Down with the Iraqis

Scot adventurer and ex-Iraq governor Rory Stewart explains why civil war in Iraq is unlikely and corruption is sometimes necessary.

By Sarah Goldstein

Read more: Books, Terrorism, Afghanistan, Middle East, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews, Iraq War

Sept. 6, 2006 | Rory Stewart rejects the label "pundit," but turn on the radio and there's a good chance you'll hear him commenting on the situation in Iraq. And not without reason. In 2003, having recently retired from Britain's Foreign Service, Stewart, 33, took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad hoping to secure a job with the Coalition Provisional Authority and participate in the reconstruction of Iraq. Successful, he was assigned the governorship of Maysan Province, a remote, mostly Shia region of 850,000 people in the eastern part of the country. Yet, as the author of two highly praised books that tell the stories of two different war zones, Stewart could be mistaken for a renegade journalist who occasionally moonlights as a foreign aid worker instead of the other way around.

Just after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Stewart walked 800 kilometers (or about 500 miles) across Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. The villages between the two cities, from the rich valley of the Hari Rud (river) to the mountainous Ghor region, gave him the name for his first book, "The Places in Between." Part traveler's journal, part history, the book traces Stewart's arduous journey, introducing us to Afghanistan's major ethnic groups and the often devastating conflicts among them. This strange walking tour of Afghanistan -- in winter, in wartime -- brings us to places so remote that villagers have never traveled more than a three-hour walk from their homes.

With his fluent Farsi and decade-long experience in the Muslim world, Stewart is an able guide. Other than noting his body's aches and pains, and describing his appreciation for the land, its quiet and his ability to walk ("I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human"), he rarely writes about himself. Instead, he focuses on the Afghan people and their lives -- from meals to mosques -- as well as their history. Amazingly, you never doubt his sanity for undertaking what is, in the end, a journey far more dangerous than most of us can imagine.

Stewart's second book, "The Prince of the Marshes," is another remarkably detailed account, this time relaying his year as a governor in Iraq. Stewart writes as much about the particularities of Iraqi greetings and the color of rationed juice as he does about the grittier details of war, like a chilling attack on the governor's compound -- an assault so brutal that it's shocking Stewart even survived.

"Marshes," more than anything else, is a civil servant's notebook, a kind of Westerner-caught-in-the-headlights how-to guide to running an occupation. As he writes, Stewart is well aware of the absurd situation he is in -- in his 10-month stint as governor he is expected, among other things, to create tens of thousands of jobs, rebuild hundreds of schools, organize a functional police force and oversee democratic elections, all while gradually handing responsibility to Iraqis, whose intentions he does not know. If there is one idea that runs throughout "Marshes," it is that foreigners -- who often know so little about the countries they are traveling to -- would do best to listen to and be as humble as possible toward the local people they encounter and must work with. Indeed, as a foreigner more often than not, this is what Stewart has spent the last 10 years of his life attempting.

I spoke with Stewart by phone from his home in Scotland as he was preparing to return to Kabul. We discussed why he thinks civil war is unlikely in Iraq, why corruption is sometimes necessary in democracy building, and how Afghanistan has changed in the last five years.

You've criticized the effectiveness of policy wonks and relief workers who spend just brief stints -- a couple of months at most -- in a country or region before moving on to the next one. You've made it a point to spend as much time as possible trying to understand local customs and societal structures in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well, I think that a necessary part of any kind of approach in a post-conflict society is to put a huge amount of effort into understanding local political structures. And that involves hundreds of hours spent asking hundreds of people about tribal structures, new political parties, people's biographies and histories. And, equally, a lot of time invested in understanding the manner or the politeness of a culture -- the way in which people greet each other, the way in which people sit in a room -- in order to sense what it is that can work politically, what is likely to engender a popular response, what's likely to offend people.

My guess is that the reason why a lot of international development work fails -- particularly in post-conflict situations -- is that security regulations prevent people from spending much time in rural communities or even interfacing directly with communities. Therefore development organizations like the United Nations, the coalition [Coalition Provisional Authority] -- tend to fall back on more abstract theoretical models which fail to take into account that it's the local, it's the particular, which defines the success or failure of an intervention.

Has there been a push to better understand local and political customs in Iraq?

Well, I think there's a lot more talk about it, but I think in practice it hasn't happened and it isn't likely to happen because our societies are so complacent, so isolated from the realities of rural life in the developing world that it doesn't seem to me credible that young American or British development workers are ever going to develop that kind of sensitivity and sympathy toward traditional structures. And development workers have a strong ideological reason to not want to get too involved in cultural systems because they would perceive this as much too political, even, in their mind, colonial. They would prefer to see development work as a very impartial, neutral economic process and they are uncomfortable with the whole business of engaging with local political structures.

So there's a guilt factor.

Yes, there's a very strong guilt factor. There's a very strong guilt factor that underlies any kind of attempt by foreigners to intervene in somebody else's society.

And yet when it comes to something like drafting the constitution, arguably the fabric of a society, there are these foreign law professors and academics coming in to offer expertise. Is that not perceived as colonial?

Well, for some reason those kinds of things are framed as though they're abstract and universal. Somehow, at least in a certain academic vision, constitutions and democracy have been viewed as a technocratic exercise based on the assumption that all humans, in terms of their rights and legal structures, are the same. That there's a single thing called democracy and the rule of law. And that you can bring it to somebody else's country.

And can you? Does that ever work?

Well, it works well if you're setting up a central bank or stabilizing the currency. It does appear that foreigners can do those kinds of things relatively easily. Which implies to me that these are relatively technocratic, value-neutral interventions. But I think that drafting constitutions and human rights laws turns out to be considerably more culturally inflected and controversial than we acknowledge.

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