Dressed in a Savile Row blazer, Rory Stewart cuts an unlikely figure in the streets of Kabul. But his efforts to restore part of a historical city devastated by war seem to be working
By Chris Sands
The Independent, 09 July 2007
In Kabul it is not unusual to see an elderly woman huddled on the floor begging for money from behind a burqa, or drug addicts too doped up to talk as they linger outside a mosque. Then there are the piles of rubbish rotting in the mid-morning sun and the white-bearded shopkeepers who look as if they have been sitting in the same spot for hundreds of years.
Rory Stewart cuts an unlikely figure in this setting. Eschewing the desert fatigues that seem standard issue for a Westerner in Afghanistan, he strides through the slum district of Murad Khane in a starched white shirt and heavy wool blazer.
The oddness is compounded by the Scot's upright gait and his habit of greeting locals like they are close friends. He is not trailed by the usual bodyguards and shows no obvious concern for his own security.
The Savile Row blazer is intended, he says, not as a display of aristocratic Britishness but a sign of respect to the Afghans he lives and works with. Mr Stewart's current mission to breathe life into a historic but ruined neighbourhood in the Afghan capital was arrived at by a highly circuitous route.
In the early 1990s the Eton and Oxford-educated Stewart was a summer tutor to Princes William and Harry, a job that led to a friendship with their father, the Prince of Wales. Then a visit by another friend of Prince Charles, Hamid Karzai, to the heir to the throne's School of Traditional Arts in London left a deep impression on the Afghan president. So much so that he decided to launch a similar venture in 2005 in Kabul and asked Stewart to run it.
The resulting foundation has set up its own traditional arts school and is attempting to turn this warren of ornate dilapidated adobe and wood buildings north of the river into a model of regeneration for the rest of Afghanistan.
"Initially there was a lot of suspicion. It took us probably six months to really get a toehold," Stewart explains.
That suspicion was prompted not only by his status as an outside but by his comparative youth, Stewart is only 34.
By any measure he has not led a typical life and was awarded on OBE at the age of 31.
The son of a British consul general in Hanoi during the Vietnam war, Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia and Scotland before completing his education in England. From the spires of Oxford he joined the Foreign Office, serving stints in Indonesia before East Timor's independence and then Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo war.
Just weeks after the Taliban regime was bombed from power he began an epic journey, walking across this beautiful and dangerous land with a dog he met along the way. His subsequent experiences formed the basis of a critically acclaimed book, The Places in Between, and ultimately helped lead him to taking on the challenge in Murad Khane.
"I'm just very impressed by Afghans. I think I first realised this when I was walking through Ghor [province] at end of 2001/ beginning of 2002, when people were saying this was the hunger belt and that 120,000 Afghans are going to die in the winter because they didn't have any food," he recalled.
"What I discovered is that actually rather than that being true they were incredibly resilient and able to find food and run schools and run villages despite the total absence of government."
With the hum of city life always in the air, Stewart showed a clear sense of pride and purpose as he strode around the slum, pointing out part of an old royal palace he hopes to turn into a community centre, and an old Turkish bath.
His mobile phone ringing constantly, polite exchanges in an upper-class English accent end with assertions, such as: "Ah, well I'm afraid the Canadian ambassador probably takes precedence over them". The tone is passionate and upbeat.
Almost half of the buildings in Murad Khane were destroyed by war in the Eighties and Nineties. Now it is slowly coming back to life. Two thousands trucks' worth of rubbish have been removed, much of the slum's historical architecture is being preserved and the entire project is providing direct employment to roughly 200 local people.
It is a very different to his last assignment, an 11-month stint as deputy governor for a southern Iraqi province that ended in 2004, a period that yielded another acclaimed book, Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq.
"This is actually much more difficult," he insists. "But also, in the end, I find it much more challenging and much more rewarding because it forces me to understand how unbelievably difficult it is to actually make an impact even in six or seven acres of the old city."
Despite this narrow focus his experiences in Iraq, the Balkans and Indonesia lend weight to his broader thoughts on Afghanistan. He has come to the conclusion that it is impossible for the Nato-led mission to succeed in southern and eastern Afghanistan, believing the best way forward would be for the international community to concentrate on western, central and northern areas.
"Afghans are not saying 'bring us gender workshops', they're saying 'we'd like jobs, we'd like incomes, we'd like infrastructure', and we're not giving it to them.
"I think what's frustrating about policy work is that you get very excited at a very high and abstract level by talking about good governance and civil society, and going to great conferences and seminars, and plotting road maps and development strategies, and you can convince yourself that you're having a lot of impact when you're actually having no impact at all," he said.
"In the 1960s we believed that it was important to do infrastructure: roads, dams, those kinds of projects. Those are still the sorts of things that Afghans are demanding and expecting," Stewart says.
But in the meantime, the international community has changed its focus, he says, to less visible concepts such as capacity building and training for the government.
"That's very plausible, it's a good idea - the problem is it's not visible, it's not particularly welcome and I'm not certain how much effect we're having."
The former diplomat's prescription is a controversial one. "I think we need to recognise now that Afghanistan is increasingly two countries. The Pashtun belt in the south and east is very difficult to operate in, very difficult to get any kind of serious support and consent. A powerful effective minority is trying to kill us and in those areas it's almost impossible to do development.
"I think we need to focus on areas in the centre, and north and west of the country where we are welcome, where people want us to work with them."
Despite recent claims from Britain's senior army commanders that a presence could be required for the next 30 years, Stewart believes that the long view cannot be a military one.
"We don't have the resources, we don't have the will, we don't have the commitment, we don't have the power to pacify south and east Afghanistan. It's not an option. We have a few tens of thousands of troops, we are not in a position to fight a 25-year counter-insurgency campaign against the Taliban.
"Probably the best model that we could hope for is to follow the example of Pakistan where basically Punjab and the Sindh is prosperous and relatively stable, and Balochistan and [Northwest Frontier Province] is wild.
"The one card the Taliban have to play is presenting themselves as fighting for Islam in Afghanistan against a foreign military occupation.
"That is the one card we musn't give them and it's the one card we're giving them by trying to put all these troops into these areas," he says.
Even in his appointed patch in Kabul, huge problems remain. The residents have no running water in their homes, drug addicts hang around listlessly in the bazaar - but Stewart is adamant that his kind of scheme is the way forward for Afghanistan.
Most foreigners have let the deteriorating security situation throw them into the grip of a crazed paranoia, which usually involves hiding inside heavily fortified compounds and speeding through the streets in armed convoys.
Stewart seemed happy enough folding himself up and sitting in the boot of the packed Jeep his colleague drives. His main grievance appeared to be that he no longer gets to see much of the country he loves.
"I'm really annoyed about that. I want to move around, I hate being stuck in Kabul all the time," he said. "But unfortunately this project is getting too big."
His past travels are stamped all over the current project though. Its name, The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, comes from the capital of the 12th century capital of the Silk Road Empire, a place he encountered during his epic walk.
The location was marked only by an imposing minaret. The site has since been looted by locals desperate to turn their history into the money now needed to survive. The tragedy of the Turquoise Mountain was typical of the destruction of Afghanistan's heritage that has happened in the absence of international leadership.
Stewart's foundation is determined to see that Murad Khane does not suffer the same fate.
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Citation: Chris Sands. "Building hope: An old Etonian in Afghanistan," The Independent, 09 July 2007.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2747690.ece
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