Deja Vu in Afghanistan

By PLS

Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice visited Kabul this week, “in a show of support for the country’s besieged president, Hamid Karzai,” as the NYT put it. Security was tight for Condi because the situation has become so “tenuous” for Americans that US embassy officials “are prohibited from leaving embassy’s sandbagged premises without a military escort.” That means they can’t stroll around or shop in the bazaar or mingle with local people, either, which calls into question the adequacy of any State department reporting that may be coming out of Kabul.

Meanwhile, the US military, which has about 25,000 troops in Afghanistan, is in the process of turning control of some areas over to NATO forces, including British elements, whose officers must be having nightmares of the deja vu variety.

Here are some thought-provoking excerpts from Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James. Its copyright date is 1997 and its US edition appeared in 1998, well before anyone dreamed the US would be chasing (unsuccessfully) after Osama bin-Laden in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

On August 7, 1840, the British Army of the Indus entered Kabul and enthroned a puppet, Shah Shuja, to replace Dost Muhammad, who was sent into exile in India for “flirting” with the Russians.

The new state was precarious, resting almost entirely on a network of British political officers, garrisons and hand-outs to malevolently neutral tribal chiefs. But Macnaghten, chief political officer, the power behind the throne and soon to be a baronet, was highly optimistic about the new state’s chances of survival....[Nevertheless,] opposition from below flickered on with ambushes and raids, which the régime dismissed as tribal brigandage, just as in the 1980s the Russians referred to all Afghan partisans as dushmans (bandits). The Russians, as did the British before them, discovered that well-trained troops backed by modern artillery could defeat the rebels whenever they stood their ground and offered battle. Such victories were Pyrrhic; within a month of the British having beaten back a force of Gilzais near Qalat...the tribesmen were back to their old tricks, interrupting communications between Kandahar and Kabul. Nonetheless, during 1840 and the first nine months of 1841, British garrisons and punitive columns were able to keep the lid down on tribal insurgency, but only just.

Even through the numbers of the army of occupation had been successively reduced, the costs of supporting Shah Shuja [and paying off the tribal chiefs] remained high....It was an increasingly irksome burden and threw into question the purpose behind supporting Shah Shuja indefinitely. Macnaghten pooh-poohed references to nationalism and persisted...in his belief that he and his colleagues were creating a permanent, popular and stable government.

The arbitrary removal of traditional subsidies triggered an uprising among the Gilzais of the Khyber Pass at the beginning of October 1841, which became a signal for [a successful] national rebellion.

The British ended up under siege in Kabul, and then

on 6 January 1842 the detritus of the [British] army and its 12,000 camp followers began its evacuation. Within a week all but a few hundred had perished, killed either by tribesmen, hunger or cold or a combination of all three.

I’ll end by recommending Raj as a terrific read from beginning to end. Now that US policy makers are pushing to make India into an ally, it might be a good idea for Americans to bone up on Indian history. India, they'll learn, is a country that may negotiate or make occasional common cause with the US, as in the case of the pending agreement on nuclear and trade issues, but will never accept, uncritically, the US lead on anything of vital national importance.