Jammed into The Places in Between,

[spindrifter]

Rory Stewart's book about his 2002 walk through Afghanistan, is a remarkable footnote.

"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in
fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial
administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work
seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They
recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a
single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers
the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a
local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through
institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens.
They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't
their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly,
the population would mutiny.

"Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperi-
alism. Their implicit deniial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand
of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no
credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual
officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to
be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or
revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact
their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they,
unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism,
exploitation and oppression.

"Perhaps it is because no one requres more than a charming illusion of action in
the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public
knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in
Afghanistan."

fn pp. 247-8.

*****

It seems that Mr. Stewart's analysis has lessons that can be applied in a number of other areas, nor simply foreign policy.