A Scottish Dante in Middle East hell

PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS

The Places in Between

By Rory Stewart

Penguin Canada, 297 pages, $18

The Prince of the Marshes: and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

By Rory Stewart;

Penguin Canada; 396 pages; $24

Rory Stewart embodies everything that was good about the British Empire. A Scot, born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia, he was briefly an infantry officer before joining the Foreign Office, where he served in the embassies in Indonesia and Yugoslavia. In 2000, he decided to take a leave of absence for 20 months to cross Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and he briefly worked on the reconstruction of Afghanistan after the invasion.

His knowledge of the countries through which he travels and his experience with the diverse communities that inhabit them, profoundly shape his ideas about how the West can truly assist such people. And like those Foreign Office Arabists and Indologists whose concern for, and admiration of, the peoples they worked among is now the stuff of legend, Stewart understands that even in the wake of empire, there is the obligation to bring something of worth to those from whom you would take much, or of whom much would be asked.

There are no longer many in the civil service who share these views. Stewart writes: "Ten years in the Islamic world and in other places that had recently emerged from conflict had left me very suspicious of theories produced in seminars in Western capitals and of foreigners in a hurry. The best kind of international development seemed to be done by people who directly absorbed themselves into rural culture and politics, focused on traditional structures, and understood that change would always be very slow. I believed that politicians often misled others and themselves when they started wars and that there were dubious reasons for our invasions of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan."

Fluent in Farsi and Urdu, and able to converse adequately in Pushtun and some other dialects spoken by Afghan tribes, Stewart is also familiar with the history of regions in which he travels -- not just the standard gloss of Western histories, but also the minutiae gleaned from reading Arab chroniclers and local historians. He is refreshingly tough-minded and unsentimental about what and whom he encounters, but genuinely compassionate and insatiably curious, too, with a real desire to assist in the process of bringing some of the world's most lawless and anachronistic territories into harmony with the 21st century without destroying their indigenous cultures and traditions, without tearing the complex and delicate fabric of their social structures. He is well aware how much poorer we all would be in a blandly homogeneous world.

"I am not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan," Stewart writes. "Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure." I think he did it to enable himself better to understand the exigencies of reconstructing the country along lines both feasible and sustainable. Anyone who believes Canada's current presence in Afghanistan is a correct approach to helping the country emerge from its slumber in the ninth century would be well advised to read The Places in Between very carefully, because the book could easily be intended as a damning critique of everything that has gone on there since the fall of the Taliban.

At the close of his epic trek, Stewart comments: "Policy makers did not have the time, structures, or resources for a serious study of alien cultures. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist. They acted as though villagers were interested in all the priorities of international organizations, even when those priorities were mutually contradictory."

When those, like myself, who have lived or spent much time in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, object to Western policies for those countries, it is usually because knowledge and experience make it evident these policies will fail and are misguided. The problem is that such criticism is taken to be political and attacked as such by politicians or their advocates, which tends actually to politicize the issue while obscuring its real nature.

Stewart wisely avoids the Western politics and concentrates on the local ones, which are arcane enough to require his full attention. Somewhat inadvertently, he retraces the steps of Babur, first emperor of Mughal India, who travelled from Herat to Kabul in the 15th century and recorded his experiences in a diary that Stewart is initially reluctant to read, but in which he comes to find a kindred spirit: "[Babur] pays more attention to his contemporary world than to legends or ancient history, and he is a careful observer. . . . He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal or more symbolic. Unlike most travel writers, he is honest." He could well be describing himself.

It is no easy thing to walk through the foothills of the Hindu Kush in January, yet Stewart is remarkably stoic about the difficulties he encounters and the hardships he endures, mentioning them in passing merely as facts. He is stricken with dysentery; he goes days with scarcely more than a crust of bread to eat; he nearly freezes to death. But he has little sympathy with himself, possibly aware that no one else will have much either, since he is continually warned of the dangers that such a hare-brained project entails, pushing on regardless, refusing all offers of transportation, determined to reach his goal on feet that are swollen black and blue at times and smell appallingly by the end.

