Rory Stewart’s Afghanistan

Cover image of The Places in Between by Rory Stewart, 2005 Picador paperback edition, uploaded 2019

The photo is of the Dome at Chist-e Sharif, the remains of what’s believed to be a mosque and madrassa from the 12th Century. The decoration is Ghorid in style, similar to that adorning the Minaret of Jam, also from the same period

The distance between Herat in the east and Kabul in the west of the country is given as 836 km (520 miles) following the A77 highway running across Afghanistan. When Rory Stuart at age 29 decided to walk between the cites in 2002, it’s a question whether this highway existed in full or was still torn apart where IEDs had exploded, and lined with burned out Russian tanks. This was in the immediate aftermath of the CIA’s and Special Forces war on the Taliban. Though the road’s condition scarcely mattered, because Stewart wasn’t looking for major roads and direct routes; precisely the opposite. The man hiked by foot and dang some twenty miles a day—for months. He was offered shelter every night by a hospitable Afghan. Here was someone who observed, whose eyes were on the people, the country and its history.

As he describes in The Places In Between, he has a walking stick custom made for the trip:

“I had carried the ideal walking stick through Pakistan. It was five feet long and made of polished bamboo with an iron top and bottom… It was called a dang… The word dang had an archaic sound and people laughed when I used it [in Herat].

from The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

He needed a new dang for his hike across Afghanistan.

“I continued beneath the remaining vaulted sections of the old covered bazaar, which Robert Byron watched being mostly demolished in 1933. I wasn’t sure what to call the stick. It certainly seemed a waste of time to use the Punjab word dang in a place where people spoke Persian [Dari, or Afghan Farsi]. But whatever word I used, people denied having ever heard of anything like it, so I asked [1] where I could find a broom handle and was directed to a wheelwright’s store… I chose one [pole] that was reasonably straight and well balanced in the center.

“Now I needed the iron… I turned off Piaz Furushi, which meant ‘Onion Street’ but was filled with sellers of rugs and gold, and entered a courtyard. A donkey lay asleep in the center of the square. Five men were sitting on rugs sharing their lunch. I sketched the design of the stick, and one of the men, Wakil Ama, said he could help. He led me to the anvil fixed to the rough wooden planks of his shed… He took a sheet of green metal salvaged from a Russian armored personnel carrier, and cut off a triangular piece on a small guillotine. Then he bent this into a cone and welded the seam; plunged it in water, pierced a hole; forced the piece over the wood; hammered a nail through the hole; and cut off the nail head. He worked quickly in silence… The point was sharp and it was more like a spear than a stick.

“I explained that in Pakistan my stick had a round top, not a pointed one. He shrugged. I asked if he had any metal balls.

“ ‘No.’ ‘Does anyone else?’ ‘Hussein might,’ said one of the older spectators. There was much chattering and then everyone looked at me. ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘We have no ball,’ said Wakil Ama. ‘How about Hussein?’ I suggested. Wakil Ama shrugged again, ‘Hussein might.’

[Hussein indeed have a ball, so Stewart returned to Wakil Ama who proceeded to weld it onto the metal point. The scene concludes with the following conversation.]

“Wakil smiled at the result. He accepted payment only reluctantly, leaving me to choose the amount. Then he offered me some tea.

“As I walked out, an old man with a bushy white beard looked at the stick. ‘You’re carrying it for the wolves, I presume,’ he said.

“ ‘And the humans.’

“He nodded.

“ ‘What do you call this type of stick?’

“ ‘A dang,’ he said.”

from The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

[1] Throughout the book, Stewart is speaking to people who know only their own language, Dara (a dialect of Farsi) and Pashto—he distinguishes only the times when he’s with an English speaking person. Where the had he learned Farsi well enough to understand Dara?

It’s a long quote which I hope the publishers will forgive, but I wanted to give a flavor of the story. So that this doesn’t turn into a hagiography, reading the acknowledgements I came across the following: “I owe particular thanks to Patrick Mackie… for giving the book more life and all its commas.”

