The Second Pax Britannica (17sep01)
The
New Colonialism
Even before Yugoslavia exploded, I had been
struck by the world's reversion to a colonial system without admitting it. The
Idi Amin phase in Uganda, and later the genocide in Rwanda, caused all parties
to argue that we had to intervene in the internal affairs of a country.
However, Political Correctness forced all parties to not notice that we were
retreating to colonialism. Thus, we were not in a position to discuss the
various colonial systems, and debate which pattern we should follow in future.
The eruption of Yugoslavia failed to cause a
backward look at colonialism. The colonial era had certain characteristics,
which may not be discussed in the new era. They included Mandate, Mercenary
soldiers, and the taxing of the local population. Some years ago, the report
that the U.S.A.'s sworn enemy, Iran, complained that the U.S.A. did not
intervene in Yugoslavia hit me like a bombshell, but hit nobody else. This was
an ex-colony demanding the return of the colonialists.
Wilfully lacking the concept of Mandate, each
decision in Yugoslavia had to be made by a unanimous decision of a committee
composed of 23 governments, and many lives were lost as a result.
Evasion of the concept of Mercenaries meant
that the U.S.A. in particular drew back from intervention in many cases. The
return of American soldiers in body bags was unacceptable.
The idea that if the locals want us to
intervene to stop them from killing each other, they should pay the cost, still
does not exist. (This will in due course be compared with the ruling concept,
that the colonial powers stripped subject nations of their assets.) Thus,
consideration of cost will deter us from keeping the peace.
While the concept of Mandate continues to not
exist, exigencies of time caused Australia, in spite of its allegedly poor
record in East Timor, to be given a de facto Mandate in East Timor by the
United Nations. Thus, merely because it was so far away, each decision involved
in the intervention of the incipient world government had only to be made by
one country, Australia, as opposed to a committee of 23.
Thus, Political Correctness forces us to
drift imperceptibly into a new colonial era, rather than move rationally.
After the United Nations botched their own
entry, the democratically elected leader of Sierra Leone recently welcomed the
intrusion of British troops to help against the anti-democratic indigenous
forces.
I am prompted to write this by an article in
The Guardian, 7th July 2000, page 20, by Victoria Brittain;
Africans
say UN must pay for genocide.
The Organisation of African Unity is
demanding payment of "significant reparations" to Rwanda by the
countries that failed to prevent the genocide of 1994, when 800,000 people are
believed to have died.
….
The uncompromising report names the United
States and France in particular, along with the UN security council as a whole,
as guilty parties who allowed "this terrible conspiracy to go ahead".
It is written by a team headed by two
former African heads of state, ….
We have reached the stage, first in Yugoslavia
and then in Rwanda, where other ex colonies demand that the new colonial powers
intervene. However, we insist on not learning anything from the ample
historical precedent.
The new colonial power - a mixture of UNO,
NATO and Britain, impose their own criteria in the face of local democracy and
self-determination. Through fiscal pressure, the new colonial power obstructs
corruption even when indulged in by the democratically elected local
government. The new colonial power also imposes its own view of proper
government by the threatening to withhold financial aid and other financial
constructs which are necessary if the local elected government is to survive. A
local democratic government knows it will not survive financial collapse.
The tragedy is that Political Correctness
(which includes the dogma that colonialism was totally bad) prevents rational
discussion of these issues. The truth is, that in the face of local opposition,
we now support the local forces which want to impose our version of democracy and
fiscal probity. These local forces believe they see that the alternative is
financial collapse, starvation, and civil war. The parallel with the way
Britain was drawn to intervene in the internal affairs of numerous countries,
leading to the growth of the British Empire, is more or less exact. The British
Empire was probably the largest because it was the most humane. Each subject
country then sent an elite to
Britain to study law, which enabled that elite, in the name of independence
and democracy, to oust the British and impose their own form of exploitation on
the rest of their (often illiterate) population. We need to learn from history.
Ivor Catt 12july00
********************
24oct01. The book which I have read seems to
support my view. Lacking proper mandate, lacking proper definition of spheres
of influence by the new colonial powers - USA, UNO, UK, Europe, Nato, the
result is distrust and their jockeying for position and influence in the new
colonies. Thus, the pretence that we continue to live in a world of independent
states, rather than a world of client states whose excesses are limited by the
new colonialists, causes, and will continue to cause, misery and death on a
large scale. The solution is to study the British colonial system, and compare
and contrast it with other less successful systems. Ivor Catt
28oct01. Jockeying for position and influence
caused such damage in Afghanistan. Perhaps "Mandate" should be tried.
That is the unstated lesson I learn from the Cordovez book (below).
Out
of Afghanistan
By Diego
Cordovez and Selig S, Harrison, pub. OUP 1995
P4
Just as Brezhnev's decision to invade
Afghanistan was one of the last spasms of a dying Stalinist old guard, so the
withdrawal marked the triumphant emergence of a new generation of leadership.
