Rory Stewart MP on Afghanistan
A NY Review of Books piece by Rory Stewart of a 2014 book on Afghanistan, which he uses to ask hard questions about other places:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...ng-indictment/
On the book:On Afghans Rory is critical of the author:But Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living shows that everything has not been said. His new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed.On state building:Gopal’s astonishing stories are not, however, a complete portrait of Afghanistan. He is so immersed in the mayhem and abuse that he seems genuinely to believe—as the title of the book suggests—that in Afghanistan there are “no good men among the living.” The more difficult truth is that it is hard to describe living among Afghans without falling back on words like dignity, honor, courage, strength, and generosity. Many of the Afghans I have worked with epitomize these virtues so clearly, and even quixotically, that they can seem almost a rebuke to our age.Link to Amazon, with eight reviews plus and 80% excellent:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080...SIN=0805091793..Gopal shows us clearly how easy all this is to say, and almost impossible to do.
Building a state or tackling an insurgency therefore requires deep knowledge of the history and character of an individual country. And such activity demands that Western governments acknowledge how little they know and can do in most of these places and cultures. But the startling differences within the countries in which we intervene are only exceeded by the startling uniformity, overconfidence, and rigidity of the Western response.
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