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Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe (1982)

This is a good, chunky selection of British writing from the Second World War, poems and stories and essays either written and published during the actual conflict or memoirs of wartime experiences published a little later. It consists of 400 densely-printed pages in the Penguin paperback, and features work from some 56 authors: 18 prose writers and 37 poets.

Poets (37)

Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Henry Reed, Edith Scovell, Henry Treece, Herbert Cory, C. Day-Lewis, Terence Tiller, George Barker, John Pudney, Charles Causley, Roy Fuller, Roy Campbell, Alun Lewis, W.J. Turner, W.R. Rodgers, Sidney Keyes, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, Rayner Heppenstall, Keith Douglas, R.N. Currey, Alan Rook, Fancis Scarfe, Timothy Corsellis, Kathleen Raine, F.T. Prince, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, William Empson, Stevie Smith, Vernon Watkins, David Gascoyne, Paul Dehn, T.S. Eliot, G.S. Fraser, Stephen Spender, W.J. Turner.

Short stories (9)

Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom, William Chappell, Fred Urquhart, James Hanley, J. Maclaren-Ross, V.S. Pritchett, Glyn Jones, Elizabeth Berridge.

Factual memoirs/reportage (5)

  • Bryher – recalls her impressions of Blitz London upon her return to it from Switzerland
  • John Sommerfield – description of his squadron travelling through North-East India to the front line against the Japs in Burma
  • Richard Hillary – description of learning to fly a spitfire
  • Keith Douglas – how he disobeyed orders to rejoin his tank regiment in the desert west of Cairo
  • Denton Welch – a very home front story of being taken to meet the eccentric painter Walter Sickert

Essays (3)

By George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Virginia Woolf.

Structure

The pieces are divided into seven themed sections, being:

  • The City
  • The Sky
  • The Sea
  • Declarations
  • The Patient Khaki Beast (i.e the soldier)
  • Confessions and Conclusions
  • The Dark

Introduction

In his introduction the book’s editor, Ronald Blythe, explains that the 1930s was the decade of grand declarations, literary cliques and widespread left-wing or even communist confidence that the British establishment was about to be swept away in a wonderfully liberating revolution (traits I noted in my review of Robin Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties).

The Spanish Civil War

However, a great deal of that fervour to change the world drained away during the three gruelling, disillusioning years of the Spanish Civil War (see my review of the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse) in which several of the youngest, keenest English poets were killed off and those who survived were thoroughly disillusioned, above all by the revelation of Stalin’s willingness to betray the revolutionary cause in order to further Russia’s national agenda.

(Stalin didn’t want there to be a successful communist revolution in Spain because he thought it would alarm and alienate the governments of France and Britain, which he needed to keep sweet as potential allies against the obviously growing threat from Nazi Germany. Therefore Stalin did not want there to be a successful revolution in Spain. It took British communist volunteers in Spain a long time to grasp the Realpolitik of the situation and when it did, disillusion was total.)

And then the outbreak of the Second World War all happened so quickly. The nationalist leader General Franco declared the Spanish Civil War over on 1 April 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed four and a half months later, on 23 August 1939, and one week later Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September.

The people of Europe, and their writers, artists and intellectuals, were thrown into six long years of chaos, bloodshed and holocaust. The world had never before seen destruction and mass murder on such a scale.

Retreat to the personal

Against this background of political disillusion (on the Left), a widespread feeling that the entire political class had let them down, and the universal sense of forces too vast to comprehend tearing the world apart, the writers who flourished during the Second World War retreated back to the personal.

If there was a common theme found across many of the writers during the Second World War, it was the notion that the entire world was being darkened by vast totalitarian movements devoted to wiping out the personal life, to exterminating the individual. Therefore, the greatest protest against the forces of darkness was to assert the importance of individual thoughts and feelings. As so often, W.H. Auden managed to summarise the mood perfectly in his famous poem, September 1 1939.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

But Auden had left Britain for America in January 1939, and so was hors du combat. The writers left in Blighty, men and women, either too old to serve or conscripted into the forces, all had to find their own ways of expressing themselves and showing their affirming flames.

So what you have in this book is a wide range of personal reactions to the disaster the world found itself in, writings which are hard to generalise about because they are often so distinctive, not to say idiosyncratic: from the obliquely poetic short story of Elizabeth Bowen, to the intensely religious verse of Edith Sitwell, from the brisk no-nonsense memoir of Bryher to the visionary description of a torpedoed ship going down by James Hanley, from John Sommerfield’s larky description of a long journey by train, paddleboat, train and lorry to the front line in Burma to William Sansom’s brilliant accounts of being a firefighter in Blitzed London, the collection is characterised by its variety of location and event and style.

The collection itself is obviously divided into two distinct forms, verse and prose, with prose further sub-divided into fiction and factual.

Poetry

Having lived through the experimental Modernism and free verse of the 1920s, and the reversion to much more traditional forms with regular stanzas and regular rhyme schemes of the 1930s, poets of the 1940s felt free to pick and choose from either approach as suited their purpose.

So there’s quite a variety of verse forms, but I think I’m right in saying not much of it feels new. Not formally. But in terms of content, there is much that feels new, and I think can be divided into two broad categories, the realistic and the fantastical.

The New Apocalypse and Neo-Romanticism

The war saw an intensification of an aesthetic strand which had existed throughout the 1930s, an interest in the English countryside reimagined as a place of spirits and gods and paganism and Christianity interpreted in its wildest, most apocalyptic shapes. This trend had overlapped with some of the spirit of 1930s Surrealism and had been a reaction against the lucid, rational and political concerns of the dominant school of Thirties poetry.

In the fateful year, 1939, the best writings from this tradition were brought together in a volume titled The New Apocalypse with the result that a ‘movement’ of sorts was named after the book. To quote Wikipedia:

The New Apocalypse (1939)… was edited by J. F. Hendry (1912–1986) and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944).

The New Apocalyptics reacted against the political and social realism of the 1930s with its loving descriptions of factories and arterial roads and motorcycles and electricity pylons, and the belief that human nature was rational and could be rationally appealed to by rational argument. The name itself referenced D. H. Lawrence’s posthumous collection, Apocalypse (1931) and the poets in this tradition turned their backs on the Modern World and plunging into a heady stew of surrealism, myth, and expressionism. And then, of course, the world war broke out and quickly outdid their wildest imaginings of destruction, extreme situations and death.

George Barker

In this volume the Apocalyptics are represented by poems by Henry Treece and George Barker. Blythe includes a very useful 21-page section called ‘Notes on Contributors’ which gives potted biographies and select reading lists for all his authors, and spends half a page explaining Barker’s motivation: the preface to the Apocalypse volume spoke of ‘word explosions’, of their poetry’s ‘air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven around a chime of words, are the results of disintegration, not in ourselves, but in society…’ (G.S. Fraser, another founder member of the New Apocalyptics, quoted page 376).

But to be blunt, I dislike the examples of Barker’s poetry given here. If this is the best, I’m not impressed.

From Sacred Elegy by George Barker

From this window where the North Atlantic
Takes the crow in my mind home in a short line
Over the kissing fish in the wave, and the mine
Where the sailor clasps his death as mermaid like
Sex of a knife in the depth, from this window
Watching I see the farewelling seasons fall
Ever between us like rain. And the lachrymal
Memory, trailing its skirts, walks like a widow
Across those seas looking for home. O my Dido
Heart! Sail, sail the ships ever away from us all.

The phrasing and some of the obscurity which derives from it seems wilful. ‘Farewelling’ sounds like a schoolboy attempt to be interesting. The kissing fish in the wave seems pitifully inadequate to describe the Atlantic Ocean. The reference to Dido at the end kills it for me; falling back on classical references only highlights the main text’s weakness. Possibly, if you are predisposed to an anti-rational, pagan view of the world, this might ring your bell. But reading it in 2024, it felt strained and dated.

Henry Treece

Henry Treece is much more direct and therefore attractive:

From In The Beginning Was The Bird by Henry Treece

In the beginning was the bird,
A spume of feathers on the face of time,
Man’s model for destruction, God’s defence…

Though the third line is notably weaker than the first two (because over the top, grandiloquent, too much). And the word ‘spume’ instantly recalls W.B. Yeats’s much more powerful use of the same word in his wonderful poem Among Schoolchildren:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings…

Blythe’s note on Treece tells us that he went on to write an enormous number of books for children or young adults, often about the Dark Ages i.e. Arthur’s Britain, the Romans, the Vikings and so on. You can already feel that in this charming and simple poem.

Lincolnshire Bomber Station by Henry Treece

Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.

And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;
Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,
And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,
Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet
And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart . . .

It’s a big idea, which I don’t have the scholarship to verify, but I wonder whether the 1940s Neo-Romantic urge to write about the mysterious countryside, pagan beliefs, spirits and so on, after the war went into children’s fiction, went into all those novels about Roman Britain, by authors like Henry Treece or Rosemary Sutcliffe, which I read as a boy in the 1960s.

Dylan Thomas

Some critics tried to lump George Barker and Dylan Thomas together as founders or exponents of a broader literary movement called ‘Neo-Romanticism’. This label works better in the world of art and painting than in literature. In painting there was a definite turning away from the urban towards nostalgic, if highly stylised, sometimes nightmarish, depictions of the English countryside, but a countryside under stress, prey to visions and strange atmospheres. Not Constable’s England at all. (Neo-Romanticism in art.)

But although critics tried to rope him into these movement, Thomas wasn’t interested. Dylan Thomas was just 24 when the war broke out and Blythe amusingly tells us that he took it as a personal affront, a calculated attempt by the world to blunt his promising career. Nevertheless, he produced some fiery, clanging verse responses to the war. Blythe acutely points out that in several of his most famous wartime poems (Ceremony After A Fire Raid and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London) Thomas ignores the statistics, the general headlines, and – as per Blythe’s thesis – zeroes in on the particular, in each case on one particular victim of the Blitz.

From A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death…

This is in a different class from the Barker. Nobody could compete with these ringing declarations. Thomas seemed to have tapped deep into the wellspring of some pagan power, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

Edith Sitwell

Thomas may be associated with New Romanticism but he is sui generis, one of a kind, his grandiloquent poetry buttressed by the amazingly sonorous power of his readings. But out in the same paddock as Barker and Thomas were the more brittle but just as apocalyptic visions of Edith Sitwell. As Blythe points out, Sitwell’s wartime verse had travelled a long way since ‘the rhyming tomfoolery’ of the 1920s and the best of it uses Christian imagery to achieve a genuine sense of tragedy.

From Still Falls the Rain (The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross,
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us…

T.S. Eliot

The godfather of Modernist poetry was T.S. Eliot and the war saw him complete the epic undertaking of the Four Quartets, four long meditations on death and history and society, underpinned by his complex and sophisticated understanding of Christian faith. They are Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

These poems are unlike anything before or since in their complexity of structure and interlinking themes and images. To briefly summarise, each one is set in a specific rural location (hence the names) and then uses a physical description of this location and its historical associations to weave a complex web of ideas about time, history, reality and religion.

The Quartets are among the absolutely top masterpieces of twentieth century poetry in English and Blythe makes the super-sensible decision to quote the fourth and final one, Little Gidding, in its entirety. Here is the second part of section 2, a sustained homage to Eliot’s hero, Dante, in which he envisions himself walking through the glass-strewn streets of London after an air-raid and encountering a mysterious strange, much as Dante walked through hell encountering strange figures in the flickering half-light.

From Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting…

Magnificent. Simple language, simple syntax, but a weird and brooding atmosphere leading up to the spooky final line…

Little Gidding online

Soldier poets

Away from the grandeurs of the London literary scene and its professional writers was the completely different category of soldiers, sailors and airman who wrote poetry and prose. The three most famous British poets of the Second World War are Keith Douglas (1920 to 1944), Alun Lewis (1915 to 1944) and Sidney Keyes (1922 to 1943). See how young they all died (24, 29, 21).

I have to say straight away that my favourite poet of the Second World War is Keith Douglas. It might not be a totally true generalisation, but it seems, working through this selection, that the further away you were from the fighting, the more gorgeous, visionary and surreal your writing became (Sitwell, Raine, Barker, Thomas), whereas the closer you were to the fighting, the more precise, detailed (and sometimes banal and everyday) the writing became, as soldiers, sailors and airman tried to nail down precisely what it felt like, to fly a Spitfire (Richard Hillary), to be aboard a torpedoed ship (James Henley), to be stuck in an infantry camp behind the lines during long hours of rainy boredom (Alun Lewis).

In this respect – in terms of clear, convincing description of what it’s like – Richard Hillary’s prose memoir of training as a Spitfire pilot, and Keith Douglas’s memoir of the war in the desert leading up to the Battle of El Alamein, are the standout pieces.

But it is striking that Douglas is the only author featured in this selection as both a poet and a prose writer. Something about his mentalité made him write memorably in both forms. For me, it’s his precision, his ability to get to the point. This doesn’t mean his poetry is prosey. It is as full of metaphor and vision as much other poetry. It’s just that the metaphor and imagery are subsumed, in his best poems, into a kind of laser-like accuracy.

From How to Kill by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost…

The clarity and lack of any rhetoric or sentiment or bullshit, just what it is like to aim and shoot another human being.

It’s assisted by the preciseness of the half rhyme (also known as ‘imperfect rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, ‘near rhyme’ or ‘oblique rhyme’). Thus ball/kill; man/-pen; long/sang. As you read or hear it you sense that there’s a formal structure, a half-rhyme scheme, and yet the absence of exact rhymes prevents it from being predictable, makes it much closer to speech, like the speech of a man talking to you.

Of course it isn’t, and in fact lines like ‘This sorcery/I do’ has an Elizabethan feel to the syntactical reversal of the ordinary everyday phrase (‘I do this sorcery’) and the vocabulary.

The subtle half rhymes, the use of unexpected sentence structures, the ultra-modern subject matter and yet the knowing echoes of much older verse (are there echoes of Dr Faustus in ‘Being damned, I am amused’?) makes for an utterly modern read, rich in resonances and enjoyments.

Prose descriptions

Prose is more suited to descriptions of action. Thus two of the most vivid pieces are heart-in-the-mouth descriptions and/or stories of being a fireman during the Blitz by William Sansom. In both you are really right there as the vast flaming wall of a warehouse shivers and then topples towards him and his firefighting crew.

I liked John Sommerfield’s description of being part of a squadron which has to undertake an epic journey across North-East India by train and paddleboat and train again to get to the ravaged frontline with the Japanese in Burma.

What a lot of writers from the period share is a tremendous clarity of style and thought. Thus Richard Hillary comes across as very self-absorbed but he describes with wonderful clarity the experience of flying a Spitfire. Keith Douglas conveys with similar clarity the experience of being a tank commander in the excerpt from his memoir of war in the desert, Alamein to Zem Zem.

The memoir of London during the Blitz written by Bryher (pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) is snobbish and self-serving (she keeps on about how she warned everyone about the Nazis since 1933 but would they listen? No, the fools) but also displays great clarity of description in her encounters with shop assistants or soldiers during the Blitz.

Essays

George Orwell

Rather as T.S. Eliot towers over the poets by virtue of the depth and breadth of his vision, in respect of clarity of thinking and prose style George Orwell towers over all the other prose writers. His essay in defence of P.G. Wodehouse (who foolishly and naively made a handful of radio broadcasts for the Nazis in 1940) is a masterpiece of clarity and honesty, and insights.

Orwell makes it clear he’s got hold of as many of Wodehouse’s writings as possible as well as the transcripts of his German broadcasts, and tried to clarify the events surrounding them i.e. he has done as much homework as possible. And then he proceeds to make a convincing case, based on the arguments that:

  • Wodehouse had no idea how his broadcasts would be interpreted
  • he had absolutely no political sense
  • he had been interned by the Germans for a year and so had missed the intensification of the conflict during 1940
  • that the fuss being kicked up about him was really a ruse by the media-owning classes (e.g. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail) to distract attention away from their own much more serious pro-Hitler, appeasement attitudes

But it’s not only the clarity of the argument but the many insights it throws up along the way which make it still such an interesting read. For example, Orwell shows how both American and German critics in different ways had completely misunderstood Wodehouse. They thought he was a merciless satirist of the English upper classes. Orwell shows how Wodehouse was a dyed-in-the-wool, public school member of those classes and that all his tomfoolery comes from inside the worldview and is full, ultimately, of love and respect for it.

Arthur Koestler

I’ve reviewed Koestler’s two most famous books, the novels Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943). They contain much vivid detail but are a bit ‘muddy’ in their thinking by which I mean the logic of the arguments, specially in Darkness, are harder to remember than the plight of the central character (an old Russian Bolshevik in prison having been arrested as part of Stalin’s purges).

The Koestler piece here is his short essay The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) which gave its title to a collection of essays published at the end of the war. It goes some way to explaining why Koestler turned into such a bore, publishing some 25 volumes of essays and explorations in the coming decades and becoming steadily more irrelevant.

Koestler proposes a ‘spectrum of philosophies’ which stretch from ‘the Commissar’ at the materialist, scientific end of the spectrum to ‘the Yogi’ at the spiritual, metaphysical end. The Commissar wants to change the individual from outside, the Yogi wants to change the individual from within. This is precisely the kind of clever-sounding intellectual conceit which has bugger-all relevance to the real world and gives rise to a surprising amount of high-sounding verbiage in a short space. It sounds fine but everything it deals with – Fascism, Communism, Democracy, Art, Science – it does so in a shallow, superficial way. I found it unreadable and consider it the only actively bad piece in the book.

Short stories

Elizabeth Bowen

Broadly speaking, the closer they stick to the subject, the more effective the prose works tends to be. Not always, though. The selection kicks off, not with any scene of battle, but with a ghostly and evocative description of a young couple walking round London in the Blackout after a bombing raid has departed. The young woman explains to her soldier boyfriend that she makes sense of it all, the Blitz, the chaos, by imagining the city is the fantasy city of Kôr, mentioned in Henry Rider Haggard’s adventure novel, She.

After this arrestingly atmospheric opening scene the story shifts to the domestic embarrassment of the young lady having to take her boyfriend back to the poky, cramped flat she shares with a girlfriend, and everyone’s general embarrassment and inconvenience. Yet the story is full of sly insights and perceptions just on the edge of consciousness, a subtle poetry of the periphery.

At half past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the silent room.

It took me a moment to realise that ‘stepless’ means empty of people and therefore with no sounds of stepping, of people walking. It’s a tasty sentence and the story is full of just such odd obliquities. It made me want to read more Elizabeth Bowen.

Fred Urquhart

There are other striking experiments. Fred Urquhart (‘described by one critic as the foremost Scottish short story writer of the twentieth century’) is represented by a story about potato pickers in a part of deeply rural Scotland which I didn’t catch because I barely understood the intense dialect he has his characters talking in. It is a war story because it is set during the war and the tattie pickers observe planes flying overhead, which all leads up to the climax when a German bomber crashes and blows up a few miles away.

James Hanley

Far more experimental is James Hanley’s piece, Sailor’s Song, an account of a torpedoed ship going down and a handful of men surviving by clinging to a raft which ought to be grittily realistic but is actually done in the style of Walt Whitman, with both the Ship and the Sea singing, describing their song and the human characters referred to with a kind of Biblical anonymity.

Glyn Jones

A different tone is presented by Welsh short story writer Glyn Jones’s story, Bowan, Moragan and Williams, which is a larky portrait of a boy and his family and friends and friends’ families in a tight-knit Welsh community, where everyone is odd and eccentric. I particularly liked the friend’s relative who is so nervous of other people that he speaks in an increasingly shrill voice and jams the napkin ring into his eye socket as if it is a jeweller’s eyeglass. The war is peripheral to this gallery of likeable eccentrics.

Elizabeth Berridge

Not so the very short story by Elizabeth Berridge in which a woman’s flat in the city is burgled and smashed up (when she’s not there), but she’s been living for some time in a retirement home with a snug community of friends and, after going with the police to examine the wreckage, she enjoys embellishing the description on the train back to the retirement home, relishing the opportunity to make her friends’ flesh creep with this appalling example of society going to the dogs… Only to arrive at the home that night and discover it wildly on fire, having been bombed and all her friends killed. The starkness of the facts and the protagonist’s inability to process what has happened are beautifully captured.

Summary

Except for a handful of poems by the obvious gods – Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Douglas – the short stories are, on the whole, more varied and powerful than any of the poems. This last story by Berridge, stands symbol for the countless millions of people who, although physically unharmed, had their lives ruined and their minds scarred by the appalling, meaningless violence of war.

