Rory Stewart & Mr Micawber in Afghanistan

From an interesting Jason Zengerle piece in the New Republic:

And yet, for all his obvious ambition, Stewart believes the key to any successful U.S. policy in Afghanistan is modesty. “What muddling through is really about is recognizing that we don’t have all the answers,” he says. “It’s not as if we have some amazing high modernist ideology that we’re kind of engineers of the human soul or central planners who are going to come out and create an ideal state. We don’t have that ideological certainty, we don’t know what we’re trying to do, nor do we actually have the power. We don’t have the kind of authoritarian weight to impose this on another country. Nor do we have the knowledge.” He continues: “In that kind of situation, you’re much better off making small, incremental steps which are reversible. You can try something, if that doesn’t work, you can back off and try something else.