The account that follows puts the last decade of the Cold War in a new light by
showing the importance of perestroica - and diplomacy - in bringing
about a withdrawal often explained almost entirely in terms of military
pressure.
At the same time, this account makes clear
that Soviet objectives in Afghanistan were limited from the start. Moscow did
not launch its invasion as the first step in a master plan to dominate the
Persian Gulf, as most observers believed at the time. Rather, after stumbling into
a morass of Afghan political factionalism, the Soviet Union resorted to
military force in a last desperate effort to forestall what it perceived as the
threat of an American-supported Afghan Tito on its borders. Difference surfaced
soon thereafter within the Soviet leadership over the wisdom of this decision,
leading as early as 1983 to serious probes for a way out that were rejected by
an American leadership bent on exploiting Soviet discomfiture. The advent of
Gorbachev in 1983 immediately resulted in the intensified pursuit of a
settlement more than eighteen months before the introduction of the Stinger
missile often credited with bringing him to the bargaining table.
Despite the widespread stereotype of a Soviet
military defeat, Soviet forces were securely entrenched in Afghanistan when the
Geneva Accords were finally signed on April 14, 1988 …. Perestroica was the
indispensable prerequisite for the withdrawal, and diplomacy, reinforced by
military pressure, made it happen.
To say that the Afghan war brought the Soviet
Union to its knees and led to the unraveling of the Soviet system, as some
observers do, is to turn history on its head. It was precisely because Andropov
and Gorbachev recognised the shortcomings of the Soviet system that they began
to question the relevance of the Soviet model for other countries, notably
Afghanistan, and to search for a way to disengage. [Note 1] …. Disengagement from Afghanistan was the logical
first step. … To be sure, the Afghan debacle contributed to the psychological
malaise that made the unraveling of 1991 possible.
…. The internecine conflict enabled Afghan
Communist leader Babrak Karmal to feed Soviet fears of American links with his
rival, Hafizullah Amin, thus tipping the scales in the Soviet debate in favor
of intervention. ….
…. Neither the Afghan Communist Party nor
Pakistan-sponsored Islamic fundamentalist elements of the resistance
represented the unorganised majority of Afghans. Afghan leaders did create a
representative resistance coalition - the Loi Jirga movement of 1980 - but
Pakistani intelligence agencies killed this promising indigenous initiative.
Pu9rsuing its hiustorically rooted objectives, Islamabad insisted on channmeling
the lion's share of U.S. aid to fundamentalist-dominated resistance groups as
the price for its role as a conduit. The United States paid the piper but did
not call the tune. American acquiescence in the Pakistani demand for a
fundamentalist-dominated government in Kabul with no Communist representation
strengthened those in Moscow who believed that only a Communist-led regime
could survive for the "decent interval" desired after Soviet forces
left. ….
Although the regime of Najibullah did in fact
survive for four years, the end result of the Soviet-American failure to
cooperate with the U.N. in establishing a coalition regime has been continual
bloodshed in Kabul and the emergence of well-armed fundamentalist forces in a
society traditionally hostile to fundamentalist dogma. Moreover, the fact that
the United States tolerated or was unable to stop Islamabad's support of
fundamentalist factions has had ugly consequences. The CIA inadvertently
colluded in the training of fundamentalist zealots from a variety of Islamic
countries who have been implicated in terrorism against the World Trade Centre
and even Islamic targets. ….
Note 1. The philosophy of the British
colonial system, and probably of the Roman, was to support local satraps, who
would ideally rule using the local version of what benign rule (possibly
democracy) should be. The British would intervene in extremis, for instance to
stop suttee. Whether British colonialists actually acted in this way, or used
it as a cover for brutal exploitation, does not undermine my contention, which
is that such a philosophy is the basis for the New Colonialism which events are
forcing on us. The destruction of Afghanistan's boundaries by Bin Laden is only
the latest in a series of events, which force us to intervene throughout the
world. We must urgently get over our negative knee-jerk reaction, which
prevents us from studying colonialism, good as well as bad, with a view to
learning about our future
- Ivor
Catt, 24oct01
26oct01; I would quote the following further
items;
p148; [About resistance fighters against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan;] The most flamboyant local warlord with the
most unabashed indifference to which side he served was Esmatullah Moslem, who
started out with a resistance faction and then shifted back and forth several
times until he ended up in command of the [Russian backed] government's
Kandahar militia. Whether or not it is true that "thousands, perhaps tens
of thousands, or mujahideen fighters lost their lives in intergroup combat,
it is clear that continual internecine skirmishes greatly vitiated the
effectiveness of the resistance. Most of the armed clashes between resistance
groups were over control of the saleable booty acquired either in battle or
through the [US, channelled through Pakistan] foreign aid cornucopia.
