Jason Zengerle: The T. E. Lawrence of Afghanistan ... Rory Stewart Takes on McChrystal
[Jason Zengerle is a senior editor of The New Republic.]
It's some 400 miles from Harvard Square to Capitol Hill, but when Rory Stewart made the trip last month, he chose an unlikely mode of transport: He took a plane. Stewart is an inveterate, epic walker. He spent part of this past summer strolling the 150 miles from Crieff to Penrith in his native Scotland. More impressively, in 2002, not long after he quit his job with the British Foreign Office, he walked across Afghanistan, a 600-mile jaunt that served as the basis for his best-selling book The Places In Between. Indeed, his Afghan adventure was only one leg of a 6,000-mile journey by foot through six Asian countries that took nearly two years to complete.
But these days, Stewart, who's now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, doesn't have time for such peregrinations. He's too consumed by the debate over the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy. Stewart went to Capitol Hill in September to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was just his latest encounter with American policymakers, as he has become a leading--and unlikely--voice for the increasingly popular view that Obama himself once mocked John McCain for espousing: namely, that in Afghanistan, America should just "muddle through."
"It's an administration which has boxed itself in in a range of ways, and I think a lot of it is the president himself," Stewart told me one recent afternoon as he sat in his Harvard office, a spartan space with half-filled bookshelves and an Afghan rug on the floor. "The president has taken the position, at least in his speeches, where the very narrow objective of counterterrorism could only be achieved through an incredibly maximalist comprehensive vision which extends to defeating the Taliban, building a legitimate and effective state, stimulating development, stabilizing the region, et cetera." At 36 years old, Stewart, who has long brown hair and the whippet-thin build of a long-distance runner (or, in his case, walker), already has experienced a lifetime's worth of maximalist undertakings. After his walk across Asia, he spent a year working for the Coalition Provisional Authority as the deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces. Today, in addition to teaching Harvard students, he runs a 350-employee NGO in Kabul that's devoted to teaching Afghans traditional crafts skills. The son of a British diplomat, Stewart was raised in Malaysia, where he rafted in rain forests and was taught by his father to box and fence; later, at Eton and then Oxford's Balliol College, he received a traditional British upper-class education steeped in classics, philosophy, economics, and history. Admirers and detractors frequently compare Stewart to T.E. Lawrence (about whom he recently completed a documentary for the BBC), although Stewart himself prefers to think of the nineteenth-century explorer David Livingstone as a better historical analogue.
And yet, for all his obvious ambition, Stewart believes the key to any successful U.S. policy in Afghanistan is modesty. "What muddling through is really about is recognizing that we don't have all the answers," he says. "It's not as if we have some amazing high modernist ideology that we're kind of engineers of the human soul or central planners who are going to come out and create an ideal state. We don't have that ideological certainty, we don't know what we're trying to do, nor do we actually have the power. We don't have the kind of authoritarian weight to impose this on another country. Nor do we have the knowledge." He continues: "In that kind of situation, you're much better off making small, incremental steps which are reversible. You can try something, if that doesn't work, you can back off and try something else."
It's a view Stewart has advocated publicly in articles and interviews and privately in meetings with Hillary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, and David Petraeus (among others), all of whom have sought out his advice. But, as Stewart and his allies in the Afghanistan policy debate ruefully note, his view has so far failed to move the administration. "He gets talked to a lot," says Michael Cohen, a foreign policy analyst at the New America Foundation, "but no one seems to listen to him." Or, as Stewart put it earlier this year in an interview with the Financial Times: "It's like they're coming in and saying to you, 'I'm going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?' And you say, 'I don't think you should drive your car off the cliff.' And they say, 'No, no, that bit's already been decided--the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.' And you say, 'Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.' And then they say, 'We've consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says. ...'"
What would Stewart's version of muddling through in Afghanistan look like? While General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency plan calls for more than 100,000 American troops, and Joe Biden's bare-bones counterterrorism proposal reportedly keeps troop numbers around their current level of 68,000, Stewart believes the foreign-troop presence in Afghanistan should actually be reduced--all the way down to 20,000. Those troops would then be used exclusively to fight Al Qaeda terrorists; the Taliban would no longer be an enemy...
