Flashes of Panic

I recently finished Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, which is a sort of travelogue of Stewart’s walk, in the winter of 2002, from Herat in western Afghanistan to Kabul in the East.

When I read a book like this, a “one person’s adventure” sort of story, I hope that I’m going to take something away from the story that I didn’t know before. I’ve read a few books which don’t reach this level at all—one about a young girl sailing around the world (mostly) solo which was barely about sailing at all and more about the various mechanical difficulties she had with her boat, and a few Antarctic-type books which can be boiled down to, “It was so cold it hurt.”

I think a lot of the sales Stewart’s book is enjoying (I’ve seen it cover-out in a few bookstores, so it’s evidently popular) are due to people hoping or expecting to learn a little bit about the current state of Afghanistan; the cover photo of Stewart setting out from Herat with the curious company of two gunmen and an extraneous relative certainly does carry some political implications. I did learn quite a bit along those lines; one of Stewart’s messages is that most of the policies the developed world has adopted towards Afghanistan demonstrate a lack of understanding of the way the country works, blinded either by well-meaning ignorance or an arrogant “neo-imperialist” desire to re-mold the country’s culture closer to that of Europe and America.

But there’s a lot more than that. Stewart followed the path of the 16th-century Afghan leader Babur when he made his own return to Kabul from a visit to Herat; the book is liberally sprinkled with excerpts from Babur’s diary, reflecting on what has changed and what has not in the intervening five hundred years. (More hasn’t changed than has.) I learned about the ancient Ghorid empire and its capital, the Turquoise Mountain, one of the very few empires in recorded history which sprung from a mountain culture instead of the agricultural plains. (The Ghorid state was eventually erased from the earth by Genghis Khan, and at the time of Stewart’s walk the actual location of the Turquoise Mountain was unknown to the outside world.)

Apart from a few specific criticisms, Stewart offers little in the way of political commentary, but it is clear from his observations that the “problem” of Afghanistan is deeper and more complex than simply removing the Taliban, mouthing platitudes about the Koran, and attempting to impose a Western-style democracy with civil rights and universal suffrage. Why we opted for another war of convenience when we’re so far from figuring out what we’ve wrought in Afghanistan, I’ll never really understand.

The title comes from Stewart’s method of navigation from village to village. Without carrying detailed maps (which he feared would bring suspicion that he was a spy,) Stewart would ask in each village for the names of the villages and head men between there and his next significant destination (e.g. Bamiyan.) The villagers would list places they had never seen, with walking times which grew progressively less accurate as the distance from their home increased, but this was how they knew how to get anywhere else—through a list of the places in between.

Now Playing: Secret Handshake from Green Eggs And Crack by Too Much Joy

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