The Places in Between

 In his afterword, Rory Stewart explains the odd afterlife his 2001-2 walk through central Afghanistan has undergone. It has become a comment on a moment in time, between the rule of the Taliban and NATO's attempts to impose liberal democracy on what the West regularly terms a failed state. Stewart himself is unequivocal: this was not his aim. He simply wanted to walk across Afghanistan.

An odd goal, perhaps, given the dangers involved. It is hard to imagine many places more dangerous than Afghanistan in the weeks after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. What structures there had been had collapsed. A power vacuum existed, being filled by tribal leaders and traditional village leadership. The legacy of a decade and a half of invasions, power shifts and failed initiatives, going up to the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan.

Once again, that's what the Western narrative would suggest. And it is hard to read Rory Stewart's book without using Western eyes, sensible to the rule of law and sense of shared, common identity. Afghanistan, viewed through those eyes, does appear to be a failed state. But that, as every person Stewart met showed, is viewing Afghanistan as a geo-political problem and not necessarily a social one.

The Afghanistan Stewart walked through is one quite probably very similar to one that exists today, in the aftermath of the disastrous Western withdrawal in 2021. The Taliban continue to be zealots who vandalise the cultural heritage of this place in between; in between the Persian world of Iran and the structured Islamic world of Pakistan. Local justice - often based on Sharia law - is still dispensed under trees by village headmen rather than through a formalised court system. Viewed in such a light, Afghanistan is not a country that we would recognise as a nation state.

But that's the beauty of this astonishing book. Those places in between - the villages of central Afghanistan, in the mountain passes, where UN advisors and international experts were told it was too dangerous to travel - are Afghanistan. I would not want to go travelling there myself; today, as in 2001, it is simply too dangerous for someone unprepared. But it is in those places that millions of Afghans live, in villages that still work within a feudal system. Afghanistan isn't a Western democracy; it is a place of its own that the West has fundamentally misunderstood in two decades of foreign policy failure.

But that wasn't the point of the book. The point was the people. From the security escorts provided to Stewart in the early legs of his six-week walk, to the headmen he met, Afghanistan teems with complex humanity. It is those individuals and Stewart's interactions with them that form the basis of the book. It is fundamentally a travel book, interlaced with the history of Afghanistan. Every person he met on his journey he met on organic terms, not those imposed by some international treaty or agreement. Stewart saw villages and their social structures in operation. He met the kind, the cruel, the honest, the vindictive, the decent, the hospitable, the xenophobic and all other types in the human tapestry. He stayed on mosque floors and ate the bread of hospitality. And that is the backbone of this book: humanity.

Stewart doesn't always emerge to his credit - there are times when he is almost stereotypically the Brit abroad, domineering, abrasive, and stubborn - but in hindsight it's clear that he learned at every step, whether dealing with his security detail or with former Taliban commanders. He learned the country in a way few could do without spending weeks immersed in its people and landscapes. His affection for the place, despite its dangers, shines through. There are times when Afghanistan's beauty is able to shine; sadly, these times tend to be when he discusses the rich history of Afghanistan or its unforgiving geography, and not the very human problems that have dogged the place for centuries.

The Places in Between will live with me for a long time. In places poignant, in others brutal and unflinching, it is a book that touches on the entirety of human experience on the fringes of Western understanding. It is hard to read it without feeling something of the pity that exists in such a place.