What he encounters along the way, however, is well worth the sacrifice. This is the real Afghanistan, a remote scattering of tribal peoples whose geographical isolation from one another and whose traditions and histories make them as different as Masai and Swedes, yet whose collective dislike of foreign intruders can unite them into a military force so tenacious and formidable it has defeated every empire that attempted to rule there. It is probably the only issue upon which all Afghans are in agreement, yet it is also the one we in the West persist in ignoring with our mistaken attempts to shore up the flagging authority of a government in Kabul that everyone outside the city and its tribal region views as a Western quisling.

The point is made to Stewart countless times, although one tribe's reasons for making it may differ widely from another's, just as some communities mourn the absence of the Taliban, and others even fondly remember the period of Russian occupation, since it increased their power and wealth. Afghanistan is a land that resists generalization, and indeed, this is the very nature of tribal culture: Each tribe is its own nation and ought to be regarded as such by anyone wishing to usher in the dubious benefits of Western democracy. As a Scot, Stewart is well aware of what little difference the Roman occupation of Britain made to his own tribal peoples.

It is a measure of Afghanistan's remoteness that Stewart may be the first Westerner to have stumbled across the complete remains of the Ghorid capital, known as the Turquoise Mountain, which Genghis Khan's Mongol horde sacked. Western archaeologists did begin excavations in the 1970s, but they clearly had no idea of the site's vastness. The locals have since done quite a bit of excavation themselves. As Stewart records: " 'It was destroyed twice,' Bushire added, 'once by hailstones and once by Genghis.'

" 'Three times,' I said. 'You're destroying what remained.'

"They all laughed."They had been hacking away all over the lost capital of the Silk Road empire for years now, digging through the traces of more than a single Afghan culture, uncovering art imported from all over 12th-century Asia and selling it off to traders for a few dollars. As Stewart balefully observes, it would surely not take much to install an archeological mission here and pay the same energetic locals to dig more cautiously. Such a project would help create a tourist industry that would solve a lot more immediate and long-term problems than any current reconstruction scheme is able to do.

As I also found when travelling here, Stewart comes to realize that tribal pride and tribal realities often contradict one another. Every Afghan is prone to extol the hospitality of his people to strangers above all other virtues, yet when that hospitality is requested, it is often absent or given reluctantly these days, because hospitality requires the means with which to be hospitable, and too many villages now exist on the edge of grinding poverty for the appearance of a stranger to be greeted with any enthusiasm. Many of the lives Stewart encounters are tragic in the extreme, either shattered by war, poor crops or ill health, often beyond repair. One wonders how his hosts and guardians are faring long after leaving them in these pages, with the onset of another winter and the resurgence of Taliban fighters.

We are better informed about Iraq, however, and know how much more bleak the situation of ordinary citizens has become since Stewart left that country in 2004.

The Prince of the Marshes essentially takes up the story of Stewart's quixotic adventures where the previous book leaves off. As coalition forces invade Iraq, he once more offers his services to the Foreign Office and, receiving no reply, heads for Baghdad, around the time I left, in August, 2003, renting himself a small apartment in the south of the city. I am tempted to call Stewart "fearless" and "courageous," but I suspect that his sensibilities are much like my own and he simply feels comfortable among Iraqis, seeing no need to fear them, thus no need for courage. I know I am not brave and the moment I feel unsafe anywhere, I leave. I imagine it is the same for him; otherwise it would be recklessness, not fearlessness, that drives him.

The few months following the fall of Saddam were a period of such chaos and lawlessness that Stewart wisely gave up trying to acquire employment. On his return to Britain, however, he found the Foreign Office asked him to be the deputy governorate co-ordinator of Maysan province, "which lay in the marshes just north of the Garden of Eden. Or rather just north of the dead date palm and visitors' parking lot that Iraqis claimed marked the site of paradise."

