The places in between

Having read a recent memoir by Rory Stewart, noticed at reference 5, I accepted an email offer from Amazon for a Kindle version of his book about his walk from Herat to Kabul in January 2002 for 99p. An offer I couldn’t refuse.

January 2002 being not long after the defeat of the Taliban at the start of the Afghanistan War, started in the wake of the September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers.

A solo walk taking around 35 days, across the mountains from Herat to Kabul, 400 miles as the cross flies, rather than the longer, softer route to the south, via Kandahar. The high road through the snow, across the watershed of the Harirud, Helmund and Kabul rivers and reaching maybe 10,000 feet, rather than the low road used by sensible people. 

He was accompanied at times and he did acquire a large dog along the way, but a considerable feat of endurance and courage nonetheless. It seems to have been all too likely at the time for him to have to come to grief along the way, a victim of the cold, of illness, of robbery or a casual shooting. Of which last there seems to have been a good deal about. 

He was not armed but he did carry a wooden staff, widely used in the region: about five feet long and tipped with iron at both ends. Useful both as a walking stick and something with which to see off dogs, wolves and on occasion people. I associate to the quarter staff used by the Saxons of England after the Conquest when they were not allowed edged weapons.

The route was once a caravan route, the silk road to China or the spice road to India, which meant that there were stopping places at a day’s walk apart along most of the way. Some quite substantial structures, if only offering very basic facilities. One slept on the mud floor.

He spoke Dari pretty well, an Iranian language, which worked well enough in most of Afghanistan, certainly northern Afghanistan where he mostly was. Pashtun, another Iranian language, to the south. His interactions were more or less exclusively with men.

Most of the country he walked was very poor and the concerns of most of the people did not extend much beyond their own and neighbouring villages. They cared a lot about Islam and were interested to hear about the strange treatment of women and wives in other countries. A mixture of Sunni and Shia. Over the years a great deal of violence, quite apart from that occasioned by the arrival of waves of foreigners with axes to grind: Russians, Arabs and Americans. But their understanding of or interest in the nation building talk of well-meaning but often ignorant Westerners was pretty much zero.

Stewart had both the energy and interest to take in plenty of historical interest on the way, including some vary large structures, something very few of the soldiers or civilians from international agencies bothered with. Or, indeed, many Afghanis. His walk took in what had been one of the sources from which the 16th century Moghul invasion of India by Babur sprang. A chap who, like Caesar, got the history straight by writing it himself, in the form of an autobiography which is still available from Amazon today. A chap who also made the same march as that made by Stewart.

Stewart came away from all this strongly opposed to ramping up the Western intervention, interference in the country, a mission he was sure would end in failure, as indeed it eventually did. This was a large, poor, conservative people who had their way of doing things, and a sprinkling of half-baked Western institutions from on-high – plus a rather thicker sprinkling of money and weapons – was not going to work. Unfortunately, he made no headway before the event.

We hear something, but not a great deal, about the drugs business. Some recreational use of cannabis by the villagers.

I suppose one might say that Stewart is taking a small government, conservative view of things. That the Russian attempt to drag the country into today’s world, to build schools and hospitals, to emancipate women, was doomed to failure, even before the US armed the tribesmen and guerillas.

Notwithstanding a fascinating read.

Some oddments

Iran to the west, central Asian republics (once part of the Russian/Soviet empire) to the north and Pakistan to the south and east. Linked by a tongue of land to China in the northeast. No idea how that came to be.

Afghanistan is a very diverse place, home to lots of different ethnic groups and lots of different languages, these last mostly of an Iranian flavour. In the olden days, more or less endemic, low-level warfare. Central government weak, especially in the mountains. From which I associate to the endemic tribal warfare of the Bedouin described by Lawrence of Arabia.

The Taliban did not approve of playing chess or of keeping pigeons for amusement. Nor of the lax ways of some of the Shias with their women. Nor of Buddhist statues.

Stewart took in the wrecked statues of Bamiyan along the way. Above: ‘Panorama of the northern cliff of the Valley of Bamyan, with the Western and Eastern Buddhas at each end (before destruction), surrounded by a multitude of Buddhist caves’. But he was able to explore some of the caves.

The villages elders might have been very religious and some of them could recite the Koran. But recite it in Arabic of which they actually knew little or nothing. Apparently, to a true believer, anything other than the revealed word in classical Arabic does not count. Plenty of illiteracy too.

The heavy bride price was a burden for young men who wanted to get married. But a burden which they seemed to put up with, at least in the country villages.

Most of the villagers seemed to have done stints working to save money in either Iran or Pakistan.

Donkeys and dogs were treated rather badly by our standards. Furthermore, dogs were unclean and not suitable as house pets in our way. But they were useful for hunting and as guard dogs, and these Afghanis were very keen on dog fighting and on betting on same.

For someone doing serious exercise, Stewart seems to have survived on what sound like very short rations: dry bread (nan), rice, sweet tea and the occasional small bit of meat. He also manages to get through dysentery.

And he still had the energy to write up his diary most nights.

References

Reference 1: The places in between – Rory Stewart – 2004.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Places_in_Between.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021). ‘… Overall, the war killed an estimated 176,000–212,000+ people, including 46,319 civilians. While more than 5.7 million former refugees returned to Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion, by the time the Taliban returned to power in 2021, 2.6 million Afghans remained refugees, while another 4 million were internally displaced…’. The population of (the Islamic Emirate of) Afghanistan is around 40m.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babur. 

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Afghanistan. 

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/politics-on-edge.html.