The Revenge of History. Seumas Milne
for a latter-day revival of the imperial project. What began as an almost playful attempt at historical revisionism by right-wing pundits on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990s has, since September 11, flowered into a chorus of full-throated calls for the US and its allies to move from the informal imperial arrangements of the postwar era to the imposition of direct ‘international colonial’ rule on rogue states. The argument has been most forcefully advanced by the Oxford history professor Niall Ferguson, currently filming a television series on the history of the British empire. But his passion for a new imperium – restrained only by a fear that the Americans may not have the appetite for the task in hand – is far from unique. Among others pressing for a modern imperial renaissance are the novelist and critic Philip Hensher, who suggested a viceroy be appointed to run Afghanistan, while the polemicist Mark Steyn insisted that compared with the current system of relying on corrupt and dictatorial regimes like Saudi Arabia to protect big-power interests, ‘colonialism is progressive and enlightened’.
Such voices could be more easily dismissed as nostalgic mavericks were it not for the fact that they reflect a far broader emerging consensus in favour of intervention against recalcitrant governments, UN protectorates and the imposition of Western norms through legal and economic restraints on national sovereignty. This is the ‘doctrine of international community’, first championed by Tony Blair during the Kosovo war, with its echoes of the liberal imperialism of the 1890s, but expressed in a language of ‘partnerships’ and ‘values’ to appease the sensitivities of the age. Underpinned by that postmodern conceit of ‘humanitarian war’, it reached its emotional apogee in the vision of a reordered world he held out to Labour’s Brighton conference last month. And so long as it is dressed up in a suitably multilateral form, the new liberal imperialists are just as happy with international colonial rule as their blunter right-wing counterparts.
A UN trusteeship or other multinational occupation arrangement is of course exactly what is being prepared for the benighted people of Afghanistan, as and when US ‘daisy cutters’ and Northern Alliance warlords finally displace the Taliban from the rubble of Kabul and Kandahar. We know roughly what such a setup will be like, because UN protectorates – effectively administered by Nato and its friends – are already functioning in Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor (in Sierra Leone, Britain preferred to act unilaterally). In every case, the results have been dismal – most notably in Kosovo, where the occupation forces have failed to prevent large-scale reverse ethnic cleansing. We have in any case been here before. In the aftermath of the first world war, the League of Nations handed out mandates to Britain and France to prepare countries such as Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon for eventual self-government. On the eighty-fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – in which Britain promised to establish a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people without prejudicing the rights of the Arab inhabitants – it hardly needs spelling out that the long-term fallout was calamitous.
The roots of the global crisis which erupted on September 11 lie in precisely these colonial experiences and the informal quasi-imperial system that succeeded them. By carving up the Middle East to protect oil interests – as Britain did when it created Kuwait – and supporting a string of unrepresentative client states across the region, the Western powers fostered first the nationalist and then the Islamist backlash which now threatens them. The claim of the American political class that the US was attacked because it stands for freedom and democracy is more or less the opposite of the truth. In reality, the rage driving anti-Western terror is fuelled by the fact that the West continues to deny the peoples of the area the freedom to determine their own affairs – and has repeatedly intervened militarily across the region to enforce its interests since the end of formal colonial rule.
There is simply no reason to believe that what did not work and was rejected during the colonial era will be accepted if it is dressed up in the language of human rights, markets and the rule of law. The nineteenth-century imperialists did not, after all, sell themselves as exploiters and butchers, but as a force for progress and civilisation, bringing education, trade and religion to all – they even claimed to be defending women’s rights. The anti-colonial storm that swept away Western direct rule in the twentieth century cannot be reversed. If the US and Britain are set on a continuing course of armed intervention, punitive sanctions and multinational colonies, that is a recipe for indefinite war.
Blair has led Britain into four wars in four years – against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leonean rebels and Afghanistan. So far, British and US casualties have been negligible. But the likely costs are now rising. When British troops slaughtered the followers of the Mahdi in Sudan or the Muslims of northern Nigeria a century ago, the fighting was far from home and the colonial forces had overwhelming technological superiority. ‘Whatever happens,’ wrote Hilaire Belloc, ‘we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.’ Retaliations for colonial atrocities in the metropolitan heartland – such as the attempted assassination in London of General Dyer, the man who ordered the 1919 Amritsar massacre – were rare. Now all that has changed. Since September 11, we have discovered that the empire can strike back.3
(8/11/01)
A hollow victory and the war of the flea
Ten days after victory was declared in the Afghan war, real life continues to make a mockery of such triumphalism in the cruellest way. As American B-52 bombers pound Taliban diehards around Kandahar and Kunduz, tens of thousands of refugees are streaming towards the Pakistani border and chaotic insecurity across the country is hampering attempts to tackle a fast-deteriorating humanitarian crisis.
Aid agencies confirm that six weeks of US bombing – which even the British government concedes has killed hundreds of civilians – has sharply exacerbated what was already a dire situation. Oxfam warned yesterday they were ‘operating on a precipice’. More than 100,000 people are now living in tents in the Kandahar area alone, and the charity has been asked by Pakistan to gear up camps across the border to receive similar numbers in the next few days. After an aid convoy was hijacked by local warlords on the Kabul–Bamiyan road on Tuesday, Oxfam and and other agencies argue that only a UN protection force can now prevent starvation outside the main towns and distribution centres.
But of course the return of lawlessness and competing warlords was an inevitable and foreseen consequence of Anglo-American support for the long-discredited Northern Alliance, just as the humanitarian disaster has been the widely predicted outcome of the attack on Afghanistan. It was reportedly British advice that led to the decision to rely on the heroin-financed gangsters of the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban out of Kabul and the north. If so, it will be a struggle even for Tony Blair to chalk it up as another feather in the cap of his doctrine of international community.
The effect of US and British intervention in Afghanistan has been to breathe new life into the embers of a twenty-year-old civil war and hand the country back to the same bandits who left 50,000 dead in Kabul when they last lorded it over the capital. What has been hailed in the West as a liberation for women from the Taliban’s grotesque oppression is being treated very differently by Afghan women’s organisations. The widely praised Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, for example, described the return of the alliance as ‘dreadful and shocking’, and said many refugees leaving Afghanistan have been even more terrified of their ‘raping and looting’ than of US bombing.
British and American politicians have gone out of their way to commend the restraint of their new friends, now absurdly renamed the United Front, even when its soldiers have been filmed maiming and executing prisoners. But then by supporting the alliance so decisively, they are indirectly complicit in what are unquestionably war crimes. That complicity moved a stage further on Monday, when US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he was determined to prevent thousands of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters in Kunduz from escaping as part of any surrender agreement. He hoped, he said, they would be ‘killed or taken prisoner’, but added that US forces were ‘not in a position’ to take prisoners. Since Northern Alliance commanders have repeatedly made clear that they will not take foreign volunteers prisoner – and are reported already to have killed hundreds they have captured – the implication of Rumsfeld’s remarks was pretty unmistakable.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. The US government appears to be increasingly impatient