Hi, I’m Bob Davis, former executive director of High Plains Public Radio, for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
It takes a special kind of person who plans a walk across the entirety of Afghanistan. Rarer still is the person that will plan such a trek at the turn of the 21st century, and then forge ahead just after the 9/11 attacks when Afghanistan was an unstable hotbed. The U.S. and NATO allies were on the hunt for the members of al-Qaeda that had engineered and financed the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Rory Stewart was just that person.
In Stewart’s 2004 account of his long march - The Places In Between - the former British diplomat doesn’t flinch at the challenges he faced in covering Afghanistan by foot over four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Yet, the focus of his book is not about 9/11 or terrorists, which were just the latest hardships endured by the Afghans and their country over the centuries.
Stewart writes of early 2002, “The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam. All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world’s attention.”
The Places In Between is not an explainer of geopolitics, it’s something far richer - an unvarnished village-by-village account of a place where letters of introduction from a well-connected elder statesman and/or tribal warlord carry more weight than social media follows or passports. This is a place where time is marked by how long it takes to walk to the next village, and where, as Stewart vividly illustrates in one section of the book, a deep knowledge of Islam’s dictates for the care of a stranger, even a British one, can cause an aggressive warlord to pull his finger off the trigger and put down his arms.
As Stewart takes us from Herat near the border with Iran eastward to Kabul, he persuades his Afghani minders - a trio of hapless guards who are worthy of their own book or at least Netflix series - to let him go solo.
Eventually Stewart adopts a dog he names Babur, a tribute to the 15th century Central Asian ruler. “He was a type of mastiff, bred to fight and guard against wolves, dogs, and humans.”
Stewart faced plenty of all three during his sojourn.
Much has happened in the almost 20 years since The Places In Between was published. Stewart was elected and served as a member of the British Parliament for much of the previous decade. He led a nonprofit foundation dedicated to rebuilding Afghanistan. He published other works, including the fascinating study of the Hadrian Wall - The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland.
And what else has changed over two decades? The United States has joined that roster of mighty world powers - think the Mongols, the British, and the Soviets - in invading and subsequently failing to conquer Afghanistan. Something we could have surmised by reading The Places In Between.
I’m Bob Davis for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
Bob Davis is a former HPPR executive director who returned to his home state of Alabama where he writes, consults, works and remains an avid bike rider. He’s known for posting photographs taken each morning on his rides as well as the blogs he posts details insights into his life and world events. He once posted the following poem – with his sincere apologies to Dr. Seuss. Perhaps not the most elevated poetry but certainly a worthwhile and appreciated suggestion by this former HPPR leader.
Want can you do for High Plains Public Radio?
What can you do? Why you can renew.
But how do you do that renew?
You can renew while wearing a shoe.
You can renew while squirting some glue.
You can renew before the cows say moo.
You can renew in the wind that’s blew.
You can renew before the baby bison grew.
So, you see, it’s easy to do.
Call the old 800-678-7444 skidoo.
Or visit hppr.org to do that renew.