Credit

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe was first published in 1966. References are to the revised 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

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The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe (1983)

Political and biographical background

Nigeria attained independence in 1960. Twenty-three years later author, poet and essayist Chinua Achebe published this extended essay briskly summarising the problems his nation faced. Before we get to the text, there’s some interesting biography to point out. Achebe had published his last novel, A Man of The People in 1966, so what had he been doing between 1966 and this publication 16 years later?

Soon after the publication of A Man of The People Nigeria experienced the 1966 military coup. This in turn led to the Nigerian Civil War, triggered when the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967.  In fact some in the military thought the ending of A Man of The People so closely paralleled the real-life coup that he must have had some foreknowledge so he had to flee to Biafra to escape arrest. Achebe supported Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the new state, travelling to European and North American cities to drum up support. He helped draft a declaration of principles for the new country. The Achebe family narrowly escaped disaster several times during the war, including a bombing of their house. The general disruption favoured the form of poetry and in 1971 he published the collection ‘Beware, Soul Brother.

With the end of the war, he returned to the family home in Ogidi only to find it destroyed. His passport was revoked. He took up a teaching post at the University of Nigeria. In 1971 he helped set up two literary magazines. In 1972 he published a collection of short stories, ‘Girls At War’.

In 1972 he took up a teaching post at the University of Amherst, later adding a visiting professorship at the University of Connecticut. It was at Amherst in 1975 that he gave his famous lecture accusing Joseph Conrad of being a ‘racist’.

Achebe returned to the University of Nigeria in 1976, where he held a chair in English until his retirement in 1981. He edited the literary journal Okike and became active with the left-leaning People’s Redemption Party (PRP). In 1983, he became the party’s deputy national vice-president and it was now, after 17 busy, traumatic, and globetrotting years, that he published the pamphlet under review, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’. Its publication was timed to coincide with the upcoming elections i.e. it was a direct and controversial intervention in Nigerian politics by someone who was, by now, a veteran of political commentary.

The Trouble with Nigeria

In this brief pamphlet Achebe set out to enumerate Nigeria’s many problems and suggest solutions. His stated aim was to challenge the resignation and negativity of his fellow Nigerians ‘which cripple our aspiration and inhibit our chances of becoming a modern and attractive country’. He aimed to inspire them to reject the old habits which, in his opinion, prevented Nigeria from becoming a modern country.

The book became famous because it attributed the fundamental failure of Nigeria on its disastrously bad leadership. With the right leadership he thought the country could resolve its many problems such as: tribalism, lack of patriotism, social injustice, the cult of mediocrity indiscipline and, of course, corruption. The essay is divided into ten parts.

Rather than give a long conclusion at the end I’ll comment on the points he raises chapter by chapter.

1. Where the problem lies (3 pages)

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of great leadership. (p.22)

Change is possible but it requires ‘a radical programme of social and economic reorganisation’.

I believe that Nigeria is a nation favoured by Providence. I believe there are individuals as well as nations who, on account of peculiar gifts and circumstances, are commandeered by history to facilitate mankind’s advancement. Nigeria is such a nation…the fear that should haunt our leaders (but does not) is that they may already have betrayed Nigeria’s high destiny. (p.24)

I find it hard to take this overblow rhetoric seriously. There is no Providence. There is no guiding hand. ‘History’ is not a force in the world, it is just the record of what we’ve done. There is no ‘high destiny’. There is no God or law saying mankind will ‘advance’ in any particular direction – what a ridiculous idea.

Throughout his career Achebe railed against Western misconceptions about Africa and yet here he is spouting just such 19th century, positivistic rhetoric about the forward march of humanity etc etc. Population growth is out of control. We are burning the world and destroying the habitats we rely on for our survival. Russia bombs maternity hospitals. Israel bombs refugee camps. The Sudanese massacre each other. Famine is coming in Ethiopia. What advancement of mankind?

Right here, right at the start of the pamphlet, Achebe reveals that he is more attached to high-sounding rhetoric than any kind of detailed analysis of the geography, agriculture, resources or economy of Nigeria, and this tone of lofty generalisation characterises most of the essay.

He is closer to reality when he says Nigeria benefited from an oil boom which should have been invested to modernise the country but instead Nigeria’s leaders have stolen or embezzled huge sums, and squandered the rest on importing expensive fancy foreign goods.

2. Tribalism (4 pages)

Achebe dates the triumph of tribalism in politics, and the death of a pan-Nigerian dream, to the moment in 1951 (when the country was still nominally owned and run by Britain) when Chief Obafemi Awolowo stole the leadership of Western Nigeria from Dr Nnamdi Azikwe (aka Zik). This is interesting to readers of his novels because it seems to be the basis for the similar cabinet coup described at the start of A Man of The People.

Achebe blames the fact that the national anthem was written by a British woman for perpetuating the idea of tribe and goes on to describe how, after 1966, another national anthem was adopted.

Achebe skims through a work of academic discussion and defines tribalism as ‘discrimination against a citizen because of his place of birth’, gives examples of how this discrimination operates at the time of the essay. He points to the American example where, in the specific example of filling out forms to apply to university, specifying a person’s state of origin is forbidden precisely to eliminate discrimination. Nigeria should do the same.

And that’s it on the issue of tribalism, one of the most complex and difficult problems facing almost every African country. Not exactly a thorough analysis, maybe – and it’s so typical of a writer to think that the key to such a super-complex social and political issue can be found in a couple of poems, and an official form. It feels like he lacks the academic training or background in the subject to engage with it properly.

3. False image of ourselves (2 and a half pages)

One of the commonest manifestations of under-development is a tendency among the ruling elite to live in a world of make-believe and unrealistic expectations. (p.29)

In Achebe’s view, Nigeran leaders spout high-sounding rhetoric to inspire their auditors and make themselves sound big by, for example, going on and on about Nigeria being a great country. Whereas Achebe, being an ordinary (albeit literary and articulate) citizen, is able to tell the truth.

Nigeria is not a great country, it is one of the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun…It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth. (p.30)

Achebe is straight-talking like this throughout the essay and it’s fun. Even if he then ruins the effect with the empty, hackneyed phrases of his ‘solution’:

Nigeria is not absolutely beyond redemption. Critical, yes, but not hopeless. But every single day of continued neglect brings her ever closer to the brink of the abyss. To pull her back and turn her around is clearly beyond the contrivance of mediocre leadership. It calls for greatness. (p.31)

Greatness? Unfortunately much of his argumentation consists of a rhetorical exaggeration of Nigeria’s plight, so that he can then propose surprisingly windy and rhetorical solution.

Achebe’s negativism about Nigeria is a kind of mirror image of its leaders overblown boosterism: both are just fine-sounding words, both fail to engage with the horribly complex realities on the ground.

4. Leadership, Nigeria-style (1 page)

Achebe accuses the founding fathers of Nigeria of lacking intellectual rigour, of a tendency to ‘pious materialistic woolliness and self-centred pedestrianism’. As you’ve read, I detect exactly that kind of ‘woolliness and lack of intellectual rigour in Achebe’s own discourse. He is himself part of the problem he claims to be finding a solution for.

On Unity and Faith (one and a half pages)

Leaders call loudly for unity. The word is on the Nigerian coat of arms. But Achebe says unity is only valuable if it’s for a good purpose. The mafia is united. Also on the Nigerian coat of arms is the word Faith. So he also asks, faith in what? Answering these questions:

calls for a habit of mental rigour, for which, unfortunately, Nigerians are not famous. (p.33)

(You can’t help thinking this is the kind of sweeping statement about an entire people that Achebe can make, but any white author would be cancelled for.)

Anyway, the really interesting question is why the founding fathers chose Unity and Faith at all, given that they are such vague and ill-defined terms, rather than, say Justice and Honesty and Truth, which are for more clear and definable. Is it because the founding fathers didn’t think Nigerians could live up to those harder ideals?

5. Patriotism (3 and a half pages)

Nigerians are among the world’s most unpatriotic people. (p.34)

This is because patriotism requires trust or belief in a country’s leaders and Nigerians don’t have that. A patriot, he says, is someone who truly loves their country, who holds it to the highest standards and demands the best. Is that right?

Quite clearly patriotism is not going to be easy in a country as badly run as Nigeria. (p.35)

What Nigeria abounds in is the spurious patriotism of its ruling class. True patriotism can only exist when a country is ruled well by leaders who have the welfare of the majority at heart and not the material gain of the few. In other words, a country’s leaders have to give its population something to be patriotic about.

6. Social injustice and the cult of mediocrity (8 pages)

The worst impact of tribalism is injustice in awarding jobs to mediocre or incompetent candidates who come from ‘the right tribe’. It multiplies incompetence in the system and demoralisation among the victims. Thus Nigeria is a country where it’s difficult to point to even one job which is done by the best available candidate. Consistently picking a third or fourth eleven means Nigeria will never make it into the world league. This explains why the public services are so dire:

Look at our collapsing public utilities, our inefficient and wasteful parastatals and state-owned companies. If you want electricity, you buy your own generator; if you want water, you sink your own bore-hole; if you want to travel, you set up your own airline. (p.39)

But it’s not just the inefficiency and waste which promoting mediocrities to run everything badly leads to. The bigger issue is the enormous disparity between the class of people who manage things, in effect a managerial elite, who award each other huge pay packets and perks, and the vast majority of the population who remain dirt poor.

Even if the perks and luxuries and payoffs are a legacy of the colonial system, Nigerians have had two decades to reform them instead of which they’ve made the problem ten times worse.

What is the purpose of government? Surely there are two:

  1. to maintain peace and security
  2. to establish social justice, a sense of fairness and equality

Peace and stability depends on a sense of fairness. If people’s sense of unfairness and injustice is pushed to breaking point, you get revolution. All the talk about ministers and perks and chief executives ignores the fact of the tens of millions scraping a living from infertile soil, living under flyovers, scavenging on waste dumps, ‘the wretched of the earth’.

He is fully aware that most of the conversations of intellectuals or the political or business elite are incredibly aloof and disconnected from the great mass of the population.

7. Indiscipline (12 pages)

He defines indiscipline as:

a failure or refusal to submit one’s desires and actions to the restraints of orderly social conduct in recognition of the rights and desires of others. (p.45)

As a parent I know another way of saying this is acting like a grown-up and not a spoilt child. He himself says lack of self discipline is a sign of immaturity. He says lack of self discipline blights the majority of Nigerians and helps make the place a madhouse.

You can see it most clearly in the behaviour of the traffic on the roads, which Achebe has a real bee in his bonnet about. He comes back again and again to Nigerians’ terrible behaviour on the road and uses it as an example of the way Nigerians have given themselves entirely over to ‘rampaging selfishness’ (p.49).

Leaders are, among other things, role models. If a country’s leaders are selfish and greedy, lacking all restraint and self discipline, then it creates a climate of indiscipline in which millions of their countrymen think it’s OK to be like them.

Not only that but the leaders’ indiscipline also exacerbates the divide between the Big Man who has flunkeys and police and journalists falling over themselves to please him, and everybody else who has to get used to being browbeaten, insulted and extorted by every petty official (like the corrupt tax inspectors and police who victimise Odilo’s father in A Man of the People).

I don’t know any other country where you can find such brazen insensitivity and arrogant selfishness among those who lay claim to leadership and education. (p.53)

The siren mentality: he gives this name to the tendency of Nigerian officials of every rank to be accompanied everywhere by fleets of security and police cars all with sirens blaring to terrify everyone out of the way. Achebe says it is typical of Nigeria to have turned an invention of serious-minded people into:

a childish and cacophonous instrument for the celebration of status. (p.54)

‘Childish’ was the word I used to characterise the worldview and events of A Man of The People, feeling a bit nervous about accusing such an eminent author of dealing in such superficial characters and discussions – so I’m pleased to have the concept explicitly backed up by Achebe himself.

I also commented on the short temper, quickness to anger and general air of physical violence which soaks A Man of The People. Here, in the section about the siren mentality, Achebe associates the use of bombastic sirens broadcast by convoys of VIP’s cars with a kind of psychological violence, with:

  • the brutal aggressiveness which precedes a leader’s train
  • the violence of power
  • official thuggery

He calls Nigeria a ‘mentally underdeveloped’ country which ‘indulges in the celebration and brandishing of power’. Its leaders have created a mystique around themselves when a) they’re such fools they’re hardly worthy of it and b) this only creates a yawning divide between the elite class and everyone else, cowering and quivering by the side of the road as yet another cavalcade of VIPs roars past, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Undisciplined. Self centred. Childish.

8. Corruption (8 pages)

Keeping an average Nigerian from being corrupt is like keeping a goat from eating yam (1983 newspaper headline)

Nigerians are no different from other nations.

Nigerians are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable; they will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and inconvenient. (p.58)

Achebe makes an important point which is that the exercise of corruption is intimately associated with the wielding of power; people in power have far more opportunity for corruption than the masses.

He has heard the figure that 60% of Nigeria’s wealth is consumed by corruption (p.61). He gives a couple of egregious examples of corruption scams from today’s newspapers. He explains the different types of corruption associated with big expensive building projects and refers to ‘political patronage on an unprecedented scale’ (p.63). With the result that:

Nigeria is without any shadow of doubt one of the most corrupt nations in the world… (p.63)

The only cure is for leaders to set an example, to put principle ahead of greed. A good leader would rid his administration of anyone suspected of corruption or bribery and ban them from public life.

(Just reading this passage you can see why it will never happen. In Nigeria as in most African countries corruption isn’t a blight on the system, it is the system.)

9. The Igbo problem (7 pages)

The title of this section is satirical, presumably a bitter reference to ‘the Jewish problem’, as Achebe is himself Igbo.

He explains something I didn’t know which is that the Igbo, within Nigeria, are often caricatured as aggressive, arrogant, clannish and greedy, which sounds like the worst stereotyping of the Jews.

Achebe himself calls Igbo culture ‘individualistic and highly competitive’. It is not held back by the wary religion of the other main tribal groups in Nigeria, the Hausa and Faluni, or the traditional hierarchies of the Yoruba. Igbo culture can display ‘noisy exhibitionism’ (p.67). Here’s Martin Meredith in his 2011 book The State of Africa explaining the same thing.

In the Eastern region, on the other side of the Niger river, the Igbo, occupying the poorest, most densely populated region of Nigeria, had become the best educated population, swarming out of their homeland to find work elsewhere as clerks, artisans, traders and labourers, forming sizeable minority groups in towns across the country. Their growing presence there created ethnic tensions both in the North and among the Yoruba in the West. Unlike the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba, the Igbo possessed no political kingdom and central authority but functioned on the basis of autonomous village societies, accustomed to a high degree of individual assertion and achievement. (p.76)

It was the tide of anti-Igbo violence which swept across northern Nigeria in reaction to the 1966 military coup, which led Igbo leaders to conceive the idea of seceding and setting up the separatist state of Biafra in 1967.

Achebe discusses the importance of the Town Union phenomenon. This seems to be the idea that the Igbo had networks of influence via their Town Union associations, which extended into clannish networks criss-crossing the nation. For political reasons leaders of other groups played on this fact to suggest Elders of Zion-style Igbo conspiracies to take other groups’ jobs, houses etc.

The reality, Achebe asserts, was exactly the opposite, the Igbo lacked strong centralised leadership. Instead, ruffians and upstarts were appointed by the British colonial authorities (as described in Achebe’s book Arrow of God) and then, since independence, hundreds and hundreds of ludicrously local ‘kings’ have sprung up like mushrooms (p.68).

Achebe mentions official policies of social, economic and political discrimination which the Igbo still labour under and pleads for them to be removed so the Igbo can play their full role in Nigerian society. In exchange the Igbo must learn to be less abrasive and more tactful.

He closes with some detailed examples of what he takes to be federal discrimination against the Igbo, namely the siting of huge new steel mills in every region except Igboland.

10. The example of Aminu Kano (15 and a half pages)

The last and longest section is devoted to Mallam Amino Kanu who had, apparently, just died. Who he?

Mallam Aminu Kano (9 August 1920 to 17 April 1983) was a Muslim politician from Nigeria. In the 1940s he led a socialist movement in the northern part of the country in opposition to British rule. (Wikipedia)

Achebe repeats Kano’s great question: what is the purpose of political power? It is certainly not to turn the population of their country into victims.

For we are victims. The entire Nigerian populace constitutes on huge, helpless electoral dupe in the hands of the politician/victimiser. (p.73)

And it’s the people’s fault. For some reason the electorate votes time and again for crooks. Politicians exploit ethnic differences not just to win the backing of ethnic groups but because it divides the electorate and makes them less able to hold politicians to account.

He calls on educated Nigerians to rouse themselves from their cynicism and ‘bestir themselves to the patriotic action of proselytising for decent and civilised political values’ (p.74). Here is where Achebe makes it clearest that he is primarily addressing Nigeria’s intelligentsia or educated class, rather than the people at large. As a matter of interest, I wonder what percentage of the total population this amounts to? 1%? It’s the narcissism of all academics, graduates, people in the media, the commentariat and so on to believe that they represent ‘the nation’.

Achebe hoped that, when democracy was restored in 1979, Nigeria would have learned from the ruinous civil war and a decade of military rule but no, the country just started making the same old mistakes all over again.

We have turned out to be like a bunch of stage clowns who bump their heads into the same heavy obstacles again and again because they are too stupid to remember what hit them only a short while ago. (p.76)

In my opinion this is a profoundly wrong way of thinking about politics. It is a commentator’s mindset, expecting that because series of events A took place which you, personally, disapproved of and learned from, that therefore everyone will have ‘learned’ from it and avoid repeating it. No.

But politics and political commentary are just the narcissistic froth bobbing on the deep slow-moving forces of geography, climate, agriculture, technology, social changes, the economy and the social realities stemming from them – such as widespread poverty, illiteracy, lack of housing, amenities, education, lack of experience working in factories (sounds trivial but cited by Paul Collier as a prime cause of poverty in the poorest countries) or of creating a civil life without universal corruption: the granular structures which actually make up a country, these are almost impossible to change.

Achebe professes himself disappointed because he thought that during the decades since Independence ‘an enlightened electorate’ would have come into being – by which he, like thousands of liberal commentators in countries round the world, meant an electorate who thinks like him.

But electorates around the world consistently don’t think like the tiny percentage of the population which enjoyed a liberal college education thinks they ought to think. Trump. Brexit. Erdoğan. Bolsonaro. Milei. The continuing success of authoritarian populists don’t prove that electorates are ‘wrong’ – all they do is highlight the gulf between liberal commentators and the populations and countries they claim to know about or speak for.

The chapter is the longest in the book because Achebe goes into some detail about political developments between the end of military rule / the advent of the second republic in 1979, and the time of writing i.e. 1983. This section assumes familiarity with leading figures in Nigerian politics and their careers to date which I didn’t have, so I struggled to follow it.

What it does convey to the outsider is the central importance of ethnicity or at least regional allegiance in Nigeria’s politics. He discusses figures like Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo entirely in terms of the ethnic groups they represented and promoted. There isn’t anywhere in this final section anything about these politicians’ economic or social policies. They don’t appear to have had any except to bring home the loot to their region, for ‘their’ people. Here’s a typical passage:

Professor Eyo Atik was an Efik, and the brutally unfair treatment offered him in Enugu did not go unremarked in Calabar. It contributed in no small measure to the suspicion of the majority Igbo by their minority neighbours in Eastern Nigeria – a suspicion which far less attractive politicians than Eyo Ita fanned to red-hot virulence, and from which the Igbo have continued to reap enmity to this day. (p.82)

See what I mean by not a hint of any actual policies, and how political figures are interpreted 100% in the context of their tribal allegiances? 1) Invoking tribalism i.e. getting your tribe to support you and vilifying opponents in terms of their tribal enmity, and 2) offering to bring home the bacon to your people i.e. divert profitable state funding, new roads, water, electricity, factories etc to your region – these remain the two easiest ways to drum up support among a largely illiterate electorate. They are the tried and tested routes to power and success, to personal wealth and prestige, so why on earth would any practical politician ignore them? University professors of literature like Chinua Achebe can write all the pamphlets they like but will ever change that.

Instead, people like Achebe are doomed to perpetual disappointment that ‘the people’ just don’t seem to be educated enough to share their enlightened point of view. But they never will be. This is the sentence of perpetual frustration which every intellectual in a mass democracy is condemned to. In old-fashioned Marxist terms, the bourgeois intellectual, depressed by his complete alienation from the masses, is stuck on the outside of the historical process, tutting and disapproving, and completely ineffectual because unattached to anything like a mass party which could actually change anything.