The book begins shortly after the Taliban were driven from power in late 2001, and five years after the Russians had withdrawn after a decade of continuous warfare since their invasion. After the Taliban’s fall, there was no national government to speak of, and still no love lost for foreigners. Since then, Afghans continue to be separated by language and ethnic divides—by the split between Shiite and Suni. Dari, Pashto and innumerable local dialects. Mountains, valleys and rivers, fragments of the Silk Road, routes taken since before Genghis Khan. From one valley to the next—from village to village in the same valley—people measure themselves by tribe and clan, often having little to do with their neighbors.

520 miles spanning the country and thousands of years of human civilizations, one culture replacing or laid over top of another, sometimes absorbing what had been before, other times obliterating it or trying to. Like an ocean restlessly pushing one way then another.

In another speech, Stewart points out Afghanistan’s position at the heart of a region surrounded by more prosperous countries, Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and east, India beyond, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan to the north, even touching China. Were it to take a role as a center of trade, Afghan’s poor resources could be compensated for. That its ethnic peoples are connected to all of these countries proves that it played such a role in the past.

As a metaphor, the wanton destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan stands as the country’s latest century.

Smaller Buddha of Bamiyan—before photo by Marco Bonavoglia and after photo by Marco Bonavoglia, 2005

“I was starting in January because I did not want to wait five months for the snow to clear. It was only after I made my decision that I discovered Babur had also traveled the central route on foot in January and recorded the journey in his diary.”

from The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

Babur, descendent of Genghis Khan and Timur—and the 16th Century founder of the Mughal Empire—served Stewart as choir to his own adventure. Stewart, skeptical at the start, learns to respect Babur’s ability at diarist. And though, in an early comment he claims little interest in what came before in Afghan history, seeking only to know the Afghans’ present lives, Stewart can’t evade history’s shadow in a land marked by little else.

In a 2010 speech [2] at Boston University entitled Rory Stewart: The Places In Between, Stewart talks about Afghanistan as a territory of divisions and shards, parts of previous empires and kingdoms, with cultures lapping over present national borders in the region. The country’s poverty is crushing, with 70% illiteracy. A land ruined by war and robbed of its scarce resources. Stewart insists the course of the war on the Taliban has no good outcome; he saw it earlier than the policy makers in the West. Toward the end of his book he states:

[2] Despite being a Scotsman, Stewart speaks like a proper Englishman, having attended Eton then Oxford.

“The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about his next meal. Ali was a peasant farmer and had a better idea than most about where his next meal was coming. If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan. Without the time, imagination and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.”

from The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

If I were to paraphrase Rory Stewart’s view, Afghanistan does not need implanted Western democracy; it needs to find a way to become one country.

Back in 2002, Stewart held a deep suspicion regarding the Western policy makers’ ability to put Afghanistan together, not of their earnest intent, more the likelihood of their success. “Without the time, imagination and persistence to understand…” The Western coalition, more than any come before it, gave Afghans time, two decades and billions in aid. Though we were unable to understand enough of these people to help them move beyond the warring of tribes. If the Afghans ever find true leaders—find their Atatürk, Churchill or Washington, it might turn out differently. As it is, we are leaving behind a continuing tragedy, for which we bear some responsibility.

It will be saddest if the small progress Afghan women have made —toward literacy and respect since the fall of the Taliban—will be undone by the Taliban’s return.

Stewart’s entire life—up until when he stood for election to the British Parliament—was arguably international in focus. Now it continues in that vein after his years in Parliament. He has a charisma in what drives him—that if one listens, the answers to ‘fixing’ a place like Afghanistan seem straightforward enough, even if he denies he can make that claim. He has an unstated love for the region’s people which comes out in his willingness to exchange conversations with the lowliest sheep herder whose superstitions, illiteracy and suspicion of foreigners lie at such a deep level it seems impossible to forge a connection. Person to person, he leaves the impression that intelligence, humor and kindness are what he seeks in others and is often what he found in Afghanistan, a thing easy enough to lay claim to, if a challenge to practice.

To an outside observer it seems obvious the country needs to get itself together. Here it is 2021, years since Stewart’s cross-country hike, and Taliban is more viable than ever and the Kabul government has only tenuous control of that city. The Pashtuns hate the Tajik and the Aimaq who look down on the Uzbek and all enslave the Hazara whenever the opportunity arises. Fourteen ethnic groups according to the Afghan constitution. The only thing they hold in common is a hatred for foreigners. And what does that sound like? The sad problem they face is they’ve been at constant war since the Russian invasion in 1979.

