Aggression of Empires
As, with the rest of the world, I follow developments in Afghanistan aghast, I re-watch, with undiminished interest, Rory Stewart’s documentary made for the BBC in 2012, Afghanistan: The Great Game — a Personal View. Stewart is that rare animal: a politician who is also a scholar and an explorer. He walked across Afghanistan on his own, accompanied only by a dog named Babur, in 2002.
Cataclysmic events easily call forth facile responses. Stewart helps us avoid these. He asks: ‘What is it about this place and the paranoia and aggression of empires that has created repeated tragedy?’ One of his interlocutors in the film, Akbar Ahmed, answers, ‘When you combine arrogance with a lack of knowledge of that part of the world, you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble.’
Stewart’s The Places In Between is worth reading, as is Akbar Ahmed’s Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization.
