Churchill on Empire

Your Minor Heretic enjoys reading historical first person narratives. Not necessarily full autobiographies, but travelogues and accounts of singular events and places, limited in scope. The journals of travelers bring a fresh eye to scenery and people. The lens of a century’s distance adds perspective.

I recently read Winston Churchill’s account of his early years, including his successful pursuit of danger in Cuba, northeast India, Egypt, and South Africa. My Early Life, subtitled “A Roving Commission,” covers his childhood and education, but hits its stride as he strives to go where the bullets fly. He has some instructive experiences fighting the Pathans (Pashtuns) of what was the northeastern corner of India and what are now the tribal areas of Pakistan. He describes a warlike people, happy to absorb the advanced killing technologies of the Europeans but annoyed by road building, central government, and the restraint of laws other than their own tribal codes. This sounds familiar, but I was struck by a passage from his Cuban adventure.

Churchill was just commissioned as an officer in the 4^th Hussars in 1895 when the fighting between the Spanish army and Cuban rebels heated up. He and another young officer resolved to go see some fighting, just for the experience. Strings were pulled and they joined the Spanish general staff in Cuba as observers. After giving an account of much confused and pointless marching about in the jungle, Churchill writes the following about the Spanish:

“We did not see how they could win. Imagine the cost per hour of a column of nearly 4,000 men wandering round and round this endless humid jungle; and there were perhaps a dozen such columns, and many smaller, continuously on the move. Then there were 200,000 men in all the posts and garrisons, or in the block-houses on the railway lines. We knew that Spain was not a rich country as things went then. We knew by what immense efforts and sacrifices she maintained more than a quarter of a million men across 5,000 miles of saltwater - a dumb-bell held at arm's length.

…In these forests and mountains were bands of ragged men not ill supplied with rifles and ammunition … to whom war cost nothing except poverty, risk and discomfort - and no one was likely to run short of these. Here were the Spaniards out-guerrillaed in their turn. They moved like Napoleon's convoys in the Peninsula, league after league, day after day, through a world of impalpable hostility, slashed here and there by fierce onslaught.”

The relation to our present situation in Afghanistan, substituting arid mountain for humid jungle, is all too obvious. Spain soon lost Cuba to the rebels and the newly imperial United States.

Churchill wrote long chapters about his experiences fighting the Pashtuns. His conclusions could be summarized as “we killed and were killed, destroyed houses and crops, spent inordinate amounts of money, and ended up at the status quo ante.” His summation of a chapter on the British expedition into the Mamund Valley is as follows:

“When however we had to attack the villages on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.”

 There we come to the crux of it: “honour was satisfied.” Our present situation in Afghanistan is untenable. The Afghan government is corrupt, inept, and unreliable. The Afghan National Army, such as it is, lacks cohesion, leadership, training, and motivation. The Afghan National Police are known mostly for their cruelty and corruption. Our so-called allies in Pakistan are playing us for money as they cooperate with the Taliban. The resentment against our presence among ordinary Afghans grows, along with the understanding that we won’t outlast the Taliban. The situation cries out for a long overdue departure. But honor must be satisfied.

Several generations of Americans remember the footage of the overloaded helicopters leaving the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. That humiliation still rankles. It was a militarily, politically, and socially untenable situation, but many still blame failure on those who opposed the war.

The Obama Administration faces the dilemma of a lab rat forced to cross an electrified grid to get food. Sit and starve or go eat and get shocked? Stay and be blamed for failure or go and be blamed for failure? It’s a prime situation for the maladaptive passivity of learned helplessness. In this case the passivity is manifested as yielding to the delusions of eventual victory within the Pentagon.

Back to Cuba: As it turned out, the loss of empire actually benefited Spain economically. The massive financial resources it had invested abroad came home, begetting a boom in industrial development. If the U.S. spent even a fraction of our war budget on energy efficiency, renewable energy, education, public transit, and infrastructure in general, we would launch out of the present recession.

As a final note I have to add an excerpt from the Itinerary* of one Dr. Alexander Hamilton (not the famous one). Hamilton, a physician, went on a trip from Maryland to New Hampshire and back in 1744. While traveling through Pennsylvania he remarks on their government:

“Their goverment is a kind of anarchy (or no goverment), there being perpetual jarrs betwixt the two parts of the legislature. But that is no strange thing, the ambition and avarice of a few men in both partys being the active springs in these dissentions and altercations, tho a specious story about the good and interest of the country is trumpt up by both; yet I would not be so severe as to say so of all in generall.”