CIA map of Afghanistan by ethnic group in 2005

You think they were developing it for a tourism industry?

If one were to overlay a geographic map—which no doubt the CIA had done—some of this might make better sense. You need to study the mountain ranges first, the rivers second, and deserts third, but particularly the mountains.

In pursuit of the ‘Great Game,’ the 19th Century British imperialists tried to tame the country, without helicopters and jets. They may have come closer than the Russians but they failed. Stewart mentions a British travel writer, Robert Bryon whose The Road to Oxiana includes descriptions of the aftermath of that fiasco. When Stewart is looking for a new dang, he walks through the ruins of a bazaar Bryon had described a century before—see the first quote.

As a boy growing up in South Carolina, I recall men sometimes asking, was I related to one or another local Evans family? Which was easy enough to answer: I was related only to my mother, grandmother and two sisters. Strange question to ask a kid, or so I thought. I would come away from such a questioning feeling, ‘did he think less of me for having no other kinfolk?’ and perhaps so. The question—unintentional no doubt—challenged my fragile sense of belonging. I know now it was a way to place me in context—if I was a cousin of the Evans over in Dalzell, it placed me.

We are a tribal species. Rory Stewart quotes Afghan inquiries of ‘would he marry the sister of a cousin,’ or ‘marry the cousin of his mother’? On the face of it, he thought these weird queries. But Stewart explains they were questions derived from their understanding of the Quran, the key reference in most their lives. If he married his cousin one village over as was common in Afghanistan, Stewart became better understood. Illiterate—and yet these Afghanis were searching for commonality with a stranger, as basic a need as there is in the human world.

Citizen of the world that he is, if Rory Stewart, ever had an interest in seeing how folks live in Dalzell—with the emphasis on the second syllable—I’d be happy to show him around. I have a niece in Columbia and more family near the coast in Summerville not too far from there.  

American Flag

It’s said Europeans find the American (aka U. S.) attitude about displaying the stars and stripes an odd practice—we like it too much, maybe? For most of my life, it seemed the one thing held in common by most of the country—leaving aside the 60s hippies and the retrograde ‘Lost Cause’ folks. Unlike Europe, which grew from kingdoms forced to become democracies, leaving political divisions that continue fester, simplifying a bit, white America was founded by its entire population. We have always sworn allegiance to a flag “and to the Republic for which it stands.” Americans told their one-time King George to take a hike.

We were a country founded on a humanist concept of individual freedom, and not a religious, an ethnic or cultural similarity. Even now, I’d like to think the majority of Americans still believe this.

Where European countries have far longer histories, the United States offeres its citizens and immigrants an idea incised in its early writings: that all men are created equal. And it has offered this as a contract, if not consistently applied, also not yet set aside.

It’s true the principal originally applied only to landowning white men—but once that genii was loosed, there was no re-bottling it. If it pisses off the revival preachers today in Lynchburg, well, that’s just tough. We’re not turning back.

I do not understand how a person can raise the Confederate ‘stars and bars’ and at the same time claim they are loyal to America. Rather, they are loyal to a tribe in retrograde, intolerant of others, be they Black, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu—any who they can point to as different.

If one has trouble comprehending how an obstinate Afghan farmer could willing sacrifice his children’s future, look at our home grown conspiracy theorists for reference.

Americans have tended to view themselves as first among nations, and at times we practice a foreign policy pursuing it as a primary goal. In times such as the past four years, we have blatantly acted as though our tribe demands coming first, no different from any other tribal culture. But the 18th Century declaration, all people are created equal, gives lie to the tribal.

When Americans display the flag, on our better days we intend it to mean ‘all men’ as inclusive to all humans. Perhaps even all life, though that’s still a stretch. Were we to offer the Afghan nation this example, could they adopt it for themselves?

Minaret of Jam—photo by David Adamec, 2006

The photo is of a minaret in the mountains of Ghor. Stewart suggests it is what remains of the fabled lost city, Turquoise Mountain. Turquoise Mountain Foundation is Stewart’s non-profit begun originally to restore the Old City in Kabul.