The Economist's snarky putdown of Bono

Unlike ageing rock star and SJW Bono, I have never been to Timbuktu, although many people, including my sainted mother, have told me to go there. Timbuktu is the fabled chief city of what was supposed to be a great African kingdom, once upon a time. Today it is more or less in the middle of Mali, one of those countries President Trump rightly described as "shitholes".

Until 1960, Mali was a part of l'Afrique Occidentale Française (French West Africa), a colony of, errr, France. As in the rest of post-colonial Africa, things started to go downhill once the French let the local people run their own railroad. I'm speaking metaphorically, as to the best of my knowledge Mali doesn't actually have a railroad any more. Half of the population is under the age of 16. The average Malian woman has six children. Barely a third of the population can read.

To make matters worse, ancient divisions of race and tribe turned into a shooting war which has heated up, cooled down, then heated up again in a vicious cycle ever since independence. Seems that the Tuareg and Arab minorities, who are concentrated in the northern part of the country don't like being ruled by black Africans. Whoda thunk it? There were major rebellions in 1963 and 1990, but the most major of all occurred in 2012, when the northern rebels went from being a secular nationalist movement into a militant Islamist insurgency.

In 2015 the warring parties signed a peace deal, which has proved meaningless. Violence has continued to escalate. Just last month, four separate attacks killed scores of people. According to an article in this week's Economist (from which the previous two paragraphs were excerpted), Mali's vast northern desert is a breeding ground for jihadism. And "insecurity", as the newspaper calls it, has spread to the central part of the country, including Timbuktu.

Reporting from Timbuktu, the anonymous writer of the article -- the Economist never runs bylines -- says, in what must be the best putdown of the year, so far: "...all is not well here.... At one time tourists used to pour into Timbuktu to ride camels across the desert. Now most of the foreigners at the airport wear army uniforms. The city has said goodbye to Bono, a rock musician who once played there. But in most other respects things have got worse."

Bravo, anonymous writer! That brilliant bit of snark puts you in the lead in the competition for Walt's prestigious Golden Finger award for 2018. Keep up the good work!

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.

Book non-review: A white liberal guilt trip to Timbuktu

Now that the roads have dried out, more or less, Walt ventured out to the library, over Fort Mudge way, looking for some intellectual nourishment. I picked up two pieces, one of which turned out to be quite tasty and digestible. The other was nausea-inducing. I'll tell you about that one first.

Rick Antonson (it says here) is an internationally respected tourism executive, which one supposes is a cut or two above being an internationally respected used car dealer. For reasons unclear, Mr. Antonson set out with "entertaining train companions Ebou and Ussegnou, a mysterious cook called Nema, and intrepid guide Zak" to reach the ancient city of Timbuktu, the capital of Mali, one of the most backward states of Africa, the most backward continent of the world.

The jacket blurbs compare Antonson with Eric Newby, Redmond O'Hanlon and Bill Bryson. Walt has read Newby, O'Hanlon and Bryson, and -- trust me -- Antonson is not in the same league or even on the same planet. What Antonson is is a member of the Noble Savage school. You know... "These Africans were once a great people, with a civilization much greater and more, errr, civilized than ours, but since they came into contact with the evil white men, their fabulous city crumbled into dust and their people descended into the deep pit of poverty, which we really must throw money into, to help them get out of the trap we created..." etc etc ad nauseam.

Does the book actually say this? Alas, I can't tell you, because I didn't get as far as the text itself. I was stopped by the foreword by Professor Geoffrey Lipman, a citizen of the world -- meaning I couldn't figure out his actual citizenship -- Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations World Tourism Organization and professional spokesthingy for sustainable and politically correct tourism.

Obviously Prof. Lipman is a progressive thinker and someone who does well out of doing good. No flying economy class for him, I'm sure! Here is what he has to say about Mali and about Antonson's book.

At p. 8 (first page of the Foreword) - Rick Antonson's personal odyssey is peppered with commentary on issues that are geopolitically relevant...

At p. 9 (second page of the Foreword) - We [Walt's emphasis] owe the children of Africa a seriously better future...

At p. 10 (third page of the Foreword) - What is heroic here is Mali itself and the indomitable spirit of its people.... Mali has a history as proud and rich as any country on the planet, but it is a nation that has also been dealt an incredibly tough hand...

At p. 11 (fourth and -- thank goodness -- final page of the Foreword), Lipman quotes from the book itself - Travel holds immense hope for a better world. Two hundred and eighteen countries call this tiny planet home: each of us is but a step or two away from a person in every one of those nations.... Tourism, more than any other industry, can bring people together to celebrate differences.

That was all I could take. Unfortunately I started the book while sitting down to dinner -- yes, yes, bad habit, I know -- and was obliged to put it aside at the end of the foreword lest I regurgitate Mrs. Walt's excellent dai dop woy.

Mr. Antonson's alleged book is called To Timbuktu for a Haircut. If you're a guilt-ridden liberal of the Hebrew persuasion, you'll surely love it. Being none of those things, I'm surmising from the foreword, not from having read it.