Contemporary Nigeria

Here’s the view of Africa scholar John Philips writing in Africa Studies Review in 2005:

Nigeria remains one of the most important and fascinating countries in Africa, with abundant human and material resources. If these could be harnessed effectively, Nigeria could easily become one of the most influential countries in the world. The country has played a leadership role in everything from the liberation of southern Africa to the formation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union, and the attempted stabilization of Liberia and other states in the region.

The decline of Nigeria, although not as severe as the decline and even collapse of other states in Africa, has saddened all who love her and disheartened all who had hoped for great things from independent Africa. Today Nigeria is better known for the ‘scam spam’ that clutters up internet mailboxes around the world than for its great authors, musicians, and other creative people.

Massive investments in industry have failed to industrialise the country; the hope of post-Biafra, oil-boom Nigeria has given way to cynicism, corruption, and despair. The great religiosity of Nigerians has become less a call to righteousness than a reason to murder followers of other religions. Who can ponder Confucius’s famous statement that ‘the material prosperity of a country does not consist in material prosperity, but in righteousness’ without thinking of Nigeria? Understanding the decline, if not quite yet fall, of Nigeria is one of the most important tasks facing Africanist scholars today.

Here are responses from readers on Amazon (I know it’s not scholarly opinion, but they often come from people with a special interest in the subject i.e. actual Nigerians):

Although the book is relatively old (published 1983) it continues to be distressingly relevant to the actual Nigeria. Military dictators have disappeared (again) and been replaced by democratically-elected presidents (again), but this has had little effect on the basic problems identified by this book. The author says things that only a Nigerian could get away with – and says them well, as you would expect of Achebe.

it was written in 1983 but all the issues & failures he highlights are just as relevant in 2008.

Nigerians know all about the trouble but still cannot figure out a solution and Achebe tried to sketch a route past the troubles. But alas, it is no casual ‘trouble’, it is a deeply-seated neurosis. The sad reality is that even over 3 decades later not much has changed in Nigeria – if anything it has changed for the worse in some ways – despite the passing of leadership from the illegitimate military rulers to elected civilians. Nigeria’s ruling class treat the country as an all-you-can-eat buffet while unconnected citizens are viewed as destitute serfs outside the gates. (Chris Emeka, 2014)

Material facts

As anyone familiar with my blog knows I enjoy intellectual activity and products, art and literature, very much indeed, but my belief system is based on an atheistic materialist view of the world, on the bedrock of material facts, on the biological realities of the body, on the theory of evolution, on the unpleasant realities of humans’ complete reliance on a viable environment.

People’s opinions are as changeable as their moods, even the best commentator’s interpretation is based on partial understanding, whereas the material facts can be measured and recorded. I’m not necessarily saying they’re the most important aspects of life, but objective, material facts are generally the decisive ones.

For example, you can have the most poetic thoughts in the world but if someone cuts off your head with a machete that’s the end of them. You can write reams about your splendid homeland and its historic destiny, but it’s not your fancy words, it’s the availability of food, water and energy which will determine its future. Thus:

Although it was published in 1983, all the commentators point out that the issues Achebe addressed in 1983 still challenge Nigeria in 2023. The most tangible difference is that in 1983 Nigeria’s population was 80 million and now it’s nearly three times that, at 223 million. By 2050 the population is predicted to reach 400 million. If the trend isn’t stopped, it will exceed 728 million by 2100.

Given that much agricultural and coastal land is set to be lost to climate change and environmental degradation over the same period, it’s hard not to conclude that Nigeria’s future will be catastrophic.

John Oyefara, a professor of demography at the University of Lagos, is quoted as saying that unless this unprecedented population explosion is properly managed ‘there will be more crises, insurgency, poverty and insecurity.’ It’s difficult to detect the hand of Providence, history, high destiny or ‘mankind’s advancement’, of any of the windy highfalutin’ terms Achebe opened his essay with, in any of this.

Solutions

Achebe’s pamphlet is great fun, exuberantly written, eminently quotable and quite useless. Practical solutions can only be found in the complex economic and social analyses provided by the likes of:

Credit

The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe was published in 1983 by The Fourth Dimension Publishing Company. References are to the 2010 Penguin Books paperback volume ‘An Image of Africa.’

Related links

  • The Trouble with Nigeria online [I can’t find an online version which is not only irritating but reprehensible. It’s a text of great public interest, surely it should be freely available]
  • 2006 interview with Achebe
  • Guardian Nigeria page

Chinua Achebe reviews

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Posted by Simon on January 26, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/26/the-trouble-with-nigeria-chinua-achebe/

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)

‘A man who lives on the banks of the river Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.’
(Traditional Igbo proverb, No Longer At Ease, chapter 1)

‘Na so did world be.’
(Igbo proverb, p.230 and elsewhere)

Chinua Achebe’s second novel is closely linked to the first, Things Fall Apart. The protagonist of that book was Okonkwo, a big man in the village of Umuofia, of the Igbo people in what would later become south-east Nigeria. Three-quarters of Things Fall Apart depicts the culture and practice of the Igbo people in the 1890s; the final quarter depicts the slow but unstoppable arrival of British colonial rule bringing with it European religion, administration, law and order, and showing the adverse affect these had on traditional Igbo culture and on Okonkwo in particular.

This second novel leaps forward about 60 years, to the late 1950s, to describe the life of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi Okonkwo. In Things Fall Apart one of the many ill effects of the arrival of the British was that Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye, converted to Christianity and moved out of the district altogether, changing his name to Isaac, betraying his heritage and rejecting his (often violent) father. We are told that Nwoye moved to the nearest big town, Umura, where he enrolled in teacher training college. Well, the protagonist of this book, Obi, Okonkwo, is Nwoye’s son (page 159; his mother is named Hannah Okonkwo, p.158).

An executive summary is pretty simple. Obi is a smart young man who gets the opportunity to study law in Britain. After graduating, Obi returns to his native Nigeria and gets a job in the public administration. Here he is shocked to discover that local government, already, before independence (which came in 1960), is mired in corruption.

In various ways, Obi’s attempts at honesty are rebuffed or mocked. He meets a young woman and falls in love, sharing with her the moral dilemmas he is faced with. Just paying to maintain his status, for example, paying the insurance on his car, stretch his resources. then his mother falls ill and needs medical treatment. Then he gets his girlfriend pregnant and has to pay for an abortion. The bank start pressing him about his ever-growing overdraft. Obi starts accepting bribes. The climax comes when he accepts one from an undercover policeman and is subsequently arrested, charged and taken to court for bribery.

The novel opens at the end of the plot, with Obi in court on trial for corruption and the narrative takes the form of flashbacks, back to all the moments which led up to him standing in court, broken and demoralised.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 describes responses to Obi’s arrest and trial. White colonials (notably Obi’s boss, Mr Green) are depicted as dismissing all Africans as corrupt. He and his cronies are described drinking and pompously laughing at the exclusive white men’s club, served by discreet black stewards.

By complete contrast we are then introduced to the Umuofia Progressive Union, formed 6 or 7 years earlier (i.e. about 1950) by men from Obi’s village of Umuofia, with a view to subsidising the education of the best and brightest among them (p.157).

Obi was the first candidate chosen under this scheme and had been loaned £800 to study in England, to be repaid over 4 years after his return – and now here he is, on trial, bringing shame on his village and clan, harshly criticised by some in the Union. In fact, he had already outraged many in the Union, years earlier, by changing the subject he studied in England from the (useful) Law to (useless) English (p.158).

The narrative then moves further back in time to the big prayer meeting held in Umuofia and hosted by his father, the retired Christian catechist, where Obi is toasted as the pride of the community and given blessings and presents and advice for his trip, first to Lagos, then to London.

Chapter 2

Stories about big city Lagos told by soldiers who’d fought for the British in the Second World War, when they returned to Umuofia. En route to the UK, Obi looks up a friend from his school, Joseph Okeke (‘a second class clerk’), who briefs him about life in the big city.

Then the scene cuts to four years later, with Obi returned from the UK and living in Lagos, now attached to his girlfriend, Clara, and discovering seedier, poorer slums of the city which he hadn’t seen on his brief stay en route to England.

Quite quickly we are immersed in Obi’s post-British life in Lagos, complete with girlfriend Clara Okeke who is a nurse, puts up with Obi reading his poems, prefers to go to trashy violent American movies. His friend Christopher, a graduate from the London School of Economics. They have long arguments about the future of Nigeria and the role of bribery already present in the black administration.

Chapter 3

The reader is getting used to the narrative jumping around in time. Now we leap back to when Obi and Clara first met, at a dance in St Pancras Town Hall in London. Obi was clumsy and gauche. Eighteen months later they meet by chance on the boat back to Nigeria, the MV Sasa, sailing from Liverpool.

Evocative description of the sea journey, companions at dinner, the changing moods of the sea. Obi has bad sea sickness and formerly aloof Clara is kind enough to give him some pills for it. Obi becomes firm friends with a white man, John Macmillan (p.172). They discover they’re both 25 years old.

The ship docks at Funchal, largest city in the Madeira islands. Obi, John and Clara explore the city together. That evening, back on board ship, they have their first kiss.

Chapter 4

On arriving at Lagos a local official tries to extract a £5 import duty on Obi’s radiogram. It’s a symbolic re-introduction to African corruption. ‘Dear old Nigeria,’ he said to himself (p.176).

The officials of the Umuofia Progressive Union arrange a grand gala reception for the prodigal son. We learn his first name is actually Michael, Michael Obi Okonkwo (p.177). The scene is played for laughs (I think) with a big discrepancy between Obi’s informal approach (dressing in shirtsleeves, delivering an informal speech about education) which contrast strongly with the shirt and tie formality of the Union’s officials and a grandiose speech about obi representing their village in the Great Future of the Country etc.

After the reception his friend Joseph takes him to a bar for a drink. Obi wants to eat traditional Nigerian food but finds it impossible to order. Nobody with ambition eats the old-style food (roast yams and bitter-leaf soup).

A flashy car draws up outside the club and out gets the super-popular, handsome and well-groomed politician the Honourable Sam Okoli. Happening to be in a chair facing that way, Obi sees he has a female companion in his flash car. It is Clara.

Bribery and corruption

In the 20 or so books about post-independence Africa I’ve read this year, corruption emerges as such a consistent universal feature of African states and economies that you eventually realise it is the system, the way things are run and managed from the lowest to the highest levels, while the fol-de-rol about democracy or transparent governance etc are formal hoops African leaders have to jump through in order to get their next tranche of World Bank loans, half-mocking lip service paid to western banks.

So this book is a fascinating insight into how the issue of corruption was perceived, discussed and addressed by Africans at the time of independence, over 60 years ago. Just the fact that Achebe chose to make the topic a central theme of his second book, with repeated discussions of it by the characters, is itself hugely revealing. Regarded just as documentary evidence for social history, it’s a fascinating body of evidence. I was riveted by passages like this:

In Nigeria the government was ‘they’. It had nothing to do with you or me. It was an alien institution and people’s business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble. (p.178)

Chapter 5

Obi writes a paper expressing his view that corruption is caused by the older generation and will be stamped out once a new, young generation of university graduates like himself rise to the top. He interviews for a job in the civil service, led by a white man who is happy to discuss recent literature with Obi (recent literature including Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of The Matter’). This man asks him point blank if he wants to the job (Secretary to the Scholarship Board) so he can take bribes? Obi is understandably furious but also demoralised that this is the universal and low expectation of even educated young Nigerians (cf. p.212 where Joseph’s friends simply expect Obi to take bribes).

While waiting to hear the result, Obi takes a ‘mammy-wagon’ i.e. a packed bus, the 500 miles from Lagos to Umuofia.

On the way corrupt policemen pull them over for a bribe. Obi watches the driver about to pay and both participants shy away from being directly witnessed. This only leads to the driver motoring a bit further on then stopping and running back to pay the policemen. Instead of the standard 2 shillings the bribe is jacked up to 10 shillings. Everyone in the car blames Obi for his goody two shoes, over-educated fussiness which has only ended up making them worse off. Obi despairs of wiping out corruption. Educating the masses would take centuries. It has to come from changing the people at the top. Maybe a benign dictator.

An enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? (p.186)

This book was published in 1960, just as Nigeria gained independence, six years before it had its first military coup in 1966. To date there have been five military coup d’états in Nigeria. Between 1966 and 1999 Nigeria was ruled by a military government apart from the short-lived Second Nigerian Republic of 1979 to 1983 = 29 years of military rule.

The mammy wagon arrives at the famous market town of Onitsha, allowing Obi to wander round it and Achebe to slip in a description of it, before he completes the last 50 miles to Umuofia. There’s a heartfelt passage, which feels very autobiographical, on how lonely Ibo felt in London, and how he felt like a cultural traitor, studying the language of the colonist, instead of his own culture.

Back in the village he is greeted by a great assembly, featuring his father the Christian but plenty of village elders who have refused to become Christians, and speak and think in the old ways, sitting on goatskin, unable to imagine a ship which sails the oceans, only able to conceive of Obi’s trip as a voyage to the land of the spirits. The old culture lives on very powerfully in Umuofia.

Pidgin

Many of the characters, the minor uneducated ones, appear to speak pidgin English. It feels like this novel is a good source of information about the state of pidgin in 1950s Nigeria, but I am too uneducated / ignorant of the subject to comment.

Christopher’s prowess at pidgin i.e. being able to switch between English, Igbo and pidgin to suit the company, time and situation (p.238).

Chapter 6

When everyone else has left, an intimate portrait of Obi’s family, his mother, father, brother, six sisters (p.196). His father, Isaac, is officious and bossy about his Christian faith in a way reminiscent of his tyrannical father, Okonkwo. Isaac forbade his wife, Obi’s mother, Hannah, to tell her children the old folk stories (p.197). Obi remembers being a boy at the village school and humiliated because when called on by the teacher to stand before the class and tell a folk story, he couldn’t. He went home in tears and told his mother. She said wait till your father goes to his next evening prayer meeting, then she told Obi a folk tale. Then he was able to tell it in school. These all feel like pure autobiography of Achebe whose father was a teacher and evangelist. Achebe’s father took the Christian name Isaiah; Obi’s father takes the Christian name Isaac.

It’s difficult to convey how candid and moving these passages are. No great excitement, no arguments, no historical moments, just a sense of the warmth and companionableness of a large family who enjoy teasing and entertaining each other. Made me jealous.

Chapter 7

He remembers the second white man he saw, a Mr Jones who was a school inspector 20 years previously i.e. about 1937 (in fact, later in the text the narrator dates it to 1935, p.235). Mr Jones was tall and drove a big motorbike which he left half a mile from the school so he could arrive unannounced and detect faults. How he interrupted the black headmaster, Mr Nduka and then, in his rage, slapped him. How Mr Nduka was an expert wrestler and in a flash had Mr Jones on the floor in a wrestling hold. How all the children fled in terror.

Obi presumably passed his interview because we now see him starting h is first job, in government administration. His boss is the rude Mr Green, while his immediate manager is the old and cowering African, Mr Omo, who has bad teeth and can only speak pidgin.

As a new senior civil servant Obi is awarded a clothing allowance and a car. He phones Clara who is thrilled. he discovers the Honourable Sam Okoli has no designs on Clara, in fact is soon to marry her best friend. Sam lives in a massive house. There was controversy when the government blew £35,000 on each new house for its ministers. He shows off to Clara and Obi his gramophone and tape machine. He has immaculate flunkeys to wait on him. All this before independence. You can see why post-colonial critics accuse the Europeans of establishing a template of gross inequality between governors and governed which the African ruling classes simply copied.

Clara tearfully tells Obi she can’t marry him because she is an osu, a kind of Igbo version of the Indian ‘untouchable’, from a family which devoted itself to a particular tribal god and became outcasts (defined on pages 207, 208 and 256). Obi, as an educated man, consider all this gibberish, insists that he will marry her, buys an engagement ring.

The friend in Lagos, Joseph Okeke, whose place he’s still staying at, argues with him, saying his parents, Christians though they may be, will reject an osu as a bride, specially for the local boy made good Obi. (Later Clara says she doesn’t like Joseph because ‘he’s a bushman’ i.e. uneducated, close to the old tribal rural ways, p.237.)

The first educated Nigerian generation

Sprinkled through the book are references to the idea that they – Obi, Clara, Joseph et al – belong to the new young generation, they are going to do things a new way, not just re. corruption, but bringing western education, standards of behaviour etc, in exactly such things as this ridiculous superstition about osu. But some of them are aware that, being a pioneer generation means they can’t change everything at once. For example, his educated friend Christopher coming down on his parents’ side, regarding Clara:

‘You may say that I am not broad-minded but I don’t think we have reached the stage where we can ignore all our customs.’ (p.264)

Chapter 8

We learn the years is 1956 because the Umuofia Progressive Union holds its next meeting on 1 December 1956 (p.212). You can see why the UPU exists, to promote the interests of men from the village who have moved to the big city and have formed what is in effect s self-help group. But you can also see how it itself fits into the matrix of corruption in the sense that, having got ‘one of theirs’ into a good government job, they expect him to speak up for his clansmen and use his influence to get them jobs and money.

In the event Obi makes a gracious speech and a good impression until the President of the UPU (‘the father of the Umuofia people in Lagos’) very mildly starts to refer to Clara as bad company. He had barely hinted at her osu background (‘a girl of doubtful ancestry’) when Obi, trembling with fury, leaps to his feet, shouts abuse at the President and, despite plenty of voices telling him to calm down, storms out of the meeting and has his driver roar off.

Having just read Things Fall Apart I see that Obi has inherited the fiery temper which characterised and was the downfall of his grandfather, Okonkwo.

Chapter 9

At his new work Obi is given an office with Mr Green’s secretary, Miss Marie Tomlinson. She seems to be sweet and friendly although Obi suspects her of being a spy set to catch him out.

Obi has been back from Britain for 6 months when he is first tempted by a bribe. An inoffensive looking man named Mr Mark offers him a bribe to give preferential treatment to his daughter. Obi chases him out of the office, not least because Miss Marie Tomlinson has witnessed the entire thing.

Obi is as proud of himself for resisting temptation as he was after he lost his virginity (to a white woman in England, p.220).

Money pressure. Obi is paid a monthly salary of £47 ten shillings, but from this he is paying back his loan from the UPU at £20 a month, and sending £10 to his parents, and promised his father, on his visit back to Umuofia, that he would pay his younger brother, John’s, school fees.

That evening Mr Mark’s 17 or 18 year old sister, Elsie Mark (p.222) knocks on his apartment door. He kindly invites her in and she tells her sad story, that the family spent all their money on her elder brother who failed all his exams, so now it’s desperately important that she goes to university in order to get a good job with lots of money to support her family and she’ll do anything to get a recommendation from Obi in his capacity as Secretary to the Scholarship Board. I think the implication is she is prepared to sleep with him but at this moment Clara bursts through the front door, bridles when she sees the girl, helps herself to a drink from the fridge, asks about the soup she made for Obi and generally makes it crystal clear that he is her man. But she needn’t have bothered. The poor young girl is humiliated. Obi kindly offers to run her back into town (taxis are expensive) and all the way back Clara gives him a hard time.

Chapter 10

A year later the insurance on Obi’s car is due, £40. He only has £13 in the bank. Not least because he sent his mother £35 to be given private medical treatment. Then there’s his electricity bill. And the tyres have gone and need renewing.

He decides he has to take out a £50 overdraft with the bank. Which all leads to an argument with Clara. Her way of arguing is to go completely silent and, since she does most of the talking, creating a great silence, which eventually intimidates Obi into capitulating.

Chapter 11

Obi’s speculation about Mr Green, who works very hard at the job but, Obi thinks, for a vision of Nigeria which doesn’t exist, for the Nigeria of his western colonialist dreams. Clara sends a package via a messenger from her hospital, which contains £50. Obi goes to see her, to tell her he can’t accept it. They argue about it.

Obi and Clara go to see his friend, Christopher the economist, and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, who persuade them to go dancing at the Imperial Hotel. Interesting description of dancing styles to high-life music. When they emerge from the bar in the early hours it’s to discover that someone’s broken into Obi’s car and stolen the box with Clara’s £50 in it.

Chapter 12

Mr Green is depicted as a bigot who, despite having ‘served’ in the country for 15 years, makes a point of telling everyone that all Africans are corrupt and lecturing Obi on his fellow ‘educated’ Nigerians who expect the Government to pick up the tab for their lives.