p151; But Moscow had its own growing worries
about Afghanistan as illness and drug abuse spread in the ranks of the Soviet
forces. With dysentry, typhoid, hepatitis, and pneumonia rampant, some reports
indicated that half pf the men in certain combat units were ill at any given
time. [This stage of our current incursion into Afghanistan is still in the
future. IC, 26oct01]
p152; My visit to Kabul sentisized me to the
tensions between Moscow and Karmal [head of Afghan state] that were to lead to
Karmal's replacement by Najibullah two years later, especially their
differences over the nature of the proposed U.N. settlement and the need for
power-sharing by the Communist regime with non-Communist elements. Above all, I
became convinced that the Communist city-state in Kabul would prove to have
much more staying power than generally expected despite its inability to
establish control over much of the countryside.
P160; In this new strategy, Yousaf [Director
of Pakistan's ISI] recalled, "I was now cast in the role of overall
guerilla leader, presiding directly over the strategy sessions of the Afghan
resistance groups. It was supposed to be a secret that Pakistan was funnelling
weapons to the resistance, but "even more taboo was the fact that ISI was
training the mujahideen, planning their combat operations, and often
accompanying them inside Afghanistan as advisers. Although the involvement of
Pakistan in the field was guessed at, it was never , ever publicly admitted.
The ISI operated seven training camps where a
grand total of eighty thousand resistance fighters were trained during the
course of the war [against the occupyung Russians], Yousaf said; the flow of
one thousand a month in 1984 increased steadily in number. In addition, there
were eleven Pakistani teams of three men each operating inside Pakistan,
generally consisting of a major and two junior officers dressed like Afghans.
Playing a role similar to that of special forces advisers in the U.S. Army,
they guided local commanders "on all aspects of military operations,"
conducted training activities, and prepared intelligence reports.
The ISI devised a system for the distribution
of U.S. weaponry calculated to strengthen the power of its fundamentalist
allies. Instead of dealing directly with the local commanders, as the CIA
urged, Yousaf turned over the arms to the seven resistance leaders, who then
allocated the aid to the commanders of their choice. Local commanders had to
join one of the parties in order to get weapons. Thus, since "67 to 73
percent" of the weapons went to the four fundamentalist parties, the ISI
distribution system gave the fundamentalist leaders powerful leverage.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezbe Islami and Burhanuddin Rabbani's Jamaat Islami got
the lion's share both of the weapons and of the cash support that was also
doled out by the ISI for salaries of the party faithful and for transport
costs. The ISI distribution system contributed to the pervasive corruption and
smuggling in the aid pipeline, including narcotics trafficking on a colossal
scale. A U.S. government estimate stated that heroin from the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region accounted for 51 percent of the U.S. supply
in 1984.
P163; The United States did not make a
serious effort to prevent the consolidation of fundamentalist control ovee the
resistance or to encourage support for Zahir Shah and the moderate elements.
One of the few officials who raised the issue in interagency meetings was Elie
Krakowski, an adviser to Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.
Krakowski was an active proponent of an upgraded Afghan aid program but
objected to giving the ISI a free hand in allocating aid. Like Perle, he
emphasised the importance of Israel in U.S. policy. While he did not foresee that
Pakistani-trained fundamentalists would one day be implicated in attacks on
targets in the United States itself, such as the 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center in New York, he argued that building up the Afghan fundamentalists
would damage the long-term U.S. regional interests in the Persian Gulf and in
the Middle East. But "no one at State was interested," he said,
"and the agency was definitely against putting pressure on the
Pakistanis." Part of the reason the the CIA's "pandering" to the
ISI, he said, was its desire not to disturb valuable ties that went beyond the
Afghan war. "The agency was interested in a variety of things there,"
he explained, "They were collecting lots of interesting stuff on the
Soviet Union and other things."
"We knew we were involved with Islamic
fundamentalists," Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger recalled in an
interview. "We knew they were not very nice people, that they were not all
people attached to democracy. But we had this terrible problem of making choices."
Asked whether the Unites States had ever tried to promote nonfundamentalist
moderate elements, he replied that "there was some attempt to do that, but
the real point is we had to make choices. Remember what Churchill said, 'If
Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in
the House of Commons.'"
Dawn
chorus for the new age of empire
Nation states are failing to settle the
world's differences, but a new kind of imperialism can do it, says Robert
Cooper, Sunday Times, News Review, 28oct01, sect. 5, p6.
The complete article can be found at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk [but not by me. I Catt. 28oct01]
All the conditions seem to be there for a new
imperialism. There are countries that need an outside force to create stability
(recently in Sierra Leone a rally called for the return of British rule). And
though there are few missionaries today there is a new class of imperial
auxiliaries in the form of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) preaching
human rights - the secular religion of today's world. ….
