.

In Jam, the famed Turqoise Mountain of the Ghorid kingdom (p. 159):

Antiquity looting is an ancient and highly controversial problem and because of the money involved, it is almost impossible to stop. But the situation in Jam was comparatively simple. A single, small site of immense historical importance lay in a remote location that could be manageably enclosed, policed, and monitored. Any items reaching the international market from Jam were not chance finds, but deliberately stolen. The local villagers were earning only a dollar or two a day digging and could have been employed by an archaeological team to work with an official excavation, rather than against it. Ismail Khan, the most powerful man in the provine, did not earn much from the illegal antiquities trade in comparison with the cross-border trade in other items from Herat. He would have seen providing security at the site as an inexpensive and uncontroversial opportunity to cooperate with the international community. One reasonably energetic and committed foreign archaeologist with decent funds could have stepped in to protect the site at any time. I guessed, however, that the international community would not act before it was too late, and I was right.

On the road to Chaghcharan (pp. 161-162):

In the Indian Himalayas, villagers had described their landscape in terms of religious myth. "This hill is where Shiva danced," they said, or, "This lake was made by Arjuna's arrow." But like Abdul Haq [Stewart's escort for the first leg of the trek], the Aimaq villagers defined their landscape by acts of violence or death. I was shown the hundred yards the young Commander Mullah Rahim Dad galloped when morally wounded after an ambush by men from Majerkanda, then the grave of a young man who had died of starvation on his way to the refugee camp.

Places in the Scottish Highlands are also remembered for acts of violence: the spot where Stewart of Ardvorlich shot a MacDonald raider, or where the MacGregors decapitated Ardvorlich's brother-in-law. Around my house in Scotland the Gaelic place-names record death: "Place of Mourning" or "Field of Weeping." But here the events recorded were only months old.

They were inflicted not by Russians but by one community on another. The settlement of Tangia was now only a line of red mud pillars like giant rotting teeth. The school in Ghar had been destroyed. Everyone knew the men who did these things. They had watchem them at it.

On the "new" Afghanistan (pp. 174-175):

The agreement setting up the future shape of Afghanistan had been signed in Bonn a month earlier. In five months a Loya Jirga assembly was to choose a new government. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative running this process, had staffed his Political Affairs office with some of the most competent expatriates in Afghanistan: people who spoke Dari or Pashto well, had worked in Afghanistan for years, and had experience with village culture. But these few people had to manage the conflicting interests of foreign governments, other UN agencies, warlords, international organizations, and Afghan technocrats. They knew too much of the reality on the ground to be popular with either the new Afghan government or the international bureaycracy. By the end of the year they had been moved into almost meaningless jobs.

On the changing of the Taliban (pp. 243-244):

In Herat many war reporters predicted Afghans would hate the American-led assault on the Taliban. They said the Taliban treatment of women, the Taliban's use of Sharia law, and their demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas had not been unpopular in the villages. The Taliban were "no crueller" than the Northern Alliance and had improved security in rural areas. Intervention would simply replace one group of crooks with another and anger Afghans in the process.

I had indeed found that Tajik and Aimaq communities wee not entirely opposed to the Taliban. They agreed that security had been better under the Taliban. Tajik women now wore head scarves in the village and only put on the full-face burqas to visit town, but no one objected to the lack of female education under the Taliban or the imposition of Islamic Sharia law. Seyyed Umar, who had complained the most about them ("They stole donkeys from me"), turned out to have been a Taliban commander.

But the Hazara I met were delighted the Taliban had gone, and they did not resent the Americans for expelling them. Nowhere in Afghanistan did the cruelty of the Taliban seem so comprehensive or have such an ethnic focus. In a three-day walk from Yakawlang, where the Taliban had executed four hundred, to Shaidan, where eighty shop fronts had been reduced to blackened shells, every Hazara village I saw had been burned. In each settlement, people had been murdered, the flocks driven off, and the orchards razed. Most of the villages were still abandoned.

The Hazara knew little and cared less about the World Trade Center. But in the short term things had improved for them. They were freer and more secure; they had some power again; and they were pleased with their own provincial governor, Khalili.

A footnote on the war reporters: "This may have been becuase many of them had been in the Balkans and remembered the fury of anti-Milosevic Serbs over the Kosovo bombing."

A footnote to "policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it" (p. 247-248):

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

That first paragraph includes a lot of wistful romantic thinking. Nineteenth-century colonialists may have been racist and exploitative? No shit? While the threat of revolt provided a check on their greed and/or folly, as it still does now, the manageable containment of revolt isn't much of a metric of success. The 19th century case may have been better managed in the sense that it was longer-term profit-seeking, but it also benefitted immeasurably by happening in the 19th century, when natives had primitive arms and communications networks, and often didn't understand the full impact of what the imperialists were up to. That colonialists have fared much worse in the 20th century can't be wholly chalked up to losing their skill set.

Stewart later moved on to Iraq, where he tried his hand at running a chunk of the country for the British. That's the subject of another book, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. I haven't read that book yet, but I gather he didn't do all that well.

posted 2007-07-19