He’s obviously meant to be a narrow-minded bigot but I couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for him, as I did for the bigoted ex-pats in Ronan Bennett’s novel about Congo at the time of independence, The Catastrophist. On the face of it they’re illiberal bigots except that they turn out to predict the future (political chaos, violent secessions, civil war, white flight) with perfect precision, while the sympathetic liberal characters, who hoped for the best, turn out to be completely wrong.

Mr Green is more obnoxious than that, he goes out of his way to be offensive and insulting. He’s an arse, basically. But there’s enough truth mixed up in his prejudice to make him an interestingly complicated character.

Obi receives a letter from his father saying his mother requires further medical treatment.

Then he has a day with friend Christopher going to chat up two Irish Catholic girls he knows, then onto Bisi’s place, then to his latest girlfriend’s, Florence. Obi tells him about the girl, Elsie Mark, who appeared to offer herself in order to win a scholarship. She got it anyway and is studying in England, now. Christopher calls him a fool for turning down sex with her. She probably slept with the rest of the Board. Maybe, Obi says, but can’t he see how corrupt it is. They go out for dinner and argue about definitions of bribery late into the night.

Chapter 13

February 1957 (p.249). Clara again tells him she wants to break off the engagement. She says it’s because his parents will disapprove. He reassures her, they kiss, they make love.

Obi takes a week’s leave back home. He explains how villagers like his expect the local boy who made good in the big city to shower them with largesse except that, as we’ve seen, he’s actually broke (specially as he’s just paid John’s fees for one term, £16 ten shillings), so that’s a problem (p.251).

When he gets to Umuofia he discovers his mother is very weak and ill and old, with hands like claws. He tries to contain his sorrow. Performers from a funeral pass by and stop to serenade them. His mother likes music, ‘even when it was heathen music’.

Chapter 14

Still on this week’s leave at his village, Obi finally has the conversation about Clara with his father. His father tells him point blank he cannot marry Clara. They debate it, Obi saying it’s ridiculous superstition and will have disappeared in ten years’ time, his father insisting he will curse himself, his sons and daughters, their sons and daughters, for generations to come. In a funny way Obi enjoys the argument because he feels he is engaging with his father in a way he never has before, in all his 26 years (p.257).

The next morning he is up early to attend family prayers led by his father. Then he is alone with his very sick mother who horrifies him by telling him that if he marries an osu she will kill herself and he will have her blood on his hands!

Obi retires to his bed, claiming to be too tired from the long journey to see anyone, which neighbours and people who’ve come to visit consider a great insult. In the evening his father comes quietly into his bedroom but instead of discussing the osu issue, Obi’s father tells him about how he rebelled against his father and how his father cursed him, and all his life he’s lived under this shadow.

Chapter 15

Obi drives the 500 kilometres all the way back to Lagos in one go, without stopping, nearly crashing into a mammy-wagon on the way. He washes, changes, goes to Clara’s apartment, tells her about his mother, tries to make it sound like a small impediment which can be fixed, but Clara says ‘I told you so’ and hands him back her engagement ring (p.263). Then she lowers her voice and says there was something else she wanted to tell him, but…she’ll sort it out herself. Presumably she means she’s pregnant.

Obi drives to see his friend Christopher who 1) takes his parents’ side, saying he personally would never marry an osu; and 2) he can get him the addresses of some abortionists, though again he personally thinks it’s the woman’s responsibility, not least because you can never be sure whether you’re the father.

The first doctor they go to see is an old guy who refuses point blank to perform an abortion. The second one is much younger and demands £30 in cash. Both ask Obi why doesn’t he simply marry her?

Chapter 16

Obi sweats about where to get the money, rejecting the options of a moneylender, his friends let along the President of the Umuofia Union. He settles on the smooth and handsome and rich Honourable Sam Okoli.

At 2pm the next day Obi is at the clinic and hands the doctor £30 in cash. The doctor tells Clara to stay and Obi to return at 5pm. Obi goes out and gets into his parked car, watches Clara exit the clinic and get into the doctor’s car and they drive away. After a few seconds Obi panics and lurches after them. He’s too late but he drives all over Lagos like a mad thing trying to find them.

At 5pm he’s back at the clinic but the doctor is alone, telling him he wants to keep Clara in overnight in case of complications. Next day Obi’s back at the clinic and pushes past the nurse and all the waiting patients to see the doctor. The doctor very casually says Clara had a few complications but is now at a private clinic being looked after by a colleague of his. Obi races over to the address he gives him, and is told Clara is seriously ill and cannot see visitors.

Chapter 17

Next morning Obi is back at work and the last thing he needs is the poisonous bigot Mr Green criticising the number of holidays Nigerians treat themselves too etc. He had gone to see Clara at the hospital but when she spotted him she simply turned to the wall. All the other patients saw this. Obi has never felt so humiliated.

His finances are pressing. He wants to pay Clara back the £50 that was stolen. He goes see Mr Omo about his advance. I didn’t understand this. I think he got an advance for his visit back to his parents in Umuofia but didn’t realise it was a loan and had to be paid back, retaining a sum calculated according to mileage. He does the sums and discovers he can only claim for £15 for his drive to and from Umuofia. He’ll have to lie and say he went further, say to Cameroon.

When Obi considers the total situation, he realises it’s the burden of having to pay £20 back to the Union which is screwing his finances. He decides to unilaterally stop paying it, without telling them.

He writes and rewrites a long self-extenuating letter to Clara but can’t get the tone right. Yes, great at quoting T.S. Eliot, but rubbish at managing his job, finances and relationships. Portrait of a callow young man.

Chapter 18

Clara is in hospital for five weeks then goes on 70 days sick leave without contacting him. Then he gets a demand from the Revenue for income tax £32. Then his mother dies and, although he sends money, it isn’t enough to pay for an impressive funeral, which is noted by the entire town, and reported back to the UPU in Lagos. An avalanche of troubles and failures.

By this stage it is clear Obi is a man crushed by a combination of circumstances rather than any particular Grand Flaw. Early on in the novel he had argued with the white man who interviews him for his job that tragedy isn’t a matter of one Grand Event which brings closure and satisfaction to all concerned. Real tragedy is the daily grinding down of people by circumstances. You can see how that speech was inserted as a comment on this entire narrative.

The vexing thing is, of course, that everybody misinterprets his actions. We hear a load of speeches at the Union from old timers who’ve seen it happen all-too-often, the young man who gets an education, moves to the big city, is seduced by the sweets of sin i.e. women, and forgets his family, his village and the old ways. They are like the Chorus of a Greek tragedy, or Achebe’s reimagining of a Greek tragedy as one of grinding crushing circumstances rather than a grand climax.

His work gives him leave, he goes home, cries his eyes out and sleeps like a baby. Then Joseph, the ‘bushman’, arrives with a crate of beers to be put in the fridge, and then in groups about 25 of the UPU arrive at Obi’s flat. Joseph may be a ‘bushman’ but he understands his people better than Obi. The arrivals condole with Obi who is genuinely touched, then get on with gossiping about news and current affairs.

The indictment of a young man who doesn’t respond appropriately to his mother’s death reminded me of Albert Camus’s novel The Outsider.

‘Poor mother!’ he said, trying by manipulation to produce the right emotion. But it was no use. The dominant feeling was of peace. (p.280)

Chapter 19

Suddenly the novel ends. Just four more pages, in which Obi feels as if he’s been through the wringer, been through the fire, and emerged new-forged.

It is the season when students applied for their scholarships. Obi has brought a lot of the paperwork home. A flash car pulls up in front of his apartment block. A confident flash man enters his flat and proffers £50 cash if Obi will recommend his son for the scholarship to study in Britain. He goes on to say they ought to become friends, and he will nominate him to become a member of Lagos’s premier club. Then he walks out ignoring Obi’s feeble protestations. The money lies there all the rest of the day and the night while Obi agonises.

In a few swift paragraphs we cut to a scene of Obi dancing with a young girl who is on the short list of candidates. He manoeuvres her to the bedroom. They have sex though it isn’t in the event, very fulfilling. He drives her back to her place then drops round to friend Christopher’s to joke about it.

Obi has, in other words, been thoroughly corrupted. He pays off Sam Okoli who loaned him money, he pays off his bank overdraft. Then someone brings £20. He takes it but a few minutes later the same man returns with a police officer. They search Obi, find the marked notes and he is charged with corruption. The rest is like a dream, he sleepwalks through it in a daze.

And in a quick throwaway paragraph, Achebe brings us back to the very start of the novel with Obi standing in the dock, listening to a series of witnesses to his life saying none of them understand how a fine, upstanding man with all the privileges and perks of his fine education let himself sink to the blah blah blah.

High life music

In chapter 11 Obi and Clara, Christopher and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, go to the Imperial hotel where the band plays this song and the dancefloor is immediately packed.

It’s followed by ‘Gentleman Bobby’.

Music dates stories faster, more completely, than language. This novel is as old as this music and doesn’t the music sound dated, messages from another, more innocent world?

Thoughts

Corruption is the nominal central theme of the novel, as discussed above. But from this emerges the bigger one of the clash of cultures and values over this question of osu, a clash which remains as fierce and intractable as when the missionaries first arrived in Umuofia 60 years earlier. In this respect the novel paints a really persuasive, compelling portrait of the way the old African traditions not only lived on and continued to thrive but presented an ever-wider chasm with the values of ‘the modern world’. It is this clash which the novel really presents, with the power which comes from the slow patient accumulation of thousands and thousands of tiny details, of language and description and characterisation.

Then there’s sexual politics. Clara’s abortion nearly kills her. So no-one dies but Clara nearly does and the foetus does, victims of the failure of a traditional patriarchal society to join the modern world. Mind you, as so often, the real blocker to a rational solution is not Obi’s father, who is presented as almost a victim, a sensitive man who laboured under a lifelong curse – it’s his mother, the caring woman he thought he had a special bond with, who threatens to kill herself if he should marry an osu. He thinks he can talk his father round. With his mother’s absolute ban there can be no negotiation.

Achebe is great for all kinds of reasons, for being the first great African novelist, for his style, for his loyalty to his roots, for his phenomenal ability to completely immerse you in the African milieu. All the way through I was trying to put into words the thing which makes his books so immensely enjoyable, and I think it’s his sincerity. There’s no bullshit, contrivance or pretence, for effect. It feels like he’s giving you his own experiences, slightly tweaked to fit into a novel narrative, but without pretence or contrivance. You feel like you’re reading something really profound and true. Sounds silly but it’s almost an honour to read Chinua Achebe’s novels.

Conrad and Heart of Darkness p.235.

Credit

No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe was published in 1960 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 2010 Everyman’s Library hardback edition.

Related links

Chinua Achebe reviews

Africa reviews

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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2024

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The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

This book will offer plenty more suggestions for experimental improvements to Western assistance, but don’t expect a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.
(The White Man’s Burden, page 26)

The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top.
(p.94)

William Easterly (born 1957) is an American economist, specialising in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. Surprisingly for an American academic, he’s only written three books, all of them about development economics.

  • The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001)
  • The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)
  • The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014)

This was the second one and established him, as the title suggests, as a robust critic of the entire ideology of western aid to the developing world.

Background

Right at the end of 2005 the doyen of US development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote a book called ‘The End of Poverty’, an optimistic clarion call whose introduction by globally famous rock singer Bono helped propel it into the bestseller list. The book was timed to precede the G8 conference and summit held in Scotland in July 2005. The G8 leaders pledged to double 2004 levels of aid to poor nations from $25 billion to $50 billion by 2010, with half the money going to Africa

This book by William Easterly is by way of being a refutation of Sachs’s one. Very crudely, Sachs said we must give more aid, lots more aid to Africa – and Easterly says ‘oh no we shouldn’t’.

Easterly thinks the messianic save-the-world attitude of people like Sachs is perilously close to the old colonial assumption that We Know Best what to do for the natives.

Right at the start of the book he distinguishes between two types of foreign aid donors: ‘Planners’, who believe in imposing generalised, top-down, big plans on poor countries, and ‘Searchers’, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian romantics while Searchers are more realistic because they focus on piecemeal interventions.

Planners and Searchers

The basic binary or dichotomy idea is repeated countless times:

Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward.

Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions.

Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand.

Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.

Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom.

Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.

A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

Searchers have better incentives and better results.

Searchers could find ways to make a specific task—such as getting medicines to dying children—work if they could concentrate on that task instead of on Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure if the task didn’t work.

Foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The War on Terror

The new military interventions are similar to the military interventions of the cold war, while the neo-imperialist fantasies are similar to old-time colonial fantasies.

Military intervention in and occupation of a developing country show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in a non-western country. Iraq. Afghanistan.

The aid-financed Big Push is similar to the rationale behind the invasion of Iraq = we in the West know best, we’re going to show you how to run your country. With all the disastrous consequences Easterly’s book predicts for top down, Planner solutions.

Politico-philosophical traditions

Early on Easterly claims that his binary reflects the most basic one in politics, between Utopian revolutionaries and pragmatic reformers. The French Revolution epitomises the first, with its grand Plan to introduce liberty, equality and fraternity. Edmund Burke, father of modern conservatism, epitomises the latter, believing society is best improved by targeting specific identifiable abuses and implementing limited, focused solutions. Ad hoc reforms.

In practice, the latter is how all western democracies work, overflowing with Acts and Bills and Laws fixing this, that or the other issue unaddressed by the vast quantities of previous legislation on the subject. Incremental, reformist.

Capitalism versus communism

And then he related it to another world-size binary, that between capitalism and communism.

Communists believed top-down Big Planning would deliver utopia. Capitalists believe in bottom-up, ad hoc solutions, called businesses, markets. Following on from this is his description of the often overlooked but vital quality of economic freedom which we in the West enjoy without really being aware of it.

Economic freedom is one of mankind’s most underrated inventions, much less publicised than its cousin political freedom. Economic freedom just means unrestricted rights to produce, buy, and sell. Each of us can choose the things we want and not have somebody else decide what is best for us. We can also freely choose what we are going to sell and what occupation to choose, based on our inside knowledge of what we are best at and most like doing.

Easterly overflows with fluent, articulate ways of expressing really big ideas.

The conditions for markets

Property rights, contract enforcement, rule of law, corporate accountability.

On one level, as Easterly makes abundantly clear, he is defending free market capitalist solutions to poverty. But it’s more than that, because he is very well aware that free market capitalism, pure and simple, far from delivers utopia – witness America, the most capitalist society on earth and also the most inequitable (not to mention its vast prison population and violent crime levels).

No, once he’s delivered his broadside against Planners and for Searchers, against communism and for capitalism, Easterly very interestingly goes on to describe the complex matrix of prerequisites necessary for a functioning market and productive economy and the many, many ways these can fall short, be corrupted or undermined.

To put it another way, Easterly launches into a sequence of explanations of what is required to make democratic capitalist society work and these turn out to be numerous and complicated.

No cheating

There are a myriad ways for people to cheat each other in market exchanges. The avoidance of cheating requires a certain amount of social capital or, to put it more simply, trust. He cites studies which have shown a correlation between income and trust i.e. better off people are more trustworthy; poor people are likely to cheat. Hence well off, equal societies like the Scandinavian countries have high median incomes and very high levels of trust. By comparison Mexico is a ‘low trust’ country.

Social norms also seem to be stronger among rich people than among poor people, as a rich person loses more economic opportunities and income from social disgrace.

In better off countries people can rely on the law to enforce norms of honesty although, as anyone knows who’s been to law, it is still i) very expensive ii) tardy and slow iii) has an element of randomness involved, principally in the quality of your solicitor or barrister.

The poorer the country, the less able the majority of citizens are to go to law, and the more likely aspects of corruption will creep in.

Trust networks

There are two tried and tested ways to ensure standards of trust and honesty, working within family or ethnic groups. Family is obvious and the basis of networks of trade and business around the world. Within many societies specialisation in trading is particularly prominent in minority ethnic groups.

In pre-industrial Europe, it was the Jews. In East Africa, it’s the Indians. (Indians own almost all businesses in Kenya, although they make up only 1 percent of the population.) In West Africa, it is the Lebanese. In southern Africa, it is whites and Indians. Among indigenous African groups, often one dominates trading—the Bamileke in Cameroon, the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Hausa in West Africa, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Serahule in the Gambia. In Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese (the “bamboo network”) play this role.

It’s overflowing with concepts like this which he illustrates with detailed and fascinating examples, which entertain and shed light, expanding your understanding of the world we live in.

Mafias

Unfortunately, the down side of strong ethnic networks is they often have their own systems of enforcement, which easily slip into intimidation. The mafia we know about, also the triads which figure largely in Chinese business networks. Drug lords in Jamaica, the farflung Russian mafia. Most societies have criminal networks which enforce their own systems of justice, outside official systems.

Property rights

If you own property you can mortgage it or borrow against it to raise money to invest in business. My shaky understanding of the rise of western capitalism is that we pioneered unique and innovative concepts of property, developed over centuries of adaptation and common law, which enabled the development of the money-making machine we call capitalism.

One aspect of this was the invention of the limited liability company and the corporation, a type of entity. Obviously this takes you into a vast area of history of the evolution of companies, company law, and company law-breaking. Easterly gives some examples but doesn’t go into detail because all he needs is to demonstrate his basis thesis, that:

Property law in the United States, as with many other kinds of law, evolved as piecemeal solutions to deal with particular problems as they arose.

Meanwhile, ‘Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles’. He gives a detailed description of land ‘ownership’, among the Luo tribe in western Kenya.

The traditional system among the Luo was a complicated maze of swapping plots among kin and seasonal exchanges of land for labor and livestock. There were both individual and family rights in cultivated fields and free-grazing rights for the community after the harvest. Each household’s claim to land included many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops grew – not a bad system with which to diversify risk in an uncertain climate. The traditional land patron (weg lowo) would often give temporary land rights to the client (jodak). There were seasonal exchanges of ploughs and draft animals for land, or land for labour.

These may work in the context of their cultures but not many of them approach the objectivity and impersonality found in western concepts of property and companies. It’s small-time, localised.

Britain versus France

Interpreting everything in the light of his binary he applies it to the European traditions of law which he divides into two opposites. Britain good:

The common-law tradition originated in England and spread to British colonies. In this tradition, judges are independent professionals who make rulings on cases based on precedents from similar cases. The principles of the law evolve in response to practical realities, and can be adapted to new situations as they arise.

France bad:

The modern civil-law tradition originated under Napoleon, in France, and spread to French and Spanish colonies. (Spain was under the control of Napoleon at the time.) In this tradition, laws are written from the top down by the legislature to cover every possible situation. Judges are glorified clerks just applying the written law. This system of law lacks bottom-up feedback of the common law that comes from having cases determine law. As a result, the law is less well adapted to reality on the ground and has trouble adapting to new situations as technology and society change.

So:

The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and Uganda are examples of former British colonies that have well-developed property rights protection for their level of income. Algeria, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua are examples of former French or Spanish colonies that have poor property rights protection for their level of income.

Surely Easterly could add in the whole of South America, repeating the centuries-old comparison between the poverty and political instability of the Hispanic south and central America and the (relative) stability and astounding economic success of Anglophone North America. (In fact he rolls on into a section on the dire financial mismanagement of Mexico in the 1990s and makes very interesting points about the limitations of Latin American societies and economies throughout the book.)

The failure to westernise Russia

At the collapse of communism in Russia, in 1991, scads of western economists and consultants descended on Moscow with the aim of showing them commies how it’s done and helping them transition to western-style democracy and capitalism in one ‘Big Push’. Planner behaviour par excellence.

One example of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West. 43 who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct.

You can pass all the laws you like for the establishment of democracy and free markets but if the population they’re imposed on has no experience of either they will continue to behave according to the old ways, via networks of identity and obligation, through widespread ‘corruption’ and nepotism i.e. favouring family, tribe, clan, ethnicity and religious group first. Economic theorist Avinash Dixit’s research:

may help explain why the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union was such a disaster, and why market reforms in Latin America and Africa were disappointing. Even with severely distorted markets, the participants had formed networks of mutual trades and obligations that made the system functional at some level. Trying to change the rules all at once with the rapid introduction of free markets disrupted the old ties, while the new formal institutions were still too weak to make free markets work well.

The Russian people, especially managers of businesses and state industries, carried on ignoring the new capitalist rules in much the same way as they had ignored and circumvented the old communist rules. The Russian economy continued to be ineffective and corrupt. What keeps the Russian economy afloat is its huge reserves of oil and gas. In its dependence on a handful of basic commodities to sell to the rest of the world Russia is more like the petrostates of the Middle East and Africa than like a diversified, productive western economy.

