I’ve just finished The Places In Between, Rory Stewart’s astonishing account of his walk across the remotest part of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. For much of the time, I found myself marvelling that someone should put himself through so much pain — and into so much danger — to achieve an idealistic goal. It’s both entirely admirable and completely nuts.

But the strongest impression left by Mr Stewart’s tale is of the utter fatuity of the US/UK/Nato project in Afghanistan. His account of what life is actually like in the remote fastnesses of that wretched country is truly startling, at least to this uninformed Westerner. As another reader said to me, much of Afghanistan isn’t even a medieval society: it’s pre-medieval.

Stewart walked from village to village, on one of the most treacherous paths in the world. In some villages he was treated generously; in others the famed Muslim hospitality was, to say the least, grudging. Some people clearly contemplated killing him, for for various inscrutable reasons, didn’t. Most of the people he met were poor and illiterate, and obsessed with religion. But even in some of the poorest areas, there were serious discrepancies in wealth and status between villagers, most of whose lives were truly nasty, brutish and short. Women were effectively invisible (Stewart saw only a handful of them during the entire duration of his trip), marriage between first or second cousins seemed to be the norm, and some villagers had never even set foot in the next village along the path. Just about the only piece of modern technology that anyone had experienced was a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Despite the remoteness of their locations, many of the people Stewart encountered had also been involved in a bewildering range of armed conflicts over the last few decades. In Dahan-e-Rezak, for example, he stayed in the house of the headman, one Seyyad Agha, who had been a military commander for twenty-four years:

“First, he had fought the Russians, with a group funded by Pakistani Intelligence, then, “because they weren’t killing enough people”, he had fought for a group partially funded by the British. Then the Russians withdrew and he fought the pro-Russian Najib government and the rival Northern Alliance groups. When the Taliban took over the province, five years ago, he decided, he said, to ‘retire from fighting’. This probably meant that he had been the Taliban commander in the area, but he would have denied it if I had asked.”

But Seyyad had a radio and as Stewart settled for sleep in the crowded guest house,

“someone put the BBC Dari service on the radio. Bill Gates was making a speech on American policy towards technology monopolies, which was being translated into Dari. The men listened intently. I wondered what these illiterate men without electricity thought of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows”.

Towards the end of the book, Stewart quotes a passage from the UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan, the goal of which is “the creation of a centralized, broad-based, multi-ethnic government committed to democracy, human rights and the rule of law”.

The UN folks are — like the Development personnel from the various Western governments involved in Afghanistan — talented, hard-working, well-meaning people with university degrees in subjects like international law, economics and development. They come from middle-class backgrounds, work on high-minded policy proposals on ‘democratization’, ‘capacity building, ‘gender’, ‘skills training’ and ‘sustainable development’. The trouble is, says Stewart, that they know

“next to nothing about the villages where 90 per cent of the population of Afghanistan lived. They come from post-modern, secularised, globalized states with liberal traditions of law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights and fibre-optic cable networks, to talk about transparent, clean and accountable processes, tolerance and civil society and to speak of a people ‘who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government’.”

Oh yeah? Ponder this:

“There were five if us in the guest room and for two hours we sat in silence. It was an overcast afternoon. Seyyed Umar sat by the large window, clicking his rosary. He shifted his head to look down at the black ridge, the mud below the river and the tracks in the snow. Occasionally he sighed or cleared his throat. Outside, a door creaked, a horse whinnied. Half an hour later, two ragged men came up the hill with donkeys and the children of the village threw snowballs at them. The men who were exhausted and at the end of their day’s journey smiled.

Seyyed Umar and the others could not work in the fields because of the snow; they had lived here together since they were children; nothing had happened recently that was worth talking about and they were illiterate so that they could not read. They waited in silence throughout the long afternoon for the call to prayer, dinner, and bed.”

Given the reality — the utter hopelessness of any attempt to turn this vast, pre-medieval country into even the crudest approximation of a coherent state by throwing money and armed force at it — the windy cant our politicians spout whenever they visit British troops in Afghanistan is truly nauseating. They are even preparing to do a deal with the Taliban, the elimination of whom was the ostensible justification for the US/UK intervention in the country. To date, 422 young British men and women have paid with their lives for the hypocrisy of our political elite. And many more will die before this farce is finally brought to an end.

Postscript: Rory Stewart is now a member of that aforementioned political elite — as MP for Penrith and the Border. Despite this, he’s still talking sense about Afghanistan. Trouble is: nobody in government is listening.

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s masterful campaigning guru, once said this:

“I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

He said that in 1993 and, to be honest, I didn’t really know what he meant at the time. Now we all understand it, as we watch our (European) governments cringe in terror as they endlessly speculate how to tailor economic policy to appease the bond market. The fact that this is daft should have been well known ever since Keynes’s General Theory, which appeared in 1936, but it seems to have escaped our leaders.

Discussing the behaviour of rational agents in a market, Keynes used the analogy of a newspaper beauty contest in which readers are shown photographs of women and asked to choose a set of the six “most beautiful”. Readers who pick the most popular face are eligible for a prize.

