Can intervention work stewart

New York : W. A member of the British Parliament and the founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative dissect the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and discuss the policies that have informed interventionism and how they can realize positive change. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video.

You can view this on the NLA website. Login Register. Current search limits: Clear format limits. Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional. The writing is wonderful. He did not know the Pashto poetry that celebrated the expulsion of foreign armies. He did not take an interest in the honour codes of gangsters of Old Kabul.

This was not his individual failing. He could have learned all these things, but he was not given the time to study them and he would not have been rewarded or listened to if he had known them. Instead he, like most international civilians was an expert in fields that hardly existed as recently as the s: governance, gender, conflict resolution, civil society, and public administration.

They were not experts on gender and governance in Afghanistan: they were experts on gender and governance in the abstract. Success also tends to come in the first few months after an intervention — for example, removing previous Taliban laws that banned all female education, or freeing up the media. He even turned it into an 18 minute TED talk. When does the Law actually rule? Conveniently, no-one can tell.

Stewart and Knaus parse carefully the philosophies that have informed interventionism—from neoconservative to liberal imperialist—and draw on their diverse experiences in the military, nongovernmental organizations, and the Iraqi provincial government to reveal what we can ultimately expect from large-scale interventions, and how they might best realize positive change in the world.

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Feb 26, Owen rated it liked it. Full disclosure: I adore Rory Stewart. I am a huge fan of clinically insane people in government. I think he is incurably, fascinatingly insane, and I always find his writing clever and insightful. Plus, he walked across Asia, taught at Harvard then got elected to Parliament.

Like I said, crazy. Though he was elected in his homeland of Scotland, which probably explains a lot. The overarching theme of the book is not terribly uplifting. The answer to the title is a qualified, "Maybe. If you're l Full disclosure: I adore Rory Stewart. If you're lucky. The man who smiled compulsively had to be a missionary. Only a missionary would bring a blond 2 year old to Afghanistan.

He was not amused. Stewart takes us on a tour de force of troop levels in Afghanistan from the invasion until the start of It's fascinating to learn that the Brits 'held' Helmand province with soldiers in the middle part of the decade. When I was there we were drawing down from 30, or so. There is no way on God's green Earth or that Hellscape He dumped in Helmand province that that place was in any way pacified by kafir soldiers.

This all leads to Knauss' later conjecture that increased troop levels cause higher casualties I'll buy correlation but not direct causation in this case. Stewart focuses largely on Afghanistan and Knauss on Bosnia, which is understandable, as that is where each of them had the bulk of their experience though Stewart's chronicle of his year as a governor in Iraq was a fascinating- and, to me, helpful- book titled Prince of the Marshes , but it really does make the book a sequence of two essays and less of a coherent narrative.

The most depressing part of the book would actually have been funny if it had not cost lives. For 10 years, all ten statements sounded exactly like this: "The last strategy didn't work, but this will be a decisive year as we have a new strategy and only need the resources to implement it.

It's awful to hear it read aloud by the narrator time after time, knowing how many lives were lost there. Stewart also talks at lenght about the old British foreign service, and how language proficiency became a nonfactor in placement and promotion in I think he said , and how they now select based on things I would specifically not hire people for my company if they had it on their resumes.

Not 'Women's and gender roles in Afghanistan,' just 'Women's and gender roles. I did, and it helped. During my time there I got more- and that helped more. This I posit was both correlation and causation. I found Stewart's tales of the old foreign service Brits in the Raj, serving 15 years in one place, then 16 in another, mind-bending. No wonder they were so good at administration- they were permanent residents!

They build lasting, decades-long personal relationships! I'm not advocating people living there. Though language skills and some time spent in cultural study would be helpful Stewart's piece is entertaining but not a positive look at nation-building, or intervention or whatever we are calling it.

Knauss talks extensively about Bosnia and the intervention there. I hadn't. It was 15 years at least. Quick show of hands, How many of you reading this knew that? Put your hand down, Mom. I found this piece muddled and somewhat meandering; Knauss may not have Stewart's gift for delivering a foreign land onto paper. I learned quite a bit that I didn't know, but the upshot is that Bosnia is largely a functioning country where people have returned from whence they were ethincally cleansed.

Which is good. I found some of the conclusions from the story at best unhelpful, though. The primary one of these was the aforemention increased force presence say, as per Rand Corp plan actually increases violence. What I can tell you is that if we didn't have troops out in Helmand, the Taliban would have gone about their daily business of extortion and occasional spasm of terror against the local populace I will not comment here on the new regime simply being a change of actors and not actions when we leave.

The most depressing conclusion was that "Nation building under fire" has never worked. So we're 0 for 3. Sample sizes are small 3 , so we have to examine the methodology, but no one is sure which method works, so that is hard if not impossible to do. The most interesting theory Knauss put out is that entry to the EU was a carrot to get leaders who hated each other and, indeed, each other's peoples demonstrably, having killed as many of them as possible to if not work together, at least negotiate on things they could find common ground on.

As opposed to say, murdering each other. Ultimately, what you get out of this book is a sense of pessimism.

I love anything by Rory Stewart, and if you are interested in foreign policy it is well worth the read. If you are not, read Prince of the Marshes for your Rory Stewart fix. A final aside. Why do the voice actors feel the need to do accents? Do they have it in their contracts? This guy had a lilting Scottish accent and did a passable Afghan accent even pronouncing "Afghan" "Illfan" the way they do , but his American accent was generally just a growl, and many of his other European ones were just comical Italian was my favorite.

I would actually get excited when I knew it was coming. Just read the book folks. It is the distinction between these cases, and between policies that make one outcome more likely than the other, that is the most important question facing policy-makers.

To this the futility school offers no answers. And that even when all the leaders have recognized that a policy is not working, how impossible it often seems for them to organize withdrawal.

The actual writing took place during my time with the Harvard Kennedy School, first as a visiting and then as an associate fellow at the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy. I am grateful to the school, the center, colleagues, other fellows and all of our impressive students. It was a privilege to work alongside all of them. Special thanks to Charlie Clements, and of course to Rory, for persuading me to come to the US, agreeing to take up the challenge of a joint book and then finding time to work long nights — in Istanbul, Scotland, Cumbria and London — despite the demands of a political career.

I am also grateful for the enormous patience and encouragement of everyone at Norton, Jake Schindel, Brendan Curry and Roby Harrington. Can intervention work?