* See: Colonial American Travel Narratives, Edited by Wendy Martin, Penguin Classics, ISBN 0 14 03.9088 X



An Imperial Presidency, Like It Or Not

“Empire,” “emperor,” and “imperial” all derive from the Latin word imperare, to command. Originally the term imperator was given by acclamation to a successful military commander. It later obtained its more political meaning.

With President Obama’s announcement of an escalation of troop numbers in Afghanistan, the word empire takes on a new meaning for me. It’s a question of who, or what, is commanding.

I can pile up many arguments as to why remaining in Afghanistan, much less increasing our presence, is a bad idea. I can point to history, with the stories of empire after empire breaking their teeth on the rock-strewn mountains of Central Asia. I can lay out the thesis of Jonathan Schell in his book The Unconquerable World, where he outlines the inevitable long-term failure of imperial occupations when opposed by determined indigenous forces. I can point to the mission creep of this invasion, which sought to eliminate an Al Qaeda presence that is no longer there. (The best estimate of the U.S. government is that there are perhaps 100 people associated with Al Qaeda hunkered down in Afghanistan. Not including Osama bin Laden.)

I can consider the unsavory lose-lose choice we face in Afghan government. Presently we support the second most corrupt government on the planet. Hamid Karzai’s warlord and crony-ridden kleptocracy, kept in place by U.S. cash and firepower, has near zero legitimacy after a clumsily rigged election. About 30 of the 238 members of the Afghan parliament are actually showing up to work. What is left of the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money after Karzai’s friends and relatives have skimmed their share isn’t even being spent.

The alternative force is the Taliban, a group of medievalist religious fanatics. They gained control of Afghanistan originally because the Afghan people preferred legalistic religious zealotry to the indigenous mafiosi known as the Northern Alliance.

So, what shall it be, murderous thieves or murderous zealots? In some provinces, after experiencing extortion and rape at the hands of the Afghan National Police the locals are swinging towards the Taliban. I’ll predict that the Taliban will win this one. They are religious reactionaries, but only a century retrograde of most of the rural Afghan population. They offer people some level of personal security and rule of law. 14th century law, but law nevertheless.

But none of this really matters. What matters is the imperator, and Barack Obama does not hold that office.

An empire has its own momentum. The arc of its story line is stronger than the people who serve it. An empire has its own reasons. Like a shark, it has to keep moving or die.
We still have over 750 military bases around the globe. Like the British Empire of the 19th century, the sun never sets upon us. We are, however, a waning empire. Our client states are leaving us. We have overspent. The corporate virus that infects our body politic has restructured our economy from a manufacturing powerhouse into an unsustainable paper chase. And yet our president can’t look at an obvious disaster in the making, perhaps our final disaster, and turn in a different direction.

I am reminded of a couple of parasitic organisms that modify the host’s behavior. The lancet fluke has a life cycle that includes the cow, the snail, and the ant. When it infects an ant it takes over the ant’s motor nerve system and makes it climb to the top of a grass stem and wait. This makes it more likely to be eaten by a grazing cow and continue the cycle. Likewise, the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, which cycles between the guts of cats and mice, makes mice less fearful of the smell of cats. Biologists have found many other instances where parasites have modified the behavior of their hosts to their own benefit and the host’s peril.

So it is with the U.S. We, the people, have been sold a narrative of the necessity of military force. Evidence that it isn’t working is marginalized in our public discourse. I should be more precise – it isn’t working for the average Afghan or for the average American. For the average Fortune 500 military contractor it is working fine. Hundreds of billions of dollars have churned into the accounts of Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), Lockheed Martin, Blackwater, and hundreds of other corporate beneficiaries. They, in turn, finance the campaigns of like-minded legislators. KBR even blackmailed generals in the field into approving suspicious invoices with threats of non-performance of vital support services. The Department of Justice is underfunded and understaffed so it can’t adequately pursue these corporate criminals. The military-industrial complex is taking us down from within.

Obama’s call for more troops was inevitable. He could no more back out of Afghanistan than the CEO of Exxon Mobil could transform that company into an environmental non-profit. He was swept along by a legacy of imperial narrative, a corrupt Congress, the demands of thoroughly integrated corporate parasites, and the advice of generals focused on “kinetic operations” (shooting things). I shouldn’t under-emphasize the power of the imperial narrative. We keep telling ourselves a story of our exceptional nature as a nation, the inevitability of our eventual triumph, our essential goodness, our destiny as a world leader, and the justice of our military exploits. Obama couldn’t deny any of that. Political suicide is a mild term for that kind of truth telling.

The imperator is not a man in an oval office. It is the structure of our empire itself. That structure, parisitized to the crumbling point, will lurch forward till it can’t sustain itself any longer. The long, torturous, bloody, losing proposition of occupying Afghanistan is on that path.