Read entire article at New Republic
It's some 400 miles from Harvard Square to Capitol Hill, but when Rory Stewart made the trip last month, he chose an unlikely mode of transport: He took a plane. Stewart is an inveterate, epic walker. He spent part of this past summer strolling the 150 miles from Crieff to Penrith in his native Scotland. More impressively, in 2002, not long after he quit his job with the British Foreign Office, he walked across Afghanistan, a 600-mile jaunt that served as the basis for his best-selling book The Places In Between. Indeed, his Afghan adventure was only one leg of a 6,000-mile journey by foot through six Asian countries that took nearly two years to complete.
But these days, Stewart, who's now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, doesn't have time for such peregrinations. He's too consumed by the debate over the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy. Stewart went to Capitol Hill in September to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was just his latest encounter with American policymakers, as he has become a leading--and unlikely--voice for the increasingly popular view that Obama himself once mocked John McCain for espousing: namely, that in Afghanistan, America should just "muddle through."
"It's an administration which has boxed itself in in a range of ways, and I think a lot of it is the president himself," Stewart told me one recent afternoon as he sat in his Harvard office, a spartan space with half-filled bookshelves and an Afghan rug on the floor. "The president has taken the position, at least in his speeches, where the very narrow objective of counterterrorism could only be achieved through an incredibly maximalist comprehensive vision which extends to defeating the Taliban, building a legitimate and effective state, stimulating development, stabilizing the region, et cetera." At 36 years old, Stewart, who has long brown hair and the whippet-thin build of a long-distance runner (or, in his case, walker), already has experienced a lifetime's worth of maximalist undertakings. After his walk across Asia, he spent a year working for the Coalition Provisional Authority as the deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces. Today, in addition to teaching Harvard students, he runs a 350-employee NGO in Kabul that's devoted to teaching Afghans traditional crafts skills. The son of a British diplomat, Stewart was raised in Malaysia, where he rafted in rain forests and was taught by his father to box and fence; later, at Eton and then Oxford's Balliol College, he received a traditional British upper-class education steeped in classics, philosophy, economics, and history. Admirers and detractors frequently compare Stewart to T.E. Lawrence (about whom he recently completed a documentary for the BBC), although Stewart himself prefers to think of the nineteenth-century explorer David Livingstone as a better historical analogue.
And yet, for all his obvious ambition, Stewart believes the key to any successful U.S. policy in Afghanistan is modesty. "What muddling through is really about is recognizing that we don't have all the answers," he says. "It's not as if we have some amazing high modernist ideology that we're kind of engineers of the human soul or central planners who are going to come out and create an ideal state. We don't have that ideological certainty, we don't know what we're trying to do, nor do we actually have the power. We don't have the kind of authoritarian weight to impose this on another country. Nor do we have the knowledge." He continues: "In that kind of situation, you're much better off making small, incremental steps which are reversible. You can try something, if that doesn't work, you can back off and try something else."
It's a view Stewart has advocated publicly in articles and interviews and privately in meetings with Hillary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, and David Petraeus (among others), all of whom have sought out his advice. But, as Stewart and his allies in the Afghanistan policy debate ruefully note, his view has so far failed to move the administration. "He gets talked to a lot," says Michael Cohen, a foreign policy analyst at the New America Foundation, "but no one seems to listen to him." Or, as Stewart put it earlier this year in an interview with the Financial Times: "It's like they're coming in and saying to you, 'I'm going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?' And you say, 'I don't think you should drive your car off the cliff.' And they say, 'No, no, that bit's already been decided--the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.' And you say, 'Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.' And then they say, 'We've consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says. ...'"
What would Stewart's version of muddling through in Afghanistan look like? While General Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency plan calls for more than 100,000 American troops, and Joe Biden's bare-bones counterterrorism proposal reportedly keeps troop numbers around their current level of 68,000, Stewart believes the foreign-troop presence in Afghanistan should actually be reduced--all the way down to 20,000. Those troops would then be used exclusively to fight Al Qaeda terrorists; the Taliban would no longer be an enemy...