The Places In Between

Author: Rory Stewart
Publisher: Harcourt

Travel, to nearly all of us, means finding a cheap ticket to some predictable, friendly place, wading through the deep water of airport security and placing your tray table in the locked and upright position. But not young Scotsman Rory Stewart.

Anyone for walking across Afghanistan in winter? This diplomat and scholar, following in the centuries-old footsteps of other mad Englishmen, went completely bonkers, veered wildly off the road in wartime Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban and yet lived to write a very entertaining book that is also terribly instructive, funny and discouraging.

“You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is mid winter – there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?” Despite this encouraging welcome from what passes for an official in Afghanistan in January 2002, Stewart starts his winter walk from Herat in the west, purposefully selecting the most difficult route to Kabul – the one right through the mountains where he will encounter no less than four ethnic groups of uncertain mood. And wolves. Avoiding all roads, he follows the wild Hari Rud River, winding through ancient mountain kingdoms, where “the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam.” Despite the adversity, the usually cheery Mr. Stewart finds the place to be “a country of unabashed etiquette, humor and extreme brutality.” Could be worse.

Amazingly, he is mostly successful at blending in with the locals. As a result, you have no choice but to keep turning the pages, aghast at the situations into which Mr. Stewart gets himself. Will he make it? Then a big Afghan dog joins him. Now what? You will be glad to climb into your cozy bed with this book, warm in the knowledge that you aren’t with him.

Yet as Mr. Stewart gets closer to Kabul, his mood darkens. In mid-journey, he comes across the Minaret of Jam, a stunning two-hundred-foot, slim stone column that was once the center of the ancient and mysterious Ghorid Empire. First seen by Westerners in 1957, the Minaret is so remote that no one in Kabul had been sure that it still stood. It and its surrounding ruins are being slowly picked apart by antiques smugglers and sold. Along with the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan, it is saddening.

But it is in a footnote toward the end of the book that Mr. Stewart lays it out for us. He plants a landmine aimed at today’s neocolonial, post 9/11, post-imperialist, post-Empire international interventionists. No one today invests their entire career in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation like they did in the bad old days of 19th century  imperialism. Our current implicit denial of the  differences between societies and cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. A policy or program may fail but no one notices. “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.” We need more travelers like Rory Stewart. VS