Bad government

Anybody who wants to know about bad government in developing countries, particularly in Africa, should look no further than The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015) and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018).

Democracy works, but imposing democracy from the outside doesn’t.

Trying to impose it quickly failed in Russia, failed in Iraq, failed in most Arab countries after the Arab Spring, and has failed in most African countries where it has been imposed.

This is because democracy doesn’t start with elections every four or five years, but is the end point of a long, complex evolution of social norms and standards of behaviour. These standards are still undermined and not adhered to in many western countries; look at shameful recent events in the UK and America i.e. the Trump presidency and the hilarious incompetence of the Conservative Party. ‘Democracy’ is a kind of Platonic ideal which no individual country actually lives up to.

It is awfully hard to get democracy working well (p.128)

Thus the development of democracy, like that of free markets, in Easterly’s view, is something that evolves slowly over decades, centuries, to address specific social needs.

Just like markets, the functioning of democracy depends on the slow and bottom-up evolution of rules of fair play.

Democracy is an intricate set of arrangements that is far more than just holding elections.

Social norms may be the most difficult part of building a democracy – many poor countries are far from such norms. A staple of elections in many poor countries is to harass and intimidate the opposition so that they don’t vote.

What his account hints at but never quite states is that democracy might just never be the appropriate form of rule for most countries in the world. He hints as much in the section about oligarchies which explains that oligarchies i.e. the rule of a small class, generally a wealthy elite, will be economically effective for a certain period but will inevitably lead to stagnation. At some point an oligarchy realises that it has to make concessions to democracy i.e. the people, the majority of the population, in order to allow change and development, often driven by changing technologies and new economic patterns. Oligarchies stagnate and eventually acknowledge the need for change but the crux of the matter is the terms on which the oligarchy will concede power to the demos. The basis one is that it doesn’t want to give away too much of its power and too much of its money.

This explains the history of South America. All those countries were settled on the Spanish model of economic inequality – silver mines which required huge peasant labour, sugar plantations which required huge slave workforces, vast latifundia worked by big peasant workforces, with a small oppressed proletariat in the cities. A century or more of this established rule by a landed elite, that is their social model or norm.

Perpetual oligarchy is more likely in unequal agrarian or mineral societies than in more equal industrial societies, as Latin America demonstrated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.109)

But societies, technology, cultures and economies change and so Latin American societies see the recurrent pattern of repressive rule by an elite, which is eventually overthrown in a violent revolution which gives hope to the majority of social change and economic redistribution, which the oligarchies permit, up to a point, at which there is a violent counter-revolution i.e. military coup.

The Mexican revolution typifies one part of this see-saw, being a broad social rebellion against the entrenched rule of a narrow elite. The military coup against Allende in Chile represents the opposite end of the cycle, as the forces of money and privilege stepped in when Allende threatened to take away their money and power. South America’s challenge is getting beyond these violent mood swings to achieve the kind of middle class, social democrat stability epitomised by the Scandinavian countries, but this will always be hampered by the legacy of a large, poor, rural peasant class and, these days, by the huge numbers of the poor in the countries’ teeming slums.

Security from violence

This, of course, is a prerequisite for the development of any economy. Western aid will not do much good in a country mired in civil war. Violence is part of the human condition, well, the male human condition. One of the key causes of conflict in the past 70 years since the war has, of course, been ethnic, religious or tribal difference. All the conditions listed above for the development of either markets or democracy are void if your country is mired in conflict, worst of all a civil war.

Reasons why good government may not take hold

  • conflict
  • elite manipulation of the rules of the political game
  • landed wealth
  • weak social norms
  • the curse of natural resources
  • high inequality
  • corruption
  • ethnic nationalism and hatreds

Part 2. Aid in practice

What I’ve summarised so far is ‘Part 1: Why Planners cannot bring Prosperity’. Part 2 of the book, titled ‘Acting out the burden’ applies these ideas to the actual practice of administering foreign aid, finding the same sorts of conclusions. Easterly very frankly describes himself as one of the hordes of bureaucrats the by-now bloated aid industry:

We bureaucracies will devote effort more to activities that are more observable and less to activities that are less observable. By the same token, we bureaucrats will perform better when we have tangible, measurable goals, and less well when we have vague, ill-defined dreams. We will perform better when there is a clear link from effort to results, and less well when results reflect many factors besides effort. We will perform better when we have fewer objectives, and worse when we have many objectives. We will perform better when we specialize in particular solvable problems, and less well when we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less well when there is confusion about such wants. We will perform better when agents at the bottom are motivated and accountable, and less well when everything is up to the managers at the top. (p.157)

You need to set narrow, achievable targets. You need to listen to feedback from your customers, the poor.

Aid agencies are rewarded for setting goals, not for achieving them. Aid agencies and transnational organisations publish plethoras of reports every year. Incestuous and narcissistic these reports rarely feature the voices of the poor in the developing world. Instead they proliferate aims and goals and targets like bunnies, the vaguer the better. It actually has a name: ‘goal proliferation’.

The UN Millennium Project developed a framework in 2005 with the help of 250 development experts, commissioning thirteen reports from ten task forces. All this helped the project to come up with its framework, with its eighteen indicative targets for the eight MDGs, its ten key recommendations (which are actually thirty-six recommendations when you count all the bullet points), “a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented investment framework over 10 years,” seventeen Quick Wins to be done immediately, seven “main investment and policy clusters,” and ten problems to be solved in the international aid system. (p.164)

Western countries all too often make aid conditional on the promise it will be spent on donor country products and services. Or dependent on the recipient country’s aid in, for example, the War on Terror.

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

A chapter describing the origins, aims and achievements of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF needs to shed its excessive self-confidence that it knows in detail what is best for the poor, based on an analysis of the whole economy that shares the presumptions of utopian planning.

Easterly uses a fair amount of data and graphs. Here he assembles data showing that countries the IMF and World Bank have heavy involvement in tend to have disastrous political and economic records. Of course, you could argue this is because it’s precisely struggling or failing states which they ought to get involved in.

Chapter 7. The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

A chapter on AIDS which, like everything else he discusses, Easterly fits into the terms of his primal binary:

The breakdown of the aid system on AIDS…reflects how out of touch were the Planners at the top with the tragedy at the bottom, another sign of the weak power of the intended beneficiaries. It shows how ineffective Planners are at making foreign aid work. (p.213)

Among a blizzard of facts it contains the riveting statistic that money spent educating prostitutes to be hygienic and insist on condoms can save between 100 and a thousand times more lives than money spent on (very expensive) retroviral drugs once people have contracted HIV (p.227) and both are eclipsed by oral rehydration therapy which can save babies dying of diarrhea or vaccinating against measles.

Aid, like all political-economics, is about choices and trade-offs. Easterly thinks western governments and aid agencies are unduly influenced by high profile, image-led, televisable results, what he calls ‘the bias towards observability’ (p.322). Thus a statistic like ‘number of retroviral drugs sent to Uganda to treat x number of AIDS patients’ eclipses ‘number of children vaccinated against measles thus preventing a measles outbreak and saving an unknown number of children’.

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme I met pundits and theorists who discussed the need for a new imperialism i.e. many developing countries just can’t run themselves and that was in the late 1980s, over 30 years ago.

A decade later it had become a fashionable idea. In Empire Lite (2003) Michael Ignatieff said the West needed to have the courage of its convictions and take control of failing states for the good of their citizens. In Colossus (2004) Niall Ferguson says America should face up to its position as sole superpower and formalise its financial and military control, claiming that there is:

‘such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing…in many cases of economic ‘backwardness,’ a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state.’

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote an article advocating for more western intervention in failing states, thinking which influenced Tony Blair’s famous Chicago speech, a set of ideas which explain his enthusiastic support of George Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and overthrow the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.

Leaving aside the vast culture wars-style furore this would cause, there’s a simpler problem with this superficially attractive idea, which is that the Iraq fiasco proved that the West isn’t, in fact, up to the job.

One reason for this is clearly stated by Rory Stewart and various other commentators on the Iraq and Afghan debacles, namely that the old imperial powers were in it for the long term. Their administrators stayed for decades, got to know and love the local languages and cultures, probably exploited the locals and their resources, but also built schools, roads, railways, abolished slavery, tried to help women (banned suttee etc).

The commentators and analysts he cites talk about ‘postmodern imperialism’. Whatever it’s called, it reeks of the same top down, Planner mentality which came to ruin in Iraq and no just ruin, but laughable, ridiculous ruin.

As he says:

One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.

See America’s 20 year, one-trillion-dollar involvement in Afghanistan which reverted to Taliban rule before the last US troops had even left.

I found Easterly’s chapter on the legacy of European colonialism fascinating because its focus is on colonial incompetence rather than malice. The imperialists undermined traditional societies, imposed outside rulers, exacerbated tribal rivalries and drew preposterous borders mainly out of ignorance and stupidity. His detailed examples of blundering interference, destroying local cultures and rulers, embedding conflicts many of which are still with us today, are far more powerful and shaming than the  cheap and easy blanket accusation of ‘racism’.

This emphasis is, of course, because Easterly wants to draw the comparison with modern-day aid agencies, western governments, NGOs and so on who he accuses of comparable amounts of ignorance and outside interference ignoring the wishes and complex realities of the natives. So he presents an entertaining survey of imperial mistakes and cock-ups.

There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present day grief in the Rest. 1) First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. 2) Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. 3) Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.

He describes a detailed analysis he did with academic colleagues. They examined the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries.

Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy, government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunisation against measles, immunisation for diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, and supply of clean water.

They then did something interesting and amusing, which is calculate a value for how wiggly a state’s borders are, on the assumption that long straight borders indicate they were drawn on a map by ignorant colonial bureaucrats, whereas wiggly borders indicate older or more ethnically aligned borders.

We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunisation, and less access to clean water – all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.

Easterly gives extended descriptions of Congo, Palestine and the broader Middle East (Syria, Iraq), India and Sudan, in each case going into much detail to show how ruinous western involvement in each country was.

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

This brings us up to date with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then the Coalition Provisional Authority’s attempt to turn Iraq overnight into a free market capitalist system. Cheerleader of neo-liberal capitalism and post-modern imperialism, Niall Ferguson, is quoted again:

The United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defence budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded…

But Easterly then goes back before the Iraq adventure, back before the fall of communism to look at two case studies of American intervention during the Cold War, in Nicaragua and Angola, a country of ‘spectacular misery’ (p.277). He demonstrates how the West and America in particular never really understood the local history, culture and political dynamics of either country, and how their interventions (supporting the murderous Contra opposition to the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and the psychopath Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist MPLA government in Angola) resulted in decades of misery, extreme violence, unnecessary deaths and economic ruin.

This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

So, to summarise:

The pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson – don’t.

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

By contrast with the sorry record of weak states created by uninformed western bureaucrats, ruled by colonial exploiters and then abandoned to their fate in the 1960s, Easterly contrasts a series of nations which have done very well economically, rising to and sometimes superseding western levels of economic development and which were never colonised. The highest per capita growth rates in the world 1980 to 2002 were enjoyed by South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. What they have in common is they were never colonised but also, more Easterly’s point, found their own paths to economic success and had little or no western aid and intervention.

Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and Southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.

Whereas the bottom ten countries in the per capita growth league are all in Africa, are all former colonies, are all the recipients of massive amounts of western aid, which doesn’t seem to have helped them at all.

He has sections about two of the home-grown high-growth success stories, Singapore and Hong Kong, analysing the reasons for their success. Both were, in fact, British colonies but, crucially, ones where the British authorities were wise enough to leave the local merchants and businessmen to their own devices.

He then goes on to the two giants of Asia, China and India. China’s story is simple. It stopped being a backward country, and took a huge leap forward as soon as the ruling communist party replaced Mao’s repressive, ruinous tyranny with measured, controlled form of Chinese-style capitalism.

In the mid-2000s I worked at the UK Department for International Development for 18 months. On the first day, as I was being shown round, my guide made the frank and disconcerting point that over the past 20 years nearly half a billion people had been lifted out of poverty and it was absolutely nothing to do with western aid; it was entirely down to China adopting capitalism.

You could argue that China has developed a strange hybrid version of capitalism:

It is an unconventional homegrown success, failing to follow any Western blueprint for how to be modern. It combines lack of property rights with free markets, Communist Party dictatorship with feedback on local public services, and municipal state enterprises with private ones. (p.310)

But that plays right into Easterly’s thesis, which is that each country has to work out its own way to economic success, precisely by not having identikit western models (à la World Bank and IMF) forced on them.

After China and India, Easterly gives us 3 or 4 page summaries of the success of Turkey, Botswana and, surprisingly, Chile. I quote his conclusion at length because it’s an important, succinct summary of his position.

The success of Japan, China, the East Asian Tigers, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile is turning into a comic relic the arrogance of the West. Americans and Western Europeans will one day realise that they are not, after all, the saviours of ‘the Rest.’

Even when the West fails to ‘develop’ the Rest, the Rest develops itself. The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West only when it suits the Rest to do so.

Again, the success stories do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success. But we have seen in chapter 3 that creating free markets is itself difficult, and the success stories certainly don’t all fit some pristine laissez-faire ideal.

We know that gross violations of free markets and brutal self-aggrandizing autocrats usually preclude success. Beyond that breathtakingly obvious point, there is no automatic formula for success, only many political and economic Searchers looking for piecemeal improvements that overcome the many obstacles described in chapters 3 and 4.

Bottom-up, diverse, culture-specific, exploratory, open-minded, experimental, market-driven, are the characteristics of economic success in developing countries. Piecemeal solutions to defined problems. NOT the top-down, highly planned, centralised, vague and unspecific utopian visions of western aid donors.

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging. Discard your patronising confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries, or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naive institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

Aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development based on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that. Shorn of the impossible task of general economic development, aid can achieve much more than it is achieving now to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

He then gives examples of ground-up, localised interventions which have improved the lives of poor people, especially children, in Mexico, Kenya and India. He does a survey of small-scale interventions and also new methods of evaluation which he thinks could be replicated. Then a list of 6 basic principles which, again, I quote in their entirety so as to share the ideas and knowledge:

  1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
  2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
  3. Experiment, based on the results of the search.
  4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
  5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
  6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

And a restatement of his core position:

Aid won’t make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. Isn’t that enough?

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Since the turn of the century inequality has increased in all western countries, as the rich get richer, public services collapse, and the middle and working classes get poorer.

If we cannot ‘abolish poverty’ in our own countries, what kind of deluded hubris makes us think we can solve it in countries completely unlike ours, with wildly different cultures and traditions?

The fallacy is to assume that because I have studied and lived in a society that somehow wound up with prosperity and peace, I know enough to plan for other societies to have prosperity and peace.

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else.

The rules that make markets work reflect a complex bottom-up search for social norms, networks of relationships, and formal laws and institutions that have the most payoff.

To make things worse, these norms, networks, and institutions change in response to changed circumstances and their own past history. Political philosophers such as Burke, Popper, and Hayek had the key insight that this social interplay was so complex that a top-down reform that tried to change all the rules at once could make things worse rather than better.

In the section titled ‘You can’t plan a market’, he writes:

Introducing free markets from the top down is not so simple. It overlooks the long sequence of choices, institutions, and innovations that have allowed free markets to develop in the rich Western economies.

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change…Planners underestimated how difficult it is to get markets working in a socially beneficial way.

But, as Easterly indicates, the arrogance never stops, and each new generation of politicians wants to strut and swank upon the world stage, and pledge billions to ‘aid’ and ‘poverty reduction’, commissioning the same kinds of Grand Plan, which will spend hundreds of millions on western consultants and experts and advisers and banks and planners with, in the end, little or no permanent effect on most of the inhabitants of the poorest countries.

Conclusion about the book

It might be 15 years old but ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is like an encyclopedia of ideas and arguments, every page exploding with explanations and concepts told in a clear, punchy, often humorous style. It’s hugely enjoyable and massively enlightening.

Thoughts about the West

Easterly’s book, written in 2004 and 2005, comes from a position of confident superiority – I mean it takes for granted that the West is rich and has an obligation to sort out ‘the Rest’ i.e. the Third World, the developing world or the Global South, whatever the latest term is for the poorest countries.

But nearly 20 years later it feels to me like the whole picture has changed. I can’t speak for America but the fact that Donald Trump might be re-elected president tells you all you need to know about the state of its ‘democracy’ and its deeply divided society.

But as for the country I live in, Britain no longer feels like a rich country. For thirteen years it has been mismanaged by a Conservative party in thrall to the neoliberal mirage that Britain can ever be like America, that – if only the state could be reduced to a bare minimum, all state-provided services slashed to the bone, personal and corporate taxes significantly cut – then the British people’s inner capitalist would be set free, Free Enterprise would flourish and Britain would become a high-education, high-tech, 21st century economy like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

In pursuit of this grandiose delusion the Conservative Party has undermined all Britain’s social services,  sold off our utilities, privatised state industries, making Britain a poorer, dirtier, more polluted and miserable place for most of its inhabitants to live in, with most public services on the verge of collapse (English town halls face unprecedented rise in bankruptcies, council leaders warn).

Easterly takes it for granted that the West is rich and will continue to be rich, and is democratic and will continue to be democratic, so that we can continue to intervene in other countries from a position of stable superiority. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Easterly’s book amounts to a long list of all the elements which need to be in place to secure wealth and democracy and, the longer the list went on, the more nervous I became about its viability. Democracy seems so unnatural, so against human nature, requires such a concerted effort to maintain and, in the 15 years since the book was published, so many forces have arisen, within western countries themselves and her enemies abroad (Russia, to some extent China), which seek to actively undermine it, not least the forces of the authoritarian, nationalist right.

And then there’s global warming. Severe weather conditions are coming which threaten to permanently damage food and water supplies, make parts of the planet uninhabitable and uproot billions.

The net effect of this book was to terrify me at the fragility and uncertainty of western wealth and democracy. What if Vladimir Putin is correct and liberal democracy is doomed? Personally, I don’t think  he is, Putin said that for propaganda effect. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that liberal democracy is in trouble. Easterly’s book is nominally about our obligation to save the poorest countries in the world. But what if we can’t even save ourselves?

Credit

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly was published by Penguin Books in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Oxford University Press paperback.

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by Simon on December 13, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 13, 2023

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The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (2007)

Catching up is about radically raising growth in the countries now at the bottom…This book sets out an [aid] agenda for the G8 that would be effective.
(The Bottom Billion, pages 12 and 13)

Sir Paul Collier, Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) is a British development economist who is currently Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. He’s the author of nine books tackling big global issues like migration, refugees and the future of capitalism.

The Bottom Billion was his second book, written expressly to inform and advise politicians attending the 2007 G8 meeting in Germany, which is why the final chapter is titled ‘An agenda for action’ (pages 175 to 192).

Collier asserts that while a billion or so people live in developed countries, and 5 or so billion live in developing countries many of which have flourished in the 1980s and 90s, a hard core of impoverished people live in countries whose economies have stubbornly refused to grow, despite western aid, loans and advice. He reckons there are about 58 of these countries (p.7), home to 980 million people or, by the time we’re reading his book, over a billion (p.6). If everyone else is doing relatively OK then, if the G8’s ambition is to ‘abolish poverty’, it is to these 60 or so failing countries and ‘the bottom billion’ that attention needs to be focused.

To help do this Collier has developed the theory that these countries are being held back by a number of key development traps and these are what need to be addressed. Collier claims there are four of these:

1. The Conflict Trap

Contrary to received opinion, Collier thinks that civil wars do not correlate with rebel grievances, political repression, ethnic strife or colonial legacy. Instead he finds strong links to: low income, low growth and reliance on the export of primary commodities.

Civil wars last a long time: the average international war lasts six months, civil wars last at least ten times as long, and are likely to recur or break out again. This is because the longer a civil conflict drags on, the more deeply established the players become that profit from the conflict, making them harder and harder to end. Only about half the countries which resolve a civil war manage to go a decade without conflict breaking out again (p.27).

A typical civil war costs its country and its neighbours $64 billion. After civil wars conclude homicide rates generally increase as people inured to violence carry it out unilaterally.

It’s not just civil wars, coups are also correlated with low income and low growth (p.36).

