Rory Stewart’s prize-winning book ‘The Places In Between’ chronicled his walk through Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, just after the Taliban fell in 2001.
To make it to Boston University, where he explained his take on foreign policy to about 100 students and professors at the Castle Thursday afternoon, Stewart said a professor ‘very kindly gave me a ride.’
Though his itinerant lifestyle led Stewart on a 6,000-mile journey across Asia and the resulting travelogue became required reading for Brown University’s entering freshman class this past year, Stewart’s new post as director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has made the scholar, statesman and saunterer into an informal consultant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and an expert figure on CNN.
Foreign consultants have presented a skewed vision of what is required for an independent Afghanistan, Stewart said. Bureaucratic descriptions of nation building necessities are ‘not anything more than a basic project management tool,’ he said.
‘That consultant has not told you how to do it,’ he said of proposed plans for stabilizing Afghanistan. ‘They’ve told you what you have not got.’
A number of problems, including the dominance of Gen. David Petraeus in plotting policy during the lame duck period of George W. Bush’s presidency and possible fears in Barack Obama’s administration of appearing as a ‘weak Democrat,’ undermine efforts in Afghanistan, Stewart said. Assumptions about the broad spectrum of Afghani cultures also affect policy making.
‘People tend to stereotype the country either as a progressive, liberal country committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic centralized state that respects human rights on the one hand, or as if it were some kind of regressive, reactionary medieval tribal system,’ he said.
In Stewart’s next book, he will examine what ‘a more adult conversation might look like’ in foreign policy.
‘I would like to look at this question of how we might set up doing policy,’ he said, though he admitted his writing schedule for the next book is up in the air.
‘I am pretending to write my book, but in fact I am sitting weeping in my office because I am not making any progress on my book,’ he said, in jest.
Stewart said his day to day experiences with ordinary Afghanis gives him a valuable view on policy making.
‘Not many people have the opportunity to spend much time on the ground unless they are in the military, in which case they’re often in uniform, or in government, in which case they’re isolated by security precautions,’ he said, after his talk. ‘It gives you a very unusual legitimacy simply to have normal on-the-ground interaction with ordinary people.’
As the founder and chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit that works to build up the commercial and historic sites of Kabul, Stewart has worked to improve the long war-torn nation’s capital city.
Diana Wylie, a College of Arts and Sciences history professor who donated $1,000 to the Turquoise Mountain Foundation from her distinguished teaching award, arranged for Stewart to lecture because, ‘He’s so timely,’ she said. Obama’s approach to foreign policy made Stewart’s words especially germane now.
CAS senior Amiel Bowers, who intends to study international and comparative law after graduation, said ‘what [Stewart] did was really cool.’
Communication-focused approaches to foreign policy, like Stewart’s, have inspired Bowers to study Hebrew and Arabic, she said.
Lael Adams, an international relations student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said she will be traveling to Afghanistan with the United Nations this coming summer and enjoyed Stewart’s talk.
‘I got an invaluable perspective,’ she said.
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