Further Afghanistan material

The second book of my book club was another Afghanistan-centric work, The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. It's a quick and easy read, and although it is not all that illuminating in many ways, it does give a snapshot of one person's fascinating journey through that country, and at least an idea about what it is like in the rural hamlets that comprise much of the population.

Rory Stewart never explains why it is he decided to walk across Asia. For whatever reason, he walked across India, Nepal, Iran, and other Asian countries. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, he took the opportunity to walk across that land as well (he had previously been denied access to the country by the Taliban). Stewart walks through the middle of the country, from Herat to Kabul, braving sometimes unfriendly villagers, treacherous mountain passes in the dead of winter, and various other obstacles. It's quite the concept, and yields a fair amount of striking moments. The prose is matter of fact and dry, though sometimes you can sense Stewart's sense of humor just below the surface.

However, the book does suffer from a sort of sameness. The belt of villages that Stewart walks through, and relies on to feed and shelter him, are all fairly similar. There is a familiar motion to finding the appropriate local chieftan to appeal to in each village and avoiding the same sorts of pitfalls each time. And though the journey must have been incredibly difficult, I rarely got the sense from the walking descriptions of exactly how tiring it must be. I believe that Stewart was in many ways lucky to survive at all, particularly when accounting for the dysentary he seems to always have, his lack of mastery of the language, and his travel through areas that had heavy support for the Taliban still.

One moment that was among my favorite in the book: Stewart has just come into another poor dwelling hoping to find nourishment. It is a typical mud hut with no power or amenities; it does, however, have a poster on the wall. "[The] poster showed a yellow convertible sports car parked outside a Swiss chalet with flower-decked balconies. Printed below in capital letters in English was: ANYONE WHO HAS EVER STRUGGLED WITH POVERTY KNOWS HOW EXTREMELY EXCITING IT IS TO BE POOR. Our host had bought the poster in Herat and asked me to translate it. I told him I could not understand the inscription." Irony of that passage aside, I think that would make an excellent T-shirt.

The main lesson to be drawn in my opinion from Stewart's work is that Afghanistan is not in any way to be mistaken for a uniform nation. The people do not think of themselves in national terms, and the ethnic, religious, and feudal ties are much more important to them than any action being taken supposedly in their name by a distant government in Kabul. The things that matter are of course the things that affect our day to day lives. It is a depressing book in the sense that virtually no one the author meets cares at all about human rights or really any ideal whatsoever beyond what it is to be a Muslim (indeed there is a very interesting chapter about how Bush and Blair misconstrue Muslim belief). Stewart walked a long and difficult journey, but as thinking about this book makes clear, the journey toward a humane planet will be much longer.