2. The Natural Resources Trap

Countries that are rich in natural resources are paradoxically usually worse off than countries that are not, for a number of reasons:

  • governments that rely on extractive resources (oil, gas, gold, diamonds, iron, copper) tend to become anti-democratic rentier states
  • being home to abundant natural resources can lead to Dutch disease, where reliance on one resource leads to neglect of all other aspects of the economy, a failure to diversity and develop their economies which results, long term, in low or zero growth (p.39)
  • because rentier governments make most of their income from (often corrupt) deals with western multinational corporations, they have little need for taxes from the general population, and so the taxation-with-representation model which underpins most western nations simply doesn’t apply; rich governments can afford to ignore their populations
  • an accompaniment of responsible government is checks and balances; these tend to be absent in resource-rich, low growth countries
  • in other words, resource-rich poor countries tend to evolve terrible governments of kleptocrats, Angola, Congo, Nigeria

3. Landlocked with Bad Neighbours

Around 30% of Africa’s population lives in landlocked, resources-scarce countries (p.57).

Countries with coastlines can trade with the world, while landlocked countries can only trade with their neighbours, and that depends on having decent transport infrastructure. Landlocked countries with poor infrastructure connections to their neighbours therefore have a limited market for their goods. And they may have bad i.e. predatory or unco-operative governments. What can a poor landlocked country do?

  1. Increase neighbourhood growth spillovers
  2. Improve neighbours’ economic policies
  3. Improve coastal access
  4. Become a haven for the region
  5. Don’t be air-locked or e-locked
  6. Encourage remittances
  7. Create a transparent and investor-friendly environment for resource prospecting
  8. Rural development – the single biggest problem is here is the subsidies the West and Japan pay their farmers
  9. Try to attract aid

4. Bad Governance in a Small Country

The kind of terrible governance which has characterised so many African nations since independence can destroy an economy with alarming speed. Think of the ruination of Congo by Mobutu. It’s doubtful if economic growth anywhere can exceed 10%. But someone like Robert Mugabe can run his country into the ground in under a decade. The smaller the population, the less inertia there is to prevent ruinous plans.

This chapter is highly technical with Collier explaining and defining criteria he uses to create technical reports on, among other things, what he calls ‘failing states’ (p.68) then defining what ‘turnaround’ would mean and what ‘sustained’ would mean (at least five years’ improvement; p.70). All these chapters read like summaries of pretty technical academic papers because that’s often exactly what they are.

Their study showed that a country was more likely to achieve a sustained turnaround: 1) the larger its population 2) the better educated its population 3) if it had recently emerged from a civil war.

Disappointingly whether it was or wasn’t a democracy seemed immaterial.

Solutions

Let me clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. (p.96)

Each of these countries contains honest, educated people working for reform and improvement. Collier calls them ‘heroes’. We need to help these heroes by clearing away the obstacles to their work. At our end this will require:

  1. aid ministries in Western countries to be given much more importance and money
  2. aid policies to be better co-ordinated across all government departments
  3. Western governments to work more closely together to produce a co-ordinated Western approach to making poverty history

But then he moves on to four specific areas of improvement, many of which easy to state but will require entrenched institutions such as aid agencies and government departments, to change established practices and assumptions. Each of them gets a chapter explaining in detail:

Aid To The Rescue

He marshals pretty sceptical arguments and data about aid, lots of stories of aid’s ineffectiveness, corruption, theft, the uselessness of aid agencies and so on. He says things are improving, which is what they always say. Above 16% of GDP aid stops being effective. There are numerous different types of foreign aid. He considers in particular aid as incentive, aid as skills and aid as reinforcement.

Aid agencies should be concentrated in the most difficult environments and accept more risk p.116 the sequence

Military Intervention

Despite the terrible reputation Western military intervention has acquired because of Iraq, Collier still believes it has a role to play in improving the lot of the Bottom Billion, in fact three roles: restoration of order, maintaining postconflict peace and preventing coups (p.124).

On the whole appropriate military interventions, such as the quick, cheap, effective British one in Sierra Leone, should be encouraged, especially to guarantee democratic governments against coups (so we should back military intervention in Niger).

If only the European Union was prepared to use the Rapid Reaction Force it has set up with such a fanfare it might be possible to ‘make coups history’ by intervening quickly and decisively to reverse them, certainly easier than ‘making poverty history’ (p.131).

External forces are needed to keep the peace in postconflict situations because high government spending on the military is associated with greater risk of war breaking out again. External forces will have to come in and keep the peace for at least 10 years (p.133).

Laws and Charters

International charters are needed to encourage good governance and provide examples. Collier proposes five:

  1. A charter for natural resource revenues: a very persuasive call for international charters to set standards of transparency, especially in the extractive industries
  2. A charter for democracy: ‘Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used’ (p.147). Actual elections are the showbiz side of democracy but much more important is the introduction of democratic checks and balances into corrupt countries. This takes time, planning and support.
  3. A charter for budget transparency: the story of Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile and alerting the local media (p.150)
  4. A charter for postconflict situations
  5. A charter for investment

Trade Policy: Western trade policy needs to encourage free trade and give preferential access to exports from Bottom Billion countries

Academic disputes

The uninitiated might think that academics are paid to find answers to problems and establish the truth. But the academic world, now more than ever, puts academics under tremendous pressure to compete, to publish scads of papers and books, to continually come up with something new, in order to justify their tenure and their research grants. And the best way to do this is not to come up with solutions but to continually problematise issues, finding new things to disagree about.

Hence why in History each new historian has to establish their reputation by rubbishing everyone who came before them and claiming to have found the real reason why X happened, or for the first time the true story can be told, or, in one of the clichés of our time, to be giving voices to the previously unheard, overlooked, suppressed etc.

Hence why in Literary Studies, every single work of literature from the last two and a half thousand years has to be reread and reinterpreted in light of the newish frameworks of feminism and race, post-colonial studies and, the newest kid on the block, queer studies.

Which is why second-wave feminism of the 1960s (white, horribly middle-class) had to be refuted by the 1990s generation of third-wave feminists, who claimed to be reclaiming feminism for non-white and working class people. Who were themselves supplanted around 2009 by fourth-wave feminists, who make much more agile use of digital technology i.e. social media, while insisting all previous feminism didn’t take into account modern ideas of gender fluidity.

And so it goes on, wave after wave of thinkers claiming that their new interpretation is the right one, the revelation, the radical new discovery – until the next wave comes along and proves it wasn’t inclusive or diverse enough. Same in the language arts, the performing arts, the visual arts: in all the humanities academia is a kind of machine for generating ever-new waves of ideology and discourse.

Academic disputes in the aid sector

Anyway, when we come to Development Economics, to the world of development aid and foreign aid and aid policy, exactly the same thing applies. This is that, instead of there being broad agreement about what needs to be done, there is, instead, a surprising amount of disagreement about what should be done.

Why? Because academics are paid to disagree; they make their names and careers by rebutting, disputing and overthrowing previously accepted nostrums, the old ideas which have so signally failed, proposing new solutions based on new evidence, new studies etc etc.

And this lack of disagreement is, of course, notoriously endemic in the field of economics which, unlike art criticism or literary theory, directly affects the fate of nations and the wellbeing or otherwise of hundreds of millions of people who suffer the consequences of economists’ bickering and misrule.

The American economist J.K. Galbraith was a fund of witty criticisms of his own field of study. ‘If you laid all the economists in the world in a straight line, head to toe, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion’ was one of his gags, although his best one might be: ‘The only purpose of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.’

Which is why, arguably, the most interesting part of Collier’s book is not the ostensible Key Points, outlined above, which could be conveyed in five or six PowerPoint slides. It’s the sidelights and sideswipes, in which Collier defends his position against his opponents in a range of debates I didn’t even know existed.

These shed light on the tangled undergrowth of development economic thinking and begin to explain why leaders of Western countries do not give it the prominence Collier, naturally enough, wants his field to have. Why would they, when the so-called experts can barely agree among themselves?

Academic disputes about ‘growth’

Take the simple idea of growth. What could be more uncontroversial than the idea that the world’s poorest nations need to grow their way out of poverty by developing their economies. And yet in a couple of pages, before his book has really got started (pages 11 and 12), Collier sketches out the profound disagreements development economist have about this.

He tells us that many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are deeply unhappy with the entire concept of ‘growth’, presumably (although he isn’t explicit about this) because they associate it with unbridled capitalism, the Washington Consensus, the creation of a third world middle class and the ongoing abandonment of the poor.

This, he explains, is why nowadays organisations put adjectives before the word ‘growth’, things like ‘sustainable pro-poor growth’ to distinguish their kind of growth from naughty nasty capitalist growth (p.11).

Collier has no time for this. He enjoys telling us that while he was directing the World Bank’s Research Department (swank) the most controversial paper they published was titled ‘Growth Is Good For The Poor’. To you and me that might appear a pretty uncontroversial statement but NGOs’ hated it and the president of the World Bank rang up to express his concern.

What emerges is that Collier sees himself sitting in the middle of a spectrum of beliefs. To the left of him are often quite left-wing development charities which are ‘suspicious’ (p.11) of talk about growth because of its red-blooded, Thatcherite connotations. The ‘sustainable pro-poor’ guys. In the world of economic theory, the leading figure of this wing is American economist Jeffrey Sachs, a strong proponent of large-scale aid to the developing world.

To the right of Collier are the aid sceptics, right-wingers who think well-meaning foreign intervention often makes things worse. Countries have to sort themselves out and find their own way. The American economist William Easterly is, apparently, the leading figure on this wing, as the title of his book ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ (2006), makes abundantly clear.

Easterly’s arguments are repeated and updated by someone like Dambisa Moyo and her 2010 book ‘Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa’. Moyo is black and a woman so scores double on the diversity-counter and has been showered with praise by the worried white establishment (in 2022 she was awarded a life peerage, becoming Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge). But, at the end of the day, she is yet one more American-educated development economist to enter the endless battlefield of development economics.

Anyway, amid all this argumentation, Collier is at pains to position himself in a nominal ‘centre’: definitely rejecting left-wing beliefs (he is scathing about anyone who offers Cuba as a model for other developing countries to follow) but at the same time rejecting the All Aid Is Bad school (p.191).

Early on he offers a common sense summary of what he’s aiming for, a goal he hopes everyone can rally round:

To my mind, development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world. (p.12)

Reading this book made me realise that feel-good sentiments like that are so common in this area, and drop so glibly from the lips of politicians, precisely because they don’t really say anything. Because as soon as you start to be more specific, the squabbling starts.

Supporting girls and women

This atmosphere of continual argument and debate in development economics explains why the debate has moved away from ‘growth’ (wrongly, in Colliers view) towards more ‘safe’ subjects. This, for example, explains why all the squabbling parties can be brought back together around uncontroversial rallying cries such as ‘helping girls and women in the developing world’.

Who could possibly disagree? Who would dare to disagree? It’s a worthy cause, of course, as Collier emphasises (p.11) but also one which papers over the yawning cracks which divide development economists. Framing the debate in terms of helping ‘vulnerable women’ and ‘supporting girls’ etc is all very admirable:

But continues to evade the much harder discussion about the best way to provide foreign aid, or, as per Easterly and Moyo, whether the West should give aid at all.

Academic in tone

The Bottom Billion is very academic in tone, in the bad sense. Chapter 1 is about ‘conflict’, which you might have thought would be a big juicy topic. Instead Collier focuses in on the minutiae of a research paper he did with one of his graduate students, Anke Hoeffler.

He explains that they decided to take a very narrow approach and see if they could measure whether the outbreak of civil wars was related to income and GDP. They were quickly presented with the problem of how to define a civil war so, he explains, they adopted the definition of ‘civil war’ developed by scholars at the University of Michigan, which is an expert in this field.

Then, of course, there are problems with getting reliable data about GDP, average income and so on from the poorest countries which are, by definition, often in a state of chaos.

And then he complains that some fellow academics objected to this entire data-driven analysis. These critics come from the left, from ‘the politicised end of the academic world’ (p.19), who Collier has taken the time to criticise half a dozen times by just page 19.

Not all theorists of civil war have based their work on empirical data. Some social scientists, particularly the most politically engaged, know what they want to see in civil war and duly see it. (p.20)

See what I mean by ‘academic’?

1) Instead of treating the subject in a broad and insightful way, he is instead effectively summarising one very specific paper he co-authored.

2) He tells you as much about fellow academics who objected to his approach as he does about the results.

3) And his summary is littered with snarky jibes against Western Marxists, left-wing NGOs, the politically correct media and so on, sarcastic asides which I quickly came to dislike.

(For example, Collier attributes the over-emphasis on the urgency of the West giving aid entirely to ‘the left’ and its narrative of atoning for the sins of colonialism, in what he considers a blinkered, moralistic view which actively hampers the kind of aid and support we can and ought to give, p.123.)

Economic statistics

As an economist Collier prides himself on eschewing historical, political or sociological explanations for poverty or war. The trouble is that, as he explains how he and his post-grad assistants beavered away to define the data and stats they needed to generate their conclusions, the more artificial and contingent they appear. By the time he gets to the conclusions he’s so proud of, I found them unconvincing and also weirdly irrelevant.

For example, after a lot of number crunching, he tells us that poor countries are more likely to see civil wars which we could have worked out for ourselves. But then that a typical low-income country faces a 14% risk of civil war in any given five-year period. Each percentage of economic growth knocks a percentage off the risk, so a country with a growth rate of 3% has a risk of civil war of 14% – 3% = 11%.

This is just the first of many mentions of projects his graduate students are working on or that he collaborated on with his peers. An awful lot of the book consists of summaries of research undertaken by Collier or his research students or colleagues (Lisa Chauvet, Anke Hoeffler, Stefan Dercon, Steve O’Connell, Catherine Pattillo, Jan Gunning, David Dollar, Tony Venables) and there is an appendix at the end devoted to just these research papers, titled ‘Research on which this book is based’.

Underpinning the book are a mass of technical papers published in professional journals. (Preface, p.xii)

Collier’s unique selling point is that, once he has defined his problem, he works with students and colleagues to find ways to try to apply measurable data to them. He shares his working out with us because that’s how a good academic operates. It allows others to critique his methodology or results with precision.

In addition, Collier explicitly states in his Preface that he goes into such detail about who he worked with and how they developed the concepts and definitions for their research because the book has an aim over and above framing issues and recommendations for development aid: it is to give us lay readers a sense of what it’s like to do development economics, a sense of the buzz you get from framing questions then figuring out ways to answer them:

Although this is not a book about research, I hope that along the way you will get some of the flavour of how modern research is done, and a sense of the thrill that comes from cracking intractable questions. (Preface, p.xiii)

But as well as often being pretty boring, it gives an unfortunate impression of being very, well, narrow. Instead of ranging across the whole field it reads more like the annual summary of research done by a particular department at a particular university. It feels oddly parochial.

Reasons not to be cheerful

For a guy who’s trying to come up with practical solutions, Collier shares a lot of very gloomy conclusions to his research.

– Assuming even an optimistic rate of economic growth, he estimates that ruined countries like the Congo will take something like fifty years to get back to the standard of living they enjoyed at independence in 1960.

– Resource-poor landlocked countries are going to be reliant on aid for a very, very long time. He is so pessimistic about their prospects that twice he says they should never really have been created as separate countries. Mali, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic – these countries are going to be dirt poor forever (p.107).

– Capital flight. He and his team researched long and hard to uncover the headline fact that in 1998, after decades of military rule, some $100 billion had been smuggled out of Africa by its elite and was held abroad, money which should, of course, have been used to invest in infrastructure, agriculture and so on, but had simply been stolen by its rulers. Instead of investing in their own countries, rich Africans invest their money abroad.

– Paralleling capital flight is human capital flight. Educated people leave poor countries because they have better life chances abroad. And the better your qualifications the more likely you can enter a Western country. And once one of you is in, you can bring other family members. Thus human flight disproportionately impacts the educated classes, which obviously keeps poor nations stuck in the poverty trap.

The countries of the bottom billion are already desperately short of qualified people and the situation is likely to get worse. (p.94)

– A really big reason for gloom is that his research shows that the main way to grow your economy is to attract inward commercial investment. The way to do that is to be a large country with political stability and a reasonably well educated workforce. These are the reasons why first China then India dragged themselves out of poverty in the 1990s and 2000s.

China in particular grew at an incredible rate partly because of what economists call ‘economies of agglomeration’ (p.82) meaning that you build up a well-enough educated workforce that can move easily between different firms or factories in the same sector. There are tens of thousands of foreign firms in China and tens of millions of workers educated and experienced enough to move between them.

Compare the economies of agglomeration in China with the bottom billion countries where a) there are few if any foreign firms and so b) an entire generation of workers with no experience of what is required to work in a foreign-owned factory or warehouse e.g. be clean, turn up on time day after day, literate enough to do the work, prepared to put in the hours.

So who wants to be the first Western investor to risk investing millions in a country with no educated workforce, no transport infrastructure, and corrupt rulers who are likely to overthrow each other in a chaos-creating coup at the drop of a hat? See the recent upset among the rulers of Sudan. Nobody.

Critiques

William Easterly’s criticism

William Easterly is another development economist but this time from the right-wing of the political spectrum and a deep-dyed aid sceptic. This explains why his most famous book is titled ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ (2006) and explains why Easterly makes numerous criticisms of Collier. He starts by claiming that Collier’s strategy of attributing the poverty of the poorest countries to just four causes or ‘traps’ is completely inadequate. The world is much more complicated than that.

Easterly says Collier doesn’t take into account a number of other pretty obvious factors – such as the colonial legacy i.e. the template of the elite rule of land, resources and government which post-independence local rulers simply copied; or the disruptive impact of tribalism. He adds many others and develops his critique of Collier from there.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

All Collier’s conclusions derive from data and statistical analysis and the trouble with data and statistics is, notoriously, that you can make them mean anything you want to. Even an utterly honest, unbiased attempt to use data faces a host of problems which Collier, to give him his due, owns up to and describes in detail. These include:

  • sourcing the data in the first place: it rarely presents itself clean and complete as you wish, but has to be hunted down, sought in different organisations, or formats, or with different taxonomies, or purposes so that you have to manipulate it, ‘clean’ it, repurpose it
  • or it’s just not available and has to be guessed or ‘extrapolated’ from similar datasets elsewhere
  • Collier repeatedly explains how they had to choose how to define concepts such as ‘success’, ‘turnaround’, even ‘civil war’ and ‘growth’; the more he does so, the more contingent and – not quite arbitrary, but – flaky many of his central premises come to seem

Collier, to his great credit, shows all his working out, but the more he explains, the more rickety and bodged together his working appears. I’m sure he and all his collaborators did the best possible job but his candour about the challenges they faced getting hold of and then working with the data on which his entire approach relies, slowly undermines your trust in many of his findings. And since the entire edifice is based on these findings, well…

Fifteen years later

History doesn’t stop, Time marches on. Has poverty been abolished? Have we made poverty history? Have we lifted the bottom billion out of poverty? No, no and no.

Also, ‘Events, dear boy’. Since this book was published in 2008 we’ve had the financial crash of 2008 leading to a decade of austerity, the huge political disruption caused by Brexit, the COVID lockdowns, and now the war in Ukraine. All good excuses for focusing our energies elsewhere.

I don’t know whether Collier’s recommendations were adopted by the G8 or the British government or the UN, but I doubt it and I doubt they ever will be. Look at the umpteen reports about climate change, overflowing with recommendations. Some policies are being implemented in Western and developing nations, but is it enough? No. The sample of reviews of the book I’ve read all say it was ‘very influential’ and it may well have changed a lot of thinking and speeches and papers and research and so on in the vast papermill and huge bureaucracy of the aid industry.

But were any of his policies actually implemented? It would be lovely if Collier wrote another book (or article) assessing the book 15 years on: telling us which policies, if any, were adopted, and by whom, and what difference they made, if any. Come on, Paul.

TED talk

Sir Paul gave a TED talk summarising his book:

Credit

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2008.

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by Simon on December 11, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, Politics
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Posted by Simon on December 11, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/11/the-bottom-billion-paul-collier/

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2

This is a huge, 700-page, compendious history of all the African nations from independence (roughly the mid-1950s) to the time it was written (around 2010), so 55 years or so of modern African history.

Meredith chooses as epigraph to this big book the Latin tag from Pliny the Elder, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ meaning ‘Out of Africa always something new’ – but a reading of the actual book confirms how utterly inappropriate this is. For if Meredith’s book demonstrates anything it is that, since independence, out of Africa have come the same five or six stereotypical narratives or events – civil war, one-party rule, dictatorship, economic collapse, famine, vast amounts of foreign aid – and the consistent failure to deliver the utopian dreams everyone hoped for in the heady first years of independence.

