The Places In Between

I have always been a reader of travel literature. Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between” is a modern classic of the genre. It thoroughly deserves to be widely read.The essence of Stewart’s book is a journey he took entirely on foot from Herat to Kabul shortly after the fall of the Taliban. Arguably, this was a foolhardy mission and it certainly had its moments. Nonetheless, Stewart’s book is a wonderful and enchanting description of chance encounters, breathtaking scenery and some scary mishaps.Stewart takes the journey with the companionship of a large locally acquired dog. Although this may seem normal in a western country, dogs are considered dirty in Afghanistan and it definitely raised some issues for him along the way. The dog, however, proves to be a good foil and companion for Stewart.Finally, if there is one conclusion to be drawn from the book, it’s that the politics of Afghanistan are intractable. The nation is riven by religious, racial and linguistic barriers. There seems to be no chance that these will be resolved in the medium term. This is a shame. The nation is unfortunately blighted as a consequence.

"The Places in Between" is the chronicle of Rory Stewart's journey by foot from Herat to Kabul, accompanied by nothing else but the occasional villager or passing soldier and his local dog, named Babur. This is a fitting name because Stewart, who would later be appointed to an important government post in occupied Iraq (The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq), not only wants to explore the beautiful Afghan landscape but also study the traces of its history in the present. The original Babur was one of the few leaders in Afghan history who had united the whole territory and who considered it central to his empire, and he is particularly interesting because he left an autobiographical text which is remarkable for its honesty, its objectivity, and its insight into the norms of those days. With these two Baburs, knowledge of local language and customs, and a bag full of medication, Rory Stewart sets out to traverse the sublime deserts and snow-capped mountains of central Afghanistan.The tale is very well written and makes for easy and highly compelling reading. It is a telling fact that he makes his journey, which consists in essence out of endlessly repeated harsh day marches from one village chief's tent to the next, interesting to people who have never even been near the area. Stewart is very nonjudgmental overall, probably in part because he is entirely reliant on the kindness of strangers (who are often as hostile as they are hospitable to travellers) in the classic manner of travel writing. The book sheds some light on the highly complicated chain of political and ethnic conflicts within Afghanistan - almost every Afghan male has fought in at least one, if not more, war in the country. It is clear that loyalties are usually not quite as clear-cut as one would like them to be in order to understand them: very often the same feudal lords who had opposed the Taliban later joined them, and sometimes Iran-supported islamists are the greatest enemies of local chieftains, and so forth. Stewart's book does not really delve into political analysis, but certainly shows 'ad oculos' what the real meaning of politics is in Afghanistan.All this is not to say that Stewart is necessarily an entirely reliable guide. The American edition of the book indicates that Rick Loomis took pictures of him along the way, but having a cameraman along is not mentioned anywhere. Moreover, it is clear from the facts that Stewart has been in the British Army, knows Dari as well as local politics thoroughly, has been involved with the Kennedy School of Government and finally his later appointment as governor in the occupying government in Iraq, that it is highly likely that he is a spy of some sort. Given this fact, the fact that Stewart was allowed to undertake his trip at all is quite remarkable, and it does seem some strings were pulled to make it possible. Of course, he himself says nothing about this. The result in any case is an insightful and highly readable book that will appeal to anyone interested in Afghanistan.

Whether making a journey, or writing a book, I guess that in our internet era there will always be people who feel compelled to pass some sort of harshly overdone judgment. Slightly less that 20% seemed moved to pan the book. Why?The author does something most of his readers would most probably not-- first, he undertakes a most unusual journey, and then he takes the time to share something about his experiences with the rest of us. What the caustic and uncharitable naysayer reviewers seem to have missed is that, by the time the author has done these things, their comments become sort of besides the point. Are they saying that he should not have undertaken his journey? Are they saying that once he did make his journey, he should have kept his experiences to himself?It was HIS journey, and it is HIS book. We, on the other hand, get to explore what there might be in it for us without having to do anything but to sit in our easy chairs and read. But some people seem rabidly enraged that he did not undergo the journey THEY thought he should have undergone . . . or written the book THEY thought he should have written. Yet the fact is that it was HIS book and HIS journey, and the only way the rest of us could possibly get anything out of it is by exercising some interest in HIS experiences as HE saw them, and as HE has chosen to write about them.Now, I know (and, as a citizen of the world, I blush at such narrow-minded McCarthian anti-intellectualism) that Rush Limbaugh is calling upon all his listeners to advance the cause by giving a mere one or two stars and writing scathing reviews on Amazon for any books they consider to the left of Genghis Khan; and I can't help wondering how much of this books raging 20% detractors could have come from such readership. That may not have been exactly what all these reviewers had in mind, but that style of book-burning hyper-judgmental thinking (and its "Rush"-to-judgment hostilism) about a piece of literature sure sounds at lot like that loud-mouth's style. It is as if he and they have to pass emotionally overwraught judgment on everything and anything that crosses their awareness! Like the communists of old, such people end up in a take-no-prisoners war with culture. IN THEIR VIEW, NOBODY CAN GET IT AT LEAST WORTHWHILE RIGHT EXCEPT THEM. One almost suspects the workings of naked ENVY!!!! I can just see them asking themselves: How come Rory Stewart gets to be read and talked about, and nobody gives a damn about the rumblings inside my head?Rory Stewart has written about the empty places between very empty spaces. Can't these nay-sayers bring themselves to believe that, from the perspective of our over-stimulated world, there could be people who have established what for us would be largely empty settlements in between long stretches of empty desert spaces? In fact, the emptiness to which they devote their life struggles to survive is what makes it so hard to reconcile their existences without our own cluttered, hording, and shopaholic life-style. As the author makes clear, at best we Westerners could visit such emptiness, but we would not likely get far trying to survive in it over the long haul.So here's what I get from the book. I get the benefit of someone following the impulse to leave his world of plenty and visit a place where people make a living out of what to us might seem never having enough. And guess what? To them, they have enough in their emptiness to share a bit of it in their own way with this stranger who has arrived with no real purpose for being there. His own itinerant emptiness is sufficiently greater that theirs that they can make sense of his need for something to eat and a place to stay; hence the are willing to share with him some of the little they have in their relatively empty world. For the author to have shown up with anything more than his emptiness would have involved he and they sharing "stuff" with each other, and that would have made for a totally different book-- perhaps one on commerce and cultural exchange. But this author managed to enter their emptiness with so much emptiness of his own that they could not feel empty in his presence-- in other words, he had apparently made very few waves in that dry country!!!!Think back of the Pacific Islanders, who were so traumatized by the chock full of "stuff" the WW II Americans who built air bases near their villages arrived with, that they became obsessed with having; hence, the natives developed a gripping Cargo Cult (where they prayed for and awaited the great bird in the sky to land on their island and open up its belly to become a bottomless cornucopia of "stuff").Had the author of this book appeared anywhere near so Western, I dare say we might be hearing of his funeral rather than of his book. That's just what the Taliban fear: namely, that the indigenous populations that constitute the targets of their proselytizing will become irreversibly seduced out of their rigidly-adhered-to life-style of emptiness, a life-style of not having when compared to a Westerner's materialistic life of "good-and-plenty."I think the emptiness of his voyage-- of which the book wreaks-- is the whole point of his narrative. As a clinician and social scientist, what I get out of this reading is exposure to how diverse diversity can actually be . . . and how diverse (in this case, "EMPTY" of stuff and of any recognizable ulterior motives, both of which I'm so used to expect as a Westerner) one must be to be "allowed" by those people to live even momentarily among them.At bottom, these natives seem to be as rigidly judgmental (in a medieval kind of way) as Mr. Limbaugh and his crowd appear to me to be; and these natives would probably feel as compelled to pass as pointlessly harsh judgment on any foreigner or his collection of alien "stuff" as Rush would be of anything that deviated from his expectations. That's how travelers get robbed, off-ed, or decapitated by the natives they encounter along the way-- as any anthropological field worker will tell you. The first rule of field work: never . . . never . . . never try to show off how much more "stuff" the place where you came from has than does the place where you are doing field work (even if it's done innocently/thoughtlessly through the many things you might have brought with you for what you believed to be strictly a matter of your own private creature comforts). Field workers recognize how easily tempted and corrupted by the magnetism of "stuff" indigenous cultures can be, and they usually make it a habit to wisely bring as little of it as possible when they authentically seek the explore the way of life of others. Colonialists, on the other hand, have a very different purpose, and they use such dazzlement by "stuff" to immediately undermine those they would conquer.So, in conclusion, relax and read the text as far and as long as it speaks to you at no direct cost to you(except for a few bucks for the book, but you can also get it free at the library); read it as a narrative about an emptiness those anxious 20%ers would probably not be able to take in terms of direct personal experience without getting very upset, angry, and rivalrous-- which, if you're a lone traveler in the Afghan mountains, could easily get you beheaded!!! It is the almost unbelievable survival tale of a strange guy on a strange trip to a strange place-- which can only serve to exercise our diversity muscles. Such an experience can never be riveting for everyone (and if you have ever read anthropological field monographs, it can often even be riveting to NO ONE) . . . and still such literature can be quite useful, and make a significant contribution to, any reader's personal development; however much one might have had to struggle to finish reading it. Than you.