The area housed the Marsh Arabs, who "living in wicker huts on floating reed beds with their buffalo, contrasted dramatically with their neighbours in the tents of desert Arabia." These marshes were often described by Western explorers as if they preserved something of the pre-Fall innocence, with flocks of rare birds in the sky over water-lands scattered with reed halls built to a design more than five millenniums old. "British explorers of the 1950s photographed these naked men standing with tridents against a flat marsh sky, making them appear, perhaps deliberately, to be Neolithic Polynesians in a changeless Eden."

In reality, the traditional values of the Marsh Arabs were crumbling, the young men heading down that one-way street to low-paying jobs in the cities, the power of the tribes crumbling, government intruding, and the health of villagers improving. In the 1980s, the marshes became the front line of the bloody Iran-Iraq war, with trenches, mines and unexploded shells scattered over the eastern side of the territory. The reeds hid deserters and Iranian-backed guerrillas. Tens of thousands fled or were taken prisoner. Then, in 1991, many of the inhabitants joined the Shia uprising against Saddam that George H. W. Bush urged on them, yet failed to support. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by Saddam's helicopter gunships, which trapped them in the open desert.

As a result, Saddam had the marshes drained of a thousand square miles of water, which was run off into a trench three kilometres wide and 80 kilometres long. He littered the place with water mines, burned villages, bombed houses and killed thousands of religious and tribal leaders, denying Marsh Arabs any medical treatment. Much of the marsh turned to desert; an entire people was scattered, a unique culture vanished.

The place Stewart arrives to govern no longer has anything left of its past, yet he "thought we could still help to create a better society. . . . I hoped to apply what I had learned in Afghanistan," he writes, "to spend as much time as possible in rural areas and to work with moderate leaders. I thought there was a real limit to what I . . . would be able to achieve, and that Iraqi society would remain . . . chaotic, corrupt and confusing. But I didn't think it would be too difficult to outperform Saddam."

By the time Stewart leaves Maysan, he admits that "it was not the kind of state the coalition had hoped to create . . . [it was] reactionary, violent, intolerant toward women and religious minorities, and unco-operative with the coalition." Many Iraqis were so horrified by their new leaders, who had all too often spent years as Iranian secret agents or had no education outside a theological seminary, that some were trying to leave the country. "But in the December, 2005, elections they again voted for the conservative Islamist parties in overwhelming numbers."

Although I think he underestimates the levels of voter intimidation brought by members of militia groups such as the Mahdi army during these elections, the assessment is still accurate enough. In between his arrival and departure, in Stewart's inimitable manner, we see first-hand the blundering of coalition forces and their agencies, and the astounding complexity and diversity of the peoples they are attempting to organize and subdue, often with the best intentions.

Stewart never takes sides -- he is not really in a position to do so -- presenting hubris, cruelty, weakness and stupidity in both Iraqis and their liberators, but most of all chronicling the folly and hopelessness of the whole enterprise for all concerned. Riven by old feuds and the need for vengeance, the Shiites of Maysan are every bit as culpable in the reduction of their country into a hell the likes of which has been unknown anywhere on Earth in modern times, and, as most Iraqis will agree, is infinitely worse than the tyranny of Saddam.

Yet Stewart's patience and insight are able to pinpoint precisely where and why the best laid plans come unravelled, and he gives us a masterly portrait of Iraq on the brink of catastrophe that will at least enable someone one day to avoid the same mistakes again. It is a superb piece of work, eloquent, incisive, poignant and erudite, and in its inside view of coalition activities, unparalleled and indispensable.

That Michael Ignatieff oversaw the writing of the book, during Stewart's tenure at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, may augur well for a more enlightened Liberal Party foreign policy. Failing that, perhaps someone could offer Rory Stewart his own position in our Foreign Affairs Ministry. Never have I felt so certain that someone truly had a sense of how properly to go about the noble task of helping developing nations, yet helping them in a manner that will not disrupt their traditional cultures or threaten their autonomy and its pride, and most of all in a manner that won't turn them into sworn enemies of the West.

Paul William Roberts has spent much of his life living or travelling in South and West Asia. His books on Afghanistan and Iraq include Empire of the Soul and A War against Truth. His latest book is the political novel Homeland.