Rory Stewart

Caleb held a bundle of arrows in his left hand and a bow and single arrow in his right. His mother was holding her torn ears between her thumbs and forefingers. Her chin was on her bare chest. Her legs were coated with grey mud. She was shivering as she watched me and behind her the smoke, seeping out of the hut walls, mingled with the fog and cold rain. Around her was the jungle.

All afternoon I watched three shadows moving beneath us. Mine in front, Akbar’s at the rear and between us the mule’s: its shadow legs, twenty feet long, jerking like a spider’s over the glowing thorn scrub. I felt happiest in the afternoons. The flat glare of noon had gone but the day was not yet over. Staring at that shadow image of our motion and our isolation on the...

When Ali brought out his Koran I thought of Tony Blair. It was February 2002. The Taliban had retreated, having burned Ali’s village to the ground. Four feet of snow had closed the passes into Bamiyan and all the roads were laid with anti-vehicle mines. Ali opened the carved wooden box, kissed the bundle, unwrapped it carefully, said a prayer and opened the book. The fire had consumed...

“The gap between the way foreigners talk about Iraq and the reality is monstrous. Our political vocabulary – ‘rogue states’, ‘nation-building intervention’, ‘WMD’, ‘neo-imperialism’, ‘terrorism’ – is useless. Does anyone know how to govern Iraq, or what the country will look like in five years’ time, or what effect this will have on the international system? Critics are no better informed than members of the administration. Many authorities on Iraq have spent little or no time there. The most to be hoped for of a foreigner’s book published today would be the equivalent of an account of Britain written by a non-English-speaking Arab who had spent 18 months in the country, unable to travel freely. But the generals, the journalists, the academics, the politicians (Iraqi or foreign), the diplomats and the aid workers rarely admit that they have almost no idea what Iraq is like or is going to be like. Everyone is an expert.”

Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.