Stewart of Afghanistan

Whe

n posted to Kabul, most people dress like they're on a mountaineering expedition. Rory Stewart, on the other hand, gets fitted out on Savile Row. Settling into a tattered armchair in the Afghan capital's Gandamak bar—named after the battlefield where British troops were defeated by the Afghans in 1842 during the first Anglo-Afghan war—the Eton and Oxford alumnus looks and sometimes sounds like an unreconstructed colonial nawab. He clasps his hands behind his head, exposing a pair of malachite cufflinks that glitter against gleaming white cuffs. "The secret to a good suit," he muses, "is using a heavy wool fabric. It keeps the shape much better."

But appearances are deceiving. This onetime deputy governor of an Iraqi province and two-time author isn't garbed as a City banker in order to project upper-class Britishness, but, he says, "to show respect" to Afghans. In Stewart's latest incarnation, as President Hamid Karzai's appointed reviver of traditional Afghan architecture and crafts, earning the respect of the locals is crucial—especially because the work must take place in a war-ravaged country with no real peace on the horizon. How can preservation be achieved amid so much destruction?

Stewart does it through winning community support. For the past year, he has labored tirelessly to transform the Murad Khane slum in Kabul's 200-year-old city center into a heritage district and tourist magnet for Afghans and foreigners alike. At first, local reaction was about the same as one would expect if some bowler-hatted Brit showed up at a Rio favela and proposed that he help residents spruce the place up. "I told him he would fail," says Palawan Aziz, the neighborhood's headman and now the project's strongest supporter. Stewart persevered, visiting residents and charming them with courtly Dari and Afghan social graces burnished by his earlier visits to the country (his 2002 trek across Afghanistan formed the basis of his best-selling travel memoir The Places In Between). His first project was to rid the area of 900 cubic meters of trash—a triumph that earned him much gratitude. "We didn't trust him at first," says Aziz. "So many foreigners come in with great promises, and nothing ever happens."

International missions have indeed promised the world to Afghanistan—from judicial reforms to paved roads. These measures, while essential for a country that has been without effective central government for nearly 30 years, take time, and Afghans first need to see tangible results—like garbage off the streets—before they can have faith in higher-minded, longer-term pledges and objectives. Stewart's cleanup of Murad Khane has thus given him the license to embark on the cultural projects that are his real passion. He is directing the area's architectural restorations, and he has set up the Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture to teach craftsmen the skills they will need to restore old buildings.

The school is based on Prince Charles' School of Traditional Arts in London, which so impressed President Karzai on a visit to the British capital that he decided to set up something similar in Kabul. Stewart—who while in Iraq had set up a carpentry school and helped refurbish an old bazaar—was asked to launch it and arrived in Kabul in 2005. Under Stewart's stewardship, the school has become a substantial development program that provides jobs and has improved the lives of the 700 residents of Murad Khane. "I wouldn't see the point of teaching this stuff unless I thought that it could be a vibrant, living, income-generating project for Afghans," he says. "Because if it was just beautiful Afghan tradition, it may as well just sit in a museum."

The son of Britain's consul general in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Stewart grew up in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Scotland before joining the Foreign Office himself and serving in Indonesia and Montenegro. In 2000, he took two years off to walk 9,600 km across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India, seeking to better understand the countries now so important to the West. Then, for 11 months he served as deputy governor of a southern Iraqi province under the Coalition Provisional Authority—a stint that yielded the searingly honest The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq.

At 33, Stewart sometimes wears his age awkwardly. He often grabs unsuspecting friends for a dramatic tango across barroom floors. And, like a boyish backpacker, he worries that a long-anticipated camel trek across Afghanistan may seem irresponsible now that he needs to knuckle down to his job (which involves, among other things, raising $45 million to endow his ngo for preserving Afghanistan's heritage, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation). But when it comes to describing the project that so impassions him, he's all statesman: "This is a development project that says 'we respect your traditional culture, and we are going to put our resources and our technology and our knowledge toward supporting it,' as opposed to a development project which says 'we don't like your traditional culture and we want to change it.' That's not the way you are going to win Afghans over." And that's hardly the voice of an old-school colonial, whatever impression those Savile Row suits may give you.