Nevertheless, empire is sill about control.
It involves control, above all, over domestic affairs. The conditions that the
International Monetary Fund sets for its loans are almost all about domestic
economic and political management. In return for accepting these conditions,
states in danger of dropping out of the global economy receive help, not just
from the IMF but also from rich governments and Wall Street. These days, aid
programmes are less often about dams and roads, instead it is recognised that
having a good government is essential to progress. ….
…. The relationships are similar to those of
empire: it is a relationship between strong and weak and it is about the
organisation of domestic affairs. ….
It is not just soldiers that come from the
international community, it is also policemen, judges, prison officers, central
bankers and others. Local police are financed by the UN. As auxiliaries to this
effort are more than 100 NGOs. ….
Many parts of Europe have lived longer and
more happily in an imperial framework than as nation states. The Balkans with
its patchwork of ethnicities has known little else. …. …. Dynamism and
democracy. But the clarity and vigour of the nation state also brought
bloodshed - both in wars among themselves and in the way they handled their
minorities. Armenians, Albanians and Kurds lived more safely in the Ottoman
empire than in its more modern successors.
In those times, the empire could sometimes
function as a third party, above the ethnic groups and keeping the peace
between them. Today that role belongs to the international community. [via Mandate? IC]
[Rather a scrappy article which echoes my earlier ideas. Ivor Catt. 28oct01.]
7jan02
Alan Judd, "Brute force and national interests worked in Barbary", Telegraph, 7jan02, p22.
This article continues the gradual, tentative drift towards a reappraisal of the colonial era. I find it exraordinary that all parties prefer to have many millions die rather than face up to the key issue; whether Blair's and President Brown's present behaviour is in any way different from the colonial policies that Blair and possibly the Queen were so very recently apologising for, in India of all places as I remember. As the son of someone who served in colonial India, I was greatly offended by his behaviour.
Alan Judd risks discussing activity by colonial powers in around 1800, and fails to admit that when the Americans finally put an end to piracy on the coast of Barbary (North Africa) in 1815 by using the big stick (as now in Afghanistan) they benefited everyone, not just themselves.
The ordinary UK and US voter, confronted on his television by genocide and the like in distant lands, will not allow his government to stand idly by. Thus, whether intervention is morally justified or not, it is going to happen. What is immoral is to conduct it incompetently, which is what we are apparently prepared to do rather than face the awful truth, that the colonial era was not altogether bad. Once the bullet is bitten, we can start to study the tactics of the various colonial powers with a view to adopting what was best and avoiding their errors. However, that cannot begin so long as the 60s generation clings to the myth that colonialism was altogether bad, which it was not. I myself find it difficult to distinguish between Britain's colonial policies and the politics that Blair and Bush are presently stumbling towards. The four key factors that I identified two years ago as needed were; Mandate, Mercenaries, Local taxation, and one other. We have at last stumbled into using mercenaries, but using some dreadful ones because of wilful lack of thought - the Northern Alliance. We still avoid thinking of local taxation ( called Colonial Exploitation). However, we are even deciding who should take part in the Afghan government - Satrapy or Quislings are the proper terms. That is the same as our past support for the local Maharajah in India, so much criticised in the 20th century, and even apologised for.
What is new in the present situation is that we do not have competing colonial powers, so our colonial rule can be much more effective, but only is we face up to it honestly. (Judd talks of this in the past, as what resolved the piracy problem, but avoids pointing out that that is the current situation. Moving too far from PC will end his journalistic career.) This honesty must include the acceptance that, since we are now copying them, the colonial era, and the colonial powers, were not evil and destructive. They were similar to us, with similar motivation. However, they were more honest. They had the honesty to recognise that some cultures were worse than others. They also recognised that, in extremis, they would not allow the native to go beyond certain limits in his behaviour to his neighbour. Are we able to have the honesty to recognise that using the ballot box, the voter will not allow our politicians to stand idly by while genocide occurs in (say) Rwanda? Will the chattering, guilt-ridden classes at least admit that democracy entails limits to what they can do against the wishes of the electorate? If so, they need to study history soon and thoroughly. Not, of course, the re-written history of the 1960s. We will have to go back to texts written in 1850 at the height of empire. There we will find honest discussion on how to control an unruly colony at minimum cost of life and economic cost. This may entail ruling through a client elite (e.g. the Catholics in Indochina) or other strategy - perhaps the vilified Divide and Rule (Note 1). These matters need to be urgently discussed. They bear immediately on how we should handle the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. We need to use a strategy which has been tried and tested, not invent one unless we really have to.
Ivor Catt 7jan02
Note 1.
Vilified "Divide and Rule" needs to be compared and contrasted with "Separation of Powers". African leaders often argued that the proper system in Africa was a one-party state.