Two major contexts

Meredith only mentions them in passing but two broad historical contexts are worth bearing in mind.

  1. The independence movement in Algeria spiralled out of control into an appallingly brutal war which neither side was able to stop, and which threatened to tear the colonial power, France, apart. The war was at its worst in 1957 to 1961. The point is that Algeria stood as a terrible warning to the other colonial powers (Britain, Belgium, Portugal) of what might happen if they mismanaged things or delayed.
  2. The victory of Fidel Castro’s communists in Cuba in 1959 ushered in an era when the threat of the new African states falling to communism seemed very real and of global importance in the war between the two superpowers. Hence the head of the CIA warning President Eisenhower that Congo’s Patrice Lumumba might be ‘the African Castro’ and America’s feverish paranoia that if Congo fell to the communists it might influence the entire continent (p.104). Looking back, this level of anxiety seems exaggerated, even absurd. But the context is crucial in understanding the actions of all the colonial powers, but especially of America, which set about undermining left-wing governments and supporting right-wing, capitalism-loving dictators across the continent.

Both of these examples or precedents (Algeria, Cuba) lay behind the decisions of Britain and Belgian, in particular, not to linger or suppress independence movements. In other words, they added to the sense of urgency and haste which characterised the rush to make Africa independent, with such questionable results.

Part 1

1. The Gold Coast experiment (Ghana)

The tragic life of Kwame Nkrumah who went from political prisoner in the early 1950s, to lead his own political party, the Convention People’s Party, won the general election held under British auspices in 1954, before leading Ghana to independence in March 1957. Meredith vividly describes the week-long celebrations, attended by worthies from around the world including Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon.

With a sickening inevitability Nkrumah found the new country difficult to rule, repressed political opposition and rigged elections. In 1964 he amended the constitution to make Ghana a one-party state, with himself as president for life. In 1966 Nkrumah was deposed in a coup led by the National Liberation Council.

2. Revolt on the Nile (Egypt)

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser led the 1952 revolution which overthrew the 32-year-old playboy King Farouk I. Much rhetoric about freedom and Arab socialism as Nasser tightened his grip on power, imprisoning rivals and getting elected president in 1956. The catastrophe of the Suez Crisis which put the nail in the coffin of the British Empire. From that moment Britain’s rush to decolonise picked up speed.

3. Land of the Setting Sun (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria)

Apparently, the Arab word for north-west Africa, maghreb, means ‘land of the setting sun’ (as opposed to our word ‘Levant’ which means ‘rising’, to describe the old Ottoman Empire).

This chapter describes the descent of Algeria into a terrible insurgency which kicked off in the spring of 1954 with a wave of bomb attacks by the National Liberation Front (French: Front de libération nationale or FLN) with both sides slowly breaching their early declarations to target only combatants, so that by August 1954 the FLN was bombing civilian cafés and restaurants while the French security forces cracked down hard on the civilian Arab population, with large-scale arrests and torture.

An often overlooked aspect of the terrible war in Algeria (1956 to 1962) was that it made the French more amenable to granting its neighbours, Tunisia and Morocco, independence. Meredith describes the independence campaigning of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco. The French arrested, imprisoned and exiled both these leaders, but eventually gave into widespread protests and both Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence in March 1956.

In 1957, amid an upsurge in terrorist bombings, the French governor of Algeria handed power over to the military, led by General Jacques Massu. The army locked down the capital city Algiers, ringing it with barbed wire, dividing it into sections which could be searched, cleared and then surveilled. Thousands of Algerians were arrested and tortured using electric shocks or waterboarding. It became known as The Battle of Algiers. In the country, peasants were rounded up into camps while native collaborator/spies (harkis) were deployed by the French.

By 1958 the FLN had been defeated, its leaders seeking refuge in Tunisia, whose new leader Bourguiba gave them sanctuary. However, the political system in France itself was in crisis. Violent disagreements about policy in Algeria led to the collapse of a series of short-lived governments. Worried that pacifist-defeatist politicians would gain power, in May 1958 the military took control of Algeria, allying with leading colons (white French colonists) to form a Committee of Public Safety. The French government declared a blockade, at which the Committee called for the return of the wartime hero, General de Gaulle.

4. L’Afrique Noire (Senegal, Ivory Coast)

L’Afrique Noire was the French term for the sub-Saharan part of its colonial empire, including Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Meredith describes the careers of Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire.

5. Winds of Change (British colonies)

This chapter covers the independence movements in British colonies such as Nigeria.

Nigeria

Nigeria had only been created by the forcible union of north and south Nigeria in 1914, the north and south having themselves been slowly cobbled together from former, smaller protectorates since 1900. Nigeria could be divided into three great blocs: the north was Muslim and Hausa-speaking, with a conservative, feudal social system. It had few schools or colleges. The West, including the capital Lagos, was mostly Yoruba. Being on the coast, dotted with cities, it was more economically advanced and urban. In the East lived the Igpo who tended to be very well educated but had no social system of their own and so were scattered around Nigeria’s other territories. In addition there some 250 other ethnic groups, some of which protested and rebelled, including the Edo-speaking people of Benin province who longed to restore the kingdom of Benin. The British struggled with successive constitutions to try and create a balance between all these different constituencies. Nigeria was granted independence in 1960.

As a rule of thumb British colonies in West Africa were much more advanced than British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanganyika) and Central Africa (north and south Rhodesia, Nyasaland). Politics in these latter countries was dominated by the fierce lobbying of the small white minorities, who dominated the local governors. Thus the settlers persuaded the Colonial Office to create a federation of Central Africa, consisting of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Kenya

Plans for a similar federation in East Africa were wrecked by the Mau Mau rebellion, which was an organised protest against the grotesque monopoly of the best agricultural land in Kenya by whites, and the land deprivation and lack of rights enforced on the million-strong Kikuyu population. Meredith gives a thorough account: the phrase mau mau actually meant nothing in Kikuyu, it was just a rallying call, and then the name given to the secret meetings where oaths of allegiance were sworn to the movement. Despite white paranoia, very few whites were actually killed during the so-called ’emergency’ (1952 to 1960), Meredith gives the number as 32, fewer than lost their lives in traffic accidents in Nairobi over the same period. He details British accusations that the Kikuyu leader Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU) was involved, which led to a kangaroo court convicting and imprisoning him; and the brutal measures the British took against the insurgency, including setting up concentration camps.

The first Blacks were elected to Kenya’s legislative council in 1957. In October the Highlands area was formally opened to all races. The British thought they would continue to rule Kenya for at least another decade. In the event, independence was granted on December 12, 1963.

Nyasaland

Meredith gives the story of Nyasaland, to which the elderly Dr Hastings Banda returned as leader of the independence movement in 1959, determined to scupper Britain’s plans to make it part of a federation with Rhodesia. The colonial governor imported troops who tried to quell protests which turned into riots, troops shot, protesters killed, it becomes a nationwide movement etc.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring north Rhodesia, in the run-up to contested 1959 elections the authorities banned a leading nationalist party and imprisoned its leader, Kenneth Kaunda. Britain was losing its reputation for progressive colonialism in a welter of protests and arrests across all its African colonies.

Abruptly, Harold Macmillan’s conservative government gave in. Late in 1959 the Foreign Secretary Iain Macleod said further repression would lead to bloodshed. In February 1960 Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech. Behind it was fear that further suppressing calls for independence would drive African nations into the hands of the communists. The British knew most of their colonies weren’t ready for independence – Meredith lists the pitiful number of native lawyers or administrators in the central and east African countries – but hurrying was a less bad option than delay, with the increasing repression, bloodshed and reputational damage that would inevitably entail.

6. Heart of Darkness (Congo)

The gruesome history of the Belgian Congo. It beggars belief that there are still statues of King Leopold II, one of the most blood-thirsty rulers in history, in Belgium. Congo was notable for four or five reasons:

  1. It was and is the largest country in Africa.
  2. The grotesque rule of Leopold II was probably the most evil, mass murdering of all the colonial regimes. As many as 10 million Congolese died during his rule, 1885 to 1908.
  3. Once the colony had been handed over to the Belgian government to run, it developed through the 20th century as one of the richest sources of minerals (particularly copper and diamonds) in the world.
  4. The rush to independence was hastiest and most foolhardy here than almost anywhere else. At independence Congo had 3 Black civil servants, 30 university graduates, no doctors, secondary school teachers or army officers. The firebrand new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, had just four years of secondary school education plus one year in a technical college for postal clerks (p.95).
  5. With the result that within days of winning independence on 1 June 1960, Congo collapsed into chaos.

The army mutinied, the entire province of Katanga tried to secede, riots in the main cities included attacks on whites so that the entire Belgian community i.e. everyone who knew how to run the infrastructure of the country, fled in panic. Profile of the hectic unpredictable character of Lumumba, and the long dismal series of events which led, first to his arrest and, eventually, to his murder by Belgian and Congolese soldiers on the orders of his one-time lieutenant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, with the collusion of the UN and US, on 17 January 1961.

The stream of crises continued until Mobutu took power in a definitive military coup in 1965, and was to rule a one-party state for 32 years, until 1997.

7. The White South

South Africa

Meredith points out that the southern nations of Africa – north and south Rhodesia, south-west Africa and South Africa – looked at the other African countries gaining independence and were horrified by what they saw, especially the complete chaos punctuated by bloodbaths and military coups in Congo.

The fiercest response was in South Africa which in 1948 had established the system of apartheid and spent the next decades hardening the division between whites and blacks. Meredith chronicles the early history of the African National Congress (ANC), revolving round the figure of Nelson Mandela and the failure of peaceful efforts to counter apartheid. Peaceful protests such as general strikes became harder to justify after the SA authorities carried out the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, killing 69 protesters and injuring 180.

The more violent atmosphere heralded by the massacre led the ANC to establish the armed wing of the struggle, uMkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. These guys carried out a not very effective sabotage campaign against a variety of infrastructure targets. In 1962 Mandela was arrested and imprisoned, despite a lack of evidence against him. But then in 1964 the authorities discovered the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe hideout at Rivonia, which was stuffed with incriminating documents. On the basis of these, Mandela was retried and, along with the key leadership of the ANC and uMkhonto, sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964.

Rhodesia

Meredith gives the history of Rhodesia, taking in the creation of the two independence parties, ZANU and ZAPU, up until November 1965 when Ian Smith‘s Rhodesian Front government, rebelling against pressure to grant Black independence, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the mother government in the UK.

Angola

Angola was a backwater of the mouldering Portuguese empire, which was ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1956 the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA) was founded but police swoops in 1959 and 1960 arrested most of its leaders. In 1961 the colony was horrified by an outbreak of extreme violence in the north, where machete-wielding gangs massacred white bosses and the Blacks who worked for them. This was partly the work of a different group, the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA), run by Holden Roberto.

Mozambique

On the other side of the continent, in the other Portuguese colony, Mozambique, 1962 saw the creation of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) which commenced a campaign of small-scale guerrilla attacks against border posts etc.

Dates of independence

1956 – Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia

1957 – Ghana

1958 – Guinea

1960 – Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian), Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo (France), Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania,

1961 – Sierra Leone, Tanganyika

1962 – Burundi, Rwanda, Algeria, Uganda

1963 – Kenya, Zanzibar

1964 – Nyasaland (Malawi), North Rhodesia (Zambia)

1965 – Gambia

1966 – Botswana, Lesotho

1975 – Angola, Mozambique

1980 – Zimbabwe

1990 – Namibia

1993 – Eritrea

2011 – South Sudan

Part 2

8. The Birth of Nations

A chapter summarising the dire state of the geography and economies of most African nations at independence, and the consequent economic challenges they faced. It’s here that Meredith gives the shocking figures about the lack of African graduates or professionals right across the continent.

9. The First Dance of Freedom

Abandoning democracy

Meredith laments that almost all the new national leaders consciously disavowed democracy and instituted one-party rule. It’s interesting to read their justifications. It was claimed that democracy derived from advanced societies with well-defined classes and class interests which could be represented by political parties. By contrast, leaders like Nkomo and Kenyatta argued that while parties may have been necessary to organise and motivate different groupings in the fight against colonialism, now the colonialists had left and the nations were free, democracy represented a threat to African countries because the likelihood was that parties would come to be based on tribal or regional allegiances and so work to split and divide the nation. There’s actually a lot to this argument, as that’s what many African parties came to be, fronts for specific tribes or regional interests.

One-party rule

Regardless of the justifications, almost all the first leaders of the newly independent African nations went on to abolish democracy, establish one-party rule, declare themselves presidents for life, lock up any opposition figures (p.176), create cults of their greatness (p.180), set up a secret police which was told it could go to any lengths to save the state from communist or capitalist or imperialist subversion etc etc. These cults often took the name of the Great Leader – Nasserism, Nkrumahism and so on (p.163).

Corruption

And misuse money, in two specific ways: 1) instituting state-sponsored corruption at every level of society, while 2) spending fortunes on grandiose building projects, palaces, mansions, waterfront hotels. Presidents, ministers and powerful figures swiftly awarded themselves ‘the platinum lifestyle’ (p.171).While Nkrumah was crapping on about ‘African socialism’ his ministers made fortunes. Ghanaian minister Krobo Edusei caused a scandal when his wife ordered a £3,000 gold-plated bed from a London store. In later life he admitted to owning 14 homes, a luxury beach house, a London flat, expensive cars and six different bank accounts. African socialism.

Army coups

In 1958 in Sudan the army took control in Sudan from squabbling politicians. In 1963 Togo’s president was shot dead in a coup. In 1964 African mobs overthrew rule by the Arab elite and the sultan was forced to flee, the French army had to put down military coups in Gabon and Cameroon, while the British army suppressed army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya. From 1965 coups became more frequent: in 1965 Algeria’s first leader was deposed; Mobutu overthrew president Joseph Kasa-Vubu in Congo; there was a military coup in Benin; Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic, and so on.

10. Feet of Clay (Ghana)

An extended description of Kwame Nkrumah’s slow descent into authoritarian rule, isolation, paranoia, arbitrary arrest of opponents, accompanied by rising corruption. Meredith makes the pretty well-known point that patronage and corruption weren’t parasites on the system which could be eliminated; they were the system.

A detailed account of how Nkrumah destroyed the Ghana economy through mismanagement, ignorance, terrible accounting, disastrous decisions and so on. Incompetence on a national scale, plus classic withdrawal into dictator paranoia. And, also classically, when the army intervened it wasn’t for the good of the country – they’d happily watched it go to wrack and ruin – it was because Nkrumah started tampering with it, wishing to bring it directly under his control as he had done every other aspect of Ghanaian life. So it was that while Nkrumah was visiting China in 1966, the army deposed him. Joyous crowds celebrated in the streets, his statues was pulled down and portraits defaced. The kind of thing we were to see scores and scores of times in developing countries around the world over the past 60 years.

11. A House Divided (Nigeria)

Nigeria. Meredith explains the entirely tribal basis and vicious infighting of Nigerian politics which led up to the January 1966 military coup, in which the Supreme Council of the Revolution not just sacked but executed civilian politicians. And the complicated rivalries between North, West and East Nigeria which led leaders in the East to declare independence as Biafra, and the 3-year-long war which followed, in which up to 2 million Nigerians died.

12. Death of an Emperor (Ethiopia)

An entertaining account of the elaborate ritual which surrounded the Emperor Haile Selassie and the surprisingly aggressive imperial campaigns which had doubled his country’s size, starting back in the time of his ancestor Menelek (ruled 1889 to 1913), including the annexation of Eritrea and contested parts of Somaliland.

In the early 1970s mismanagement, especially of a famine in Wollo, protests by various sectors, and Selassie’s hastening senility, emboldened a group of army officers, who called themselves the Derg, to stage a coup in stages throughout 1974, which ended with the complete overthrow of Selassie on 12 September. In November the junta executed 60 former officials of the imperial government plus dissident elements within the Derg itself, by firing squad, and Ethiopia was declared a republic to be governed on Marxist-Leninist lines.

  • The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)

13. The Coming of Tyrants

After the first few heroic years of optimism, the military coups began. But worse was the advent of the monsters: Abaid Karume in Zanzibar (1964 to 1972); Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic (1966 to 1979); Idi Amin in Uganda (1971 to 1979); Francisco Nguema in Equatorial Guinea (1968 to 1979); Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia (1977 to 1991).

14. In Search of Ujamaa (Tanzania)

Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. He was a committed socialist though without a socialist party or advisers. In the mid-1960s he nationalised everything in Tanzania and proclaimed this native form of socialism ujaama, which is KiSwahili for ‘familyhood’ (p.253). In 1974 this was turned into the forced movement of some 11 million peasant farmers into collective farms, which had the same kind of catastrophic effect as in the Stalin-era Ukraine or Mao’s China i.e. the collapse of agricultural productivity and widespread hunger. Nyerere had to go begging to the World Bank and IMF and food agencies for emergency food supplies. As its economy went steadily downhill, Nyerere’s one-party state did improve literacy, schools, drinking water etc, but almost entirely funded by aid from the West.

15. The Passing of the Old Guard

Ghana

Nkrumah’s sad exile in a slowly deteriorating villa in Guinea planning a triumphant return to Ghana which never took place.

Egypt

Nasser’s great dreams of leading an Arab renaissance came to nothing, attempts to unify with Syria were a fiasco, his intervention in Yemen backfired, leading up to the humiliation of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in which the Israelis seized the Sinai with its oil wells from Egypt. Yet he remained popular and Egypt was plunged into mourning when he died in 1970 of a heart attack, aged just 52.

Kenya

Jomo Kenyatta was the opposite of Nyerere, a keen advocate of capitalism, and provided the stable political and legal framework within which private enterprise could flourish. Much of the land belonging to the white settlers, the issue behind the Mau Mau movement, was sold to Black Kenyans. During the 1970s he faced political challenges and hardened his one-party rule. His fiercest critic was found murdered etc. Late in life Kenyatta slowly lost interest in ruling, preferring to concoct complex riddles. He died peacefully in 1978.

Senegal

President Léopold Senghor remained strongly Francophile, committed to maintaining links with France, accepting French capital in business and retaining French troops to safeguard his regime. In France he was a noted poet. In 1976 he bucked the one-party trend of his neighbours by allowing the establishment of two new political parties. In 1980 he handed over power to his protégé, becoming the first African ruler to relinquish power voluntarily.

Guinea

The first president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, created a paranoid atmosphere of permanent plots which he claimed to uncover and used to arrest, torture and publicly execute opponents, real or imagined. A fifth of the population fled abroad. Touré nationalised industries, persecuted independent businesses, created parastatal agencies, so that the economy tanked and was, eventually, only surviving on western aid. After 20 years of enforced socialism, he began to relent and allow some elements of private enterprise.

16. The Slippery Slope

An overview of the calamitous economic issues which hit Africa in the 1970s and 80s, being:

  • famine and drought
  • the two oil shocks of the 1970s
  • the collapse of commodity prices on which most African states depended for foreign revenue
  • the disastrous loss of agricultural land, soil degradation and desertification

On top of all this, an explosive growth in population.

17. The Great Plunderer (Zaire)

This refers to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who ruled Congo from the date of his second military coup in 1965 to his overthrow by the forces invading from Rwanda in 1997. During those 32 long years he changed the country’s name to Zaire, Africanised all placenames (Leopoldville > Kinshasa, Elizabethville > Lubumbashi) and even his own name, changing it to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

Mobutu nationalised agriculture, seized all businesses from foreign owners, causing a collapse in the country’s economy, and looted it on a grand scale, siphoning vast amounts into private bank accounts. Probably the greatest African kleptocrat, he was said to have stolen up to $15 billion. The Americans supported him on the simple Cold War basis that he was fiercely anti-communist and so maintained the centre of Africa against any Soviet influence. Mobutu was an honoured guest of US presidents from John F Kennedy to George Bush. Meredith doesn’t need to comment.

18. White Dominoes (Mozambique, Angola)

Portugal was the last European country to decolonise. Independence movements in its two main African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, commenced military activities in 1961, leading to what became known as the Portuguese Colonial War (1961 to 1974).

In 1968 Portugal’s long-serving dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was replaced by another authoritarian ruler, Marcello Caetano. He inherited military operations in Portugal’s main two African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. However, junior army officers had become unhappy with the way the army seemed like it was committed forever to these ruinous, unwinnable wars and so, on 25 April 1974, carried out the Carnation Revolution, overthrowing Caetano. Portugal’s new military rulers set out to divest themselves of her colonies immediately. Small Guinea-Bissau was easily granted independence in 1973.

