Afghanistan: exemplar of the failure of post-colonial policy

In 2002, a Scottish lad by the name of Rory Stewart walked, west to east, across the centre of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. Why anyone would do this, especially in the middle of a shooting war, is beyond me. Stewart himself seems to have lost the point of the exercise, as he admits towards the end of The Places in Between (Picador, 2004).

If it was poppies the lad was looking for, he was disappointed. All he saw was sand, rocks, snow and the occasional mud building. The book has pictures, in black and white, which rather surprised me until I read the author's description of the dun monochrome he looked at from dawn till dusk. No point in spending extra on four-colour printing for that.

It turns out Mr. Stewart is a historian or ethnologist or a bit of both. He wanted to follow the path taken in the 16th century by the great Babur (it means "tiger") a descendant of Timur the Lame, who succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in the Indian subcontinent and became the first Mughal emperor.

Of Babur's mighty works in Afghanistan, virtually nothing remains. Stewart didn't even see ruins. What he saw were ruins of ruins, such as what's left of the Bamiyan Buddha, a world heritage site dynamited by the Taliban just before Stewart got there. Something similar happened in Timbuktu (Mali) last week. No competing religions allowed in Muslim countries, you know.

All in all, The Places in Between is, like the journey it describes, tedious and depressing. I did, however, find a nugget, a footnote to the chapter headed "@afghangov.org". I present it here for the stone truth the author tells about the failure of Western foreign aid -- indeed of Western foreign policy -- in places like Afghanistan, which is a metaphor for all of the Middle East and Africa. The words are Stewart's; the added emphasis is mine.

Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans' diverse experiences, [Western] policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a 19th century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.

They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens.

They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices.

There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact, their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action of judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.