The naive strategy is simply to choose the pictures one finds most beautiful. A more sophisticated strategy is to increase one’s chances by picking the women whose images conform to conventional or popular theories of attractiveness. An even more sophisticated strategy is to choose the women that one thinks the other competitors will regard as the most attractive. And so on, in every-ascending levels of abstraction.

So, Keynes writes,

“It is not a case of choosing those that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.”

Our governments appear to view the bond market as if it were a Golem — “an animated anthropomorphic being, created entirely from inanimate matter” (Wikipedia) — whereas in fact it’s much closer to Keynes’s beauty contest. Which means that trying to placate the Golem is a fatuous, nay witless, enterprise, for the simple reason that the bond market isn’t a Golem. It’s something quite, quite different — and much more complex.

Interestingly, journalism has been remarkably uncritical of governments’ hallucinations about the Golem. It’s not clear why this has been so. Maybe it’s perhaps most hacks have no idea of how the bond market works. (Our media showed the same fatal lack of curiosity about the ratings agencies in the run-up to the banking crash, btw.) Or perhaps it’s because editors think that readers and audiences aren’t interested in such arcane stuff.

Whatever the explanation, the New York Times broke some welcome new ground today with a fine piece by Katrin Bennhold in which she tried to explain what actually goes on in the bond market and how its traders view the world.

The bond market has emerged as a mighty protagonist in Europe’s economic crisis, representing a seminal shift in power from politicians to investors and a relatively obscure cohort of bankers. Their collective day-to-day judgment can now topple governments and hold the key to the survival of the euro.

If that market seems an unfathomable Goliath to outsiders, in interviews bond traders themselves confessed to being fearful and confused.

Some of the traders to whom Ms Benhold spoke said that they worry that too many of their colleagues lack the skills to decipher conflicting signals from Europe’s leaders in an industry ever more dependent on perception and political guesswork. The short-term fluctuations of bond rates, they concede, are not always an accurate reflection of value and risk. Yet traders are being taken as the last word by politicians on any range of government policies — and are often misinterpreted, they said.

“We used to be able to measure everything to the nth degree,” said Tim Skeet, managing director of fixed income at the Royal Bank of Scotland. “These days, nothing is measurable. This has become less about number-crunching and more about the oracle of Delphi.”

Economists tend to treat the bond market as a rational player imposing budget discipline on politicians. Politicians portray it as having the conscience of a mob, accusing “bond vigilantes” of undermining Europe’s recovery and its cherished welfare state. The reality is more nuanced.

That sounds right to me.

And then there’s the pernicious positive feedback loops built into the situation.

With so much leverage at its disposal, the bond market’s judgments can have the power of prophecy — that is, they can be self-fulfilling, influencing events even as traders assess them from the trading floor.

If investors and traders judge Spanish bonds to be risky because Spain’s government may default, they help make it more likely that Spain will indeed default, by raising its borrowing costs.

“Whatever the Spanish government does — and it has done a lot — it doesn’t actually help much, because the market is pretty much convinced a full-fledged bailout is required,” said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy, a consulting firm in London that specializes in sovereign credit risk.

Great piece, worth reading in full.

Footnote: Carville is a great source of pithy quotes. For example:

“Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops: it’s easier to get away with murder.”

Gore Vidal is dead at 86. Lots of obituaries online (see Arts & Letters Daily for a characteristically thorough round-up). I particularly liked Andrew Sullivan’s reflections. Sullivan disliked many aspects of Gore, especially his contempt for the gay movement. But…

I must say that his extreme hostility to the American Empire – sustained relentlessly through the decades – looks much less repellent to me than it did before Bush-Cheney. He ruined his case by exaggeration, and absurd moral equivalence. But he was surely onto something from the perspective of the 21st Century. And his willingness to court public outrage and disdain in defense of his ideas is a model for a public intellectual, it seems to me. As a historical novelist of the Roman past, he was superb – even peerless. No one can or would dispute his profound erudition. And his astonishing memoir, Palimpsest, is better than any writer has any business aiming for.

But he also, it seems to me, let his passions outweigh his reason more than a thinker as gifted as he was should. This emotionally turbulent quality seemed to me to be related to his woundedness as a brilliant scion forced by his homosexuality into a marginalization he learned to adorn with enormous style. He never, perhaps understandably, learned to let go of resentment. But this very rebelliousness was, in some ways, the flipside of a deep and romantic patriotism. You can never be that angry if you have never been that naive.

I agree about Palimpsest, which is a truly astonishing memoir.

One thing that the NYT Obit got right about Vidal is that success never mellowed him. He was a cantankerous old bugger right to the end.

Wonderful interview with David Remnick. Every writer should see this.

It appears in a lovely piece by Chris Mohney on the Storyboard site.

I’ve always loved aphorisms, and some of my favourite books are collections of them — like the volume edited by WH Auden and Louis Kronenberger many years ago. But I see from the Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks that she took a more sardonic view of them. “Aphorisms”, she writes, “are rogue ideas”.

Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that.

To write aphorisms is to assume a mask – a mask of scorn, of superiority. Which, in one great tradition, conceals (shapes) the aphorist’s secret pursuit of spiritual salvation. The paradoxes of salvation. We know at the end, when the aphorist’s amoral, light point-of-view self-destructs.

Sigh. Maybe she’s right.

From Jack Shafer.

The human reflex to find cause, meaning and lessons in the detritus of a massacre – and to impose a solution on the chaos based on those findings – should be trusted only to the extent that it allows us to muddle through the confusion churned up by such a crazed act. As we recover from the initial shock, we revert to our fundamental and irresolvable arguments about freedom and individuality, which aren’t very good at explaining why people shoot or dynamite innocents – or at stopping them from doing so.

Pollsters tell us that killings like the Colorado massacre don’t seem to move the public opinion needle very much. The 1999 Columbine shootings turned support for stronger gun-control laws upward, as this Huffington Post analysis of poll data from ABC/Washington Post, Gallup, and Pew shows, but the public’s attitude soon reverted to the previous baseline and actually continued to fall for the next 11 years.

Sadly, he’s right.

Any criminal justice system worthy of the name will throw up lots of anomalies, but in the case of the death of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller who died during the G20 protests in London in 2009 shortly after being struck and knocked to the ground by a police officer, Simon Harwood, the British system has apparently excelled itself.

First of all, there’s the fact that the assault on him would never have come to light if things had been left to the Metropolitan Police, which in recent years has sometimes functioned as a part-time subsidiary of News International. It was only reporting by the Guardian‘s Paul Lewis, and an American businessman’s cameraphone video of the assault, that launched the independent inquiry which eventually led to the trial of Harwood for manslaughter.

The Met’s performance in the case was truly lamentable. Tomlinson’s family were discouraged from speaking to journalists and initially prevented from seeing his body. They were not told of the three police officers who, 48 hours after Tomlinson’s death, said they had seen a colleague strike him with a baton and push him to the ground. And for five days the family were denied details of the bruises and dog bites on the dead man’s legs, not to mention the three litres of bloody fluid found in his stomach.

Then there was the conflict in pathologists’ opinions on the probable cause of Tomlinson’s death. The first pathologist opined that he had died from a heart attack. QED. But after the Guardian published the camera phone video, the Independent [sic] Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched a criminal inquiry and further post-mortems concluded that Tomlinson had died from internal bleeding caused by blunt force trauma to the abdomen, in association with cirrhosis of the liver. In May 2011, a inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing, which then led to the prosecution of PC Harwood for manslaughter. Yesterday, he was found not guilty on a majority verdict of the jury.

So now we have two contradictory verdicts: unlawful killing; and acquittal of the only person who might have been implicated in the death.

Fair enough, you may say — though obviously very hard on the Tomlinson family. Our justice system stipulates that juries have to be convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” and members of this panel clearly were unable to convince themselves that there was an unambiguous causal connection between Harwood’s assault and Tomlinson’s death.

But then came the revelations of the information about Harwood that had been withheld from the jury. It turns out that he has had a chequered history as a police officer, including disciplinary hearings over allegations of having punched, throttled, kneed or threatened suspects while in uniform (although it should be said that only one of these complaints was upheld).

Question: would the criminal trial jury’s verdict have been different if they had known about Harwood’s background?

Answer: possibly yes, which is why so many lay people today are outraged by the acquittal. But keeping the jury in the dark was the right thing to do, given the values embodied by our justice system. Harwood was not being tried for his past, but for this particular offence. People are innocent until proven guilty, and even bad eggs can be innocent of a particular crime, no matter how heinous their backgrounds might be.

It’s an interesting case of the importance of intangible values. A justice system which convicted people on the sworn testimony of a police or Intelligence officer would doubtless be a highly efficient one. But we — rightly — value justice more highly than efficiency. And, as m’learned friends sometimes say, hard cases make bad law.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

A pair of surveys released today detail the latest trends in what people are doing with their iPads. The interesting bits in a nutshell: The wildly popular Apple tablets are being used more, and more often for business purposes.

The third annual iPad usage survey from Business Insider found that people are spending significantly more time on their tablets. 47 percent of those polled use their iPad between two and five hours a day, up from 41 percent last year and 38 percent in 2010, and 10 percent use it five to eight hours a day (up from 8 percent last year). Overall, 64 percent reported increasing their time on the iPad once they got past the giddy initial exploratory phase. That increased usage is coming at the expense of desktops and laptops — 47 percent now consider their iPad their primary computer, up from 29 percent in 2010. Web surfing is the most popular iPad activity (taking up 37 percent of users’ time), followed by email and social networking (21 percent). The survey found almost 60 percent of web browsing by those polled is now done away from a traditional computer, with 45 percent using their iPads the most and 14 percent using smartphones the most. People also seem to be happy with their iPads — 84 percent have no interest in a Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 tablet, and 70 percent say they wouldn’t be interested in a smaller iPad.