Mozambique

In Mozambique the main liberation force had been the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) led by the zealous Marxist, Samora Machel. Terrified by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Marxist Machal, in the year between the declaration of independence in 1974 and its legal implementation on 25 June 1975, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique fled the country, including all the civil servants, administrators, managers of the infrastructure and all businesses.

Frelimo passed a law ordering the remaining Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless, leaving a country empty of experienced administrators, engineers and so on.

Frelimo commenced an aggressive implementation of Marxism-Leninism which proved a disaster: central planning was as badly managed here as in most other African countries, leading to economic collapse, inflation, shortages of everything but especially food. Industrial output and agriculture collapsed leading to widespread famine. Frelimo eventually generated so much opposition that the anti-communist forces united to form the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) rebel militias.

Renamo found backing from South Africa and the US. Civil war between Frelimo and Renamo was to consume 15 ruinous years from 1977 to 1992. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, with somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 dying of famine. 1.7 million Mozambicans took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced.

Angola

Something similar happened in Angola. As the deadline for independence approached, three rebel or independence groups/parties/armies vied for power, being the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA. As violence broke out most of the white Portuguese fled and the country collapsed into a civil war between what emerged as the two main forces, the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The civil war lasted from 1975, with interludes, until 2002. See:

Part 3

19. Red Tears (Ethiopia)

How in 1974 the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC) of army officers, also known as the Derg, overthrew the regime of emperor Haile Selassie. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam seized full control and initiated a wave of repression which became known as the Red Terror. During this two-year campaign as many as 50,000 Ethiopians were arrested, tortured and executed. The Derg dumped the corpses in the street and gained notoriety by demanding that families of the executed pay for the bullets. Marxist-Leninist housekeeping.

Meredith explains how Mengistu’s Marxist-Leninist policies, along with his brutal campaigns against Eritrean and Tigrayan separatists in the north, helped bring about the great Ethiopia famine of 1984 which led to Live Aid. At the time more than half of Ethiopia’s annual budget was devoted to maintaining an army of 300,000 (armed and supplied by Soviet Russia) in order to carry out operations against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (p.334).

Mengistu was a doctrinaire Marxist who believed in collectivising agriculture and enforcing super low prices in order to provide subsidised food for his key constituencies in the cities. The detailed chronicle of his deliberate ignoring of the famine, attempts to deny it, to prevent journalists or aid agencies entering the famine-stricken areas, and then the politically motivated strategy of moving hundreds of thousands of starving people against their will from the north (close to where Eritrean separatists operated) to the more secure south where they had no homes or livelihoods, makes for terrible reading. What a complete bastard.

The title of this chapter comes from a memoir of his time in Mengistu’s government written by a defector from the Derg, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, ‘Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia’. In the words of reviewer Mohammed Hassen, this exposes ‘the callous brutality of the Ethiopian government towards its own people’, and the leaders of the Derg as ‘uninformed, anti-people, anti-democratic criminal thugs’ (Online review).

20. Fault Lines (Chad, Sudan)

Chad

Across the north of Africa is a line between the Arab Muslim north and the start of the Black African and often Christian south. Meredith gives a long, detailed and deeply depressing account of the north-south conflict in Chad, in which both sides massacred each other and Colonel Gaddafi, in power in Libya from 1969 onwards, took advantage by trying to seize northern Chad and, at his most ambitious, declared the unification of Chad with Libya – under his supreme control, of course.

Sudan

To the East, the equally long-running and demoralising war between Muslim north and Christian south Sudan. A key aspect of the backstory to both conflicts is that the northern Muslims had, for centuries, captured southern blacks as slaves as part of the widespread Arab slave trade. In fact Meredith records Arab militias capturing and enslaving Black southerners in the 1980s, all accompanied by vitriolic racism about the Blacks being sub-humans etc. About the Atlantic slave trade I hear on a daily basis and in virtually every art exhibition I go to; about the Arab slave trade, never.

21. The Scourge of AIDS

The interesting point is the number of African governments which refused to acknowledge AIDS or dismissed it as a racist Western conspiracy, with the result that many African countries didn’t commence AIDS-awareness campaigns till the 1990s by which time the disease had taken hold in their populations. Two notable exceptions were Senegal under Abdou Diouf, and Uganda under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni. Respect.

22. The Lost Decade

A detailed look at the economic collapse of almost all African countries by the 1980s so that they became increasingly dependent on foreign aid, on loans which needed to be continually rescheduled, and the accompanying demands from the IMF and World Bank for ‘structural reforms’. Through mismanagement, drought, civil war, collapse of commodity prices, most African countries became dependent on aid from the West.

What comes over, and is expressed in terms by African commentators themselves, is what condemned Africa to becoming the most backward and poverty-stricken of the world’s continents was the appalling quality of African leaders – tyrants, dictators but, above all, thieves, on an epic, mind-boggling scale.

23. The Struggle for Democracy

The long hold on power of Africa’s strong men, the generation who took power at independence and often clung on to it for 25 years or more, for example:

  • Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (president for 38 years)
  • Omar Bongo in Gabon (41 years)
  • Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire (president for 33 years)
  • Mobutu in Zaire (32 years)
  • Hastings Banda in Malawi (30 years)
  • Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (27 years)
  • Moussa Traore in Mali (22 years)

Of the 50 African states in 1990, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships.

The fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a new era. One party regimes and Marxist regimes appeared old-fashioned overnight. But the strong men clung on in the new landscape, for example Mobutu who struggled on for another 7 years.

24. A Time of Triumph (South Africa)

A long and harrowing description of ‘grand’ apartheid in all its totalitarian, racist horror. Meredith gives an interesting explanation of the changes in international affairs and geopolitics during the late 1980s which led the apartheid leadership to consider sweeping reform. He ends with a moving account of negotiations with Nelson Mandela, climaxing with his release and then the first free, multi-racial elections in South Africa’s history.

Apart from the long, complex history of violence, guerrilla warfare, civil war between the ANC and Inkatha, South Africa’s interference in all the nations bordering it and so on – on a human level I learned that a) Mandela and the last apartheid leader, F.W. de Klerk, really didn’t get on, and that b) when his marriage to wife Winnie Mandela ended, she very publicly took a much younger lover and embarrassed him in public (‘Mandela’s late years of freedom were constantly blighted by her wayward example’), leaving him an often lonely figure (p.438).

Part 4

25. In The Name of the Prophet (Egypt, Algeria, Sudan)

Sayyid Qutb

The imperialists had oppressed them. Secular nationalism was a failure. The first generation of post-independence rulers turned out to be corrupt tyrants. Socialism and Marxism turned out to be dead ends. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 there began a revival of political Islam which seemed to many ordinary people a last resort, given that all western political systems and theories had failed. Political Islam encouraged the idea that western concepts like democracy or capitalism were infidel and inappropriate to Muslim lands, and that only return to the purity of the Prophet’s laws and rules would restore society.

The principal architect of jihad ideology [was] Sayyid Qutb…whose writings influenced generations of radical Islamists. (p.444)

Qutb, an Egyptian who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, was imprisoned by Colonel Nasser, then executed in 1965 – but not before he’d developed, written and distributed a starkly simplistic view of Islam. According to Qutb the entire Muslim world can be divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan with no middle ground. Repressive regimes cannot be changed from within and so must be overthrown by jihad i.e. armed struggle.

Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar el-Harb – the Abode of War. ‘It should be combated even if one’s own kith and kin, national group, capital and commerce are to be found there.’ (p.444)

This is really, really important. Qutb’s writings are crucial to understanding the modern age. His simplistic binary worldview, and his insistence that democracy, nationalism, human rights and all those other ideas, are infidel western abominations – all this explains the wars which have steadily engulfed the Arab/Muslim world in the last 30 years.

Qutb’s writings explain why generations of jihadis have been convinced that the only honourable and devout course of action is to fight your enemies to extermination. His writings have hugely contributed to instability right across the Arab world and are the ideological background to jihadis fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Meredith mentions a couple of other Muslim thinkers:

  • cleric Omar Abdel Rahman who taught that jihad was the only way to vanquish the enemies of Islam (p.445)
  • Muhammed al-Farag, who taught that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and that armed struggle is imperative for all true Muslims in order to cure a decadent society: ‘the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them with a complete Islamic Order’ (p.446)

Only jihad can bring about the perfect Islamic society. Jihad must be waged until the perfect Islamic society is achieved. But there are many forces resisting this, the obvious outside forces of America and the West, but also the populations of many of these countries. So the kind of perfect Islamic state the jihadis dream of will probably never be achieved. Therefore the Muslim world, certainly in the Middle East and North Africa, is condemned to permanent war or insurgency for the foreseeable future.

Algeria

The Front de libération nationale (FLN) had been the main force behind the long bloody war for the independence of Algeria from France. After independence was finally granted in 1962, the FLN became the party of government, instituting socialist policies and a one-party regime. Meredith lists the reasons why the FLN slowly became unpopular. Two stick out. One was that they downplayed agriculture in a bid to industrialise, keeping food prices artificially low in order to placate their constituencies in the towns and cities. The result was that life as a farmer got harder and harder, with many rural youths deciding to quit the poverty of the countryside and try their luck in the city. This is interesting because it’s an abiding theme of so many of these countries. If I could travel back in time to the early 60s and was an adviser to newly independent African nations, I’d say: ‘Cherish your farmers’. In Algeria, as everywhere else, neglecting and even undermining agriculture led to the country becoming ever more reliant on food imports.

The second is the explosion in population. I am a Darwinian materialist, a believer in the blunt facts of the environment and biology a long way before culture and politics. Thus the simple relevant fact is that the population of Algeria exploded from 10 million in 1962 to 26 million in 1992. No rate of economic growth, anywhere, could keep up with this explosion in mouths to feed and, more to the point, young men to employ.

Groups of young men hanging round on street corners become a prey to warlords and the siren call of violent revolution. This is true all round the developing world. The West supplied the medicines to developing countries which hugely improved infant mortality and recovery from illness, but without doing anything to transform a) cultural attitudes to women and childbirth or b) expand the economies. Result: lots of aimless young men looking for a cause.

Enter radical Islam which promises a better world, which gives young men a purpose, a goal, a sense of identity, and money and respect. What’s not to like, what’s not to sign up and commit your life to?

As radical Islamic parties began to appear in Algeria the military command which called the shots in the FLN tried to cancel them. After complicated manoeuvres the FLN agreed to hold free elections and Islamic parties stood in them. But when the Islamists looked like winning, the FLN abruptly cancelled the results and took back military control. The rest of the story could have been written by an AI bot. The Islamists hit back with a terror campaign, the army cracked down, arbitrarily arresting thousands, imprisonment without trial, torture etc, the Islamists ramped up their campaign, and so on.

Again, with utter inevitability, the insurgency spawned an extremist wing, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). With utter predictability they started off saying they’d stick to military targets but soon found these too well protected and their attacks having less and less affect so they widened their targets. Journalists were singled out, but more and more members of the general public were also murdered. Abdelkader Hattab wrote a pamphlet titled: ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’ (p.457).

As in Iraq, in order to build the perfect Islamic state, it turned out to be necessary to kill lots of Muslims, first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands.

What became known as the Algerian Civil War lasted from 1991 to 2002 and led to around 150,000 deaths. Of course the economy was wrecked. Of course a lot of the best and brightest middle classes simply fled abroad.

Egypt

I visited Egypt in 1981 and then in 1995, just before Islamist terror groups began attacking tourists. Groups like Jamaat al-Jihad and Gamma Islamiyya increasingly targeted government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians, burned Christian shops and churches, and bookshops and theatres and video stores. Farag Foda, one of Egypt’s best known writers, was shot dead. The Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was knifed. ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’, in practice.

Then they started attacking tourists: in 1996 17 Greek pilgrims were murdered outside their hotel. In 1997 58 foreign tourists were murdered in the Valley of the Kings. Meredith tells us that a Japanese man was eviscerated and inside his stomach cavity was stuffed a note reading: ‘No to tourists in Egypt’ (p.461). Fine by me. I’m never going back to a Muslim country.

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had come to power after the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat by army Islamists in 1981. Now Mubarak set about crushing the Islamic groups ruthlessly, telling his own people and the international community that he wouldn’t let Egypt become the next Algeria. This chapter takes the story up to 2000, when Mubarak was arresting members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organisations to prevent them standing in that year’s elections.

26. Black Hawk Down (Somalia)

The first fact about Somalia is that, at independence, about 40% of the people who thought of themselves as Somalis lived outside the borders of the country, in Ethiopia or Kenya. So from the day of independence the government neglected agriculture and the economy and focused on military action to try and extend its borders to include the full population.

Second fact is the Somalis have a strong and complex clan system, clans within clans, which extends in a hierarchy from the five main super-clans down through ever-diminishing sub-clans. So:

  1. Never-ending warfare helped impoverish the country, especially after the Soviet Union dropped its support for Somalia in favour of Mengistu’s Marxist revolution in neighbouring Ethiopia.
  2. As central government collapsed under the pressure of military defeats, poverty, famine and so on, the country disintegrated into a warzone of permanently fighting, feuding clans, at multiple levels, with warlords ruling their territories through terror.

27. The Graves Are Not Yet Full (Rwanda)

The Rwandan genocide. I’ve summarised the dreadful events elsewhere. I’ll just pick up on two related themes, mentioned re. Algeria. 1) the population of Rwanda ballooned from 2 million in 1940 to 7 million in 1990, which led to 2) lots of unemployed youths hanging around, waiting for a cause and meaning (and cash):

Youths with no prospect of work were easily recruited [into the interahamwe) with promises of land, jobs and other rewards… (p.496)

The French government of François Mitterrand comes over as the genocide-supporting scumbags indicated by all the other accounts. For example, it was the French government which refused the Belgian request to increase the number of the latter’s peacekeepers, so that Belgians ended up being forced to watch Tutsis being hacked to death in front of them but were unable to intervene. Because of France (p.510).

Mitterrand was determined to prevent a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in Rwanda even if it meant continuing to collaborate with genocidal killers. (p.519)

France made five arms shipments to the Hutu government while it was carrying out the genocide. Bastard Mitterrand sent a French force into Rwanda to protect the Hutu Power génocidaires (the equivalent of protecting the SS). Meredith tells of French soldiers slowly realising that the Hutus they had been sent to protect were in fact genocidal killers and realising that their government (Mitterrand) had lied to them. The piles and piles of Tutsi corpses were a clue. But the French government refused to allow their troops on the ground to track down and bring to justice the génocidaires hiding among the mass Hutu refugees who fled into Congo, once the Tutsi-led RPF reactivated the civil war and invaded in order to end the killing.

To the end, the French protected the organisers of the genocide. (p.522)

We’re never meant to forget the Holocaust. Well, in the same spirit, surely we should never forgive the arms and aid and support and protection the French government extended to the perpetrators of the second most horrific genocide of the twentieth century.

Mind you, Meredith goes on to paint the UN as far worse, biased towards Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, ignoring reports from the Canadian commander of the UN force on the ground, UNAMIR, General Roméo Dallaire. And then the Belgian government, which withdrew their contingent altogether, abandoning thousands of Tutsis who had taken shelter in their compounds and who were hacked to pieces within hours of their abandonment (p.512). And the Americans behaved disgracefully, Bill Clinton doing everything he could to avoid using the G word (genocide) and refusing to commit troops. Everyone in a position of power in the West let the genocide happen.

More Tutsis were killed in churches than any other type of building, although a lot were killed in maternity wards where a lot had their bellies ripped open and their babies hacked to pieces before they themselves were hacked to death.

Some people still believe in the essential goodness of the human race. Such innocence is touching, charming, but dangerous.

28. Where Vultures Fly (the two Congo wars)

Who supported Mobutu after he had reduced Zaire to starving ruins? France. Why? Because he spoke French. Because he represented la francophonie. Because he represented a bulwark against the rise of the beastly English-speaking leaders such as Museveni of Uganda. France supported mass murderers and world-beating kleptocrats because their crimes were less important than the preservation of ‘French culture’ (p.525). Look at their wise and good achievements in the realm of international affairs: Vietnam. Algeria. Models of wisdom and statecraft. And Vichy, when millions of French people wholeheartedly co-operated with German Nazis whose values they enthusiastically endorsed.

This is not an exaggeration. When considering international affairs, it’s important to bear in mind what despicable depths the French establishment’s paranoid fear of the English-speaking world drives them. James Barr describes the despicable behaviour of the French in Lebanon and Syria during the Second World War:

This chapter describes how the million and a half Hutu refugees from Rwanda were crammed into refugee camps, mostly in Congo, where the Hutu Power génocidaires rebuilt their power, controlled the distribution of aid, murdered dissenting voices, kept the refugees in line with terror, while they sold some of the aid the West gave them in order to buy arms to re-invade Rwanda and resume attacking Tutsi communities.

Meredith explains how the leader of the RPF, Paul Kagame, conspired with President of Uganda Mouseveni to invade eastern Zaire, to crush the Hutu Power leaders, to force the Hutu refugees to return to their country. How they found a useful idiot from within Zaire to front the army they were creating, namely fat, stupid guerrilla turned nightclub-owner Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

The combined RPF and Ugandan army force which Kabila fronted not only liberated the Hutu refugee camps, but marched on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, triggering the panic-stricken flight of the sick old dictator, Mobutu in 1997. In short order and to his own surprise, Kabila found himself in power and set about surrounding himself with cronies in the traditional style. Unwisely, he tried to bolster his support among the Congolese by turning on his Ugandan and Rwandan-Tutsi backers, whose forces were much resented in Kinshasa and beyond.

This policy badly backfired because when Kagame and Museveni found their puppet acting up against them, in 1998 they instituted a second invasion from the east, this time not marching but flying their forces direct to Kinshasa to overthrow Kabile. At this point, however, various outside countries began to get involved, several big ones supporting Kabile who had signed lucrative deals with them allowing them to plunder Congo’s natural resources.

This was the complex situation which led to what became known as the Great War of Africa. Slowly the country splintered into regions held by rival warlords or outside armies. A peace treaty was signed in 2002 which required armies from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe to withdraw. In four years of chaotic conflict (1998 to 2002) some 3 million Africans had died, mostly unarmed Congolese civilians. But even after the peace treaty, fighting continued in east Congo, and continues at a low level to this day.

29. Blood Diamonds (Liberia, Sierra Leone)

Liberia

Meredith recaps the extraordinary early history of Liberia, a colony on the west coast of Africa funded in 1822 by guilt-stricken liberal Americans who wanted to return some of their slaves to the motherland. Instead, the few thousand returned Blacks ended up creating their own version of slavery, subjugating the poor locals, exploiting their labour, building homes and dressing in the elaborate nineteenth century style of their former American oppressors. Now the immigrant Blacks oppressed the locals. The Americo-Liberians amounted to no more than 1% of the population but lorded it over the indigenes.

In a neat historical irony, in 1931 an international commission found members of the entirely Black Liberian government guilty of involvement in organised slavery (p.546).

But it the story stops being in any way funny when in April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led a coup which overturned a century of Americo-Liberian rule. Semi-literate, Doe came from a minority tribe, the Krahn, from the deep jungle. He and colleagues broke into the mansion of President William Tolbert to complain about unpaid wages. Finding him asleep in bed they shot him multiple times before disembowelling him and dumping his body in the garden. This was the coup where Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were taken down to the beach, tied to posts and shot by a squad of drunken soldiers. I remember seeing the video on the news. This set the tone of ten years of savage, primitive, ignorant, incompetent rule.

Like all stupid people, Doe thought the world revolved around him and thus saw conspiracies everywhere. His comms people publicised the idea that he had survived 38 or more assassination attempts because of his magical powers, because bullets stopped in mid-air, knives refused to cut him, and so on – fairy tales designed to appeal to the largely illiterate population.

In August 1984 Doe arrested a popular university lecturer and 15 colleagues claiming they were planning a coup. When students protested, Doe sent a troop of soldiers who opened fire indiscriminately, stripped students naked, demanded money and/or raped them (p.551). This all made me think of all Kwame Nkrumah’s speeches from the 1950s and 60s about ‘Africa for Africans’, ‘African values’, how a liberated Africa would become a beacon of progress and civilisation…

Throughout all the mayhem the US government stood by Doe, declaring his obviously rigged elections valid, overlooking his brutal massacres, upping annual aid to $80 million, and inviting him to the White House for red carpet treatment. Why? Because he was staunchly anti-Soviet. That’s all that mattered (p.555).

In November 1985 General Thomas Quiwonkpa, who had led the 1980 coup along with Doe, tried to seize power and there was premature rