The Places In Between by Rory Stewart must be the most well-known recent book about Afghanistan, and rightly so. In January 2002, Stewart was the only tourist in Afghanistan when he set out to walk from Herat to Kabul, following in the steps of the Mughal emperor Babur. While I was certainly interested in Stewart’s encounters with both friendly and hostile locals, and while I greatly admired his intelligent but unassuming style of writing, I never quite clicked with this book. I found it fascinating and vastly informative but, for the most part, not particularly absorbing.
However, I will forever adore Stewart (and overlook his enthusiastic and unrestrained use of footnotes) for this footnoted comment from my favourite part of the book, discussing the liberal, western administrators newly arrived in Afghanistan:
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 administrators 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 governments 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 neocolonialist have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitations and oppression. (p. 247-248)
It is an excellent book, offering a valuable perspective on the over-simplified issues of a much-discussed nation, but not likely to be considered one of my favourites. I will undoubtedly look out for Stewart’s The Prince of the Marshes, covering the time he spent as a deputy governor in the marsh regions of Iraq after arriving in the country as a diplomat with the Coalition Provisional Authority in August 2003.
As my knowledge of the Afghanistan conflict is so sketchy I would love to read this book.
It is certainly an informative book that way, giving a much more detailed overview of the tribal differences within the country than most media coverage or books by those familiar with the region do.
I listened to this one a while ago, and I loved the idea of it, but the author came across as kind of pretentious or snooty to me. It may have been the reading of it that gave me that impression.
I actually came away from this feeling very fond of Stewart! Narrators can definitely colour how you feel about a book but, then again, everyone brings their own preferences and prejudices to the reading experience. There are passages I adored (like the one quoted above) that I know would send some of my reading friends completely up the wall in outrage.
I’ve been wanting to read this for some time. Thanks for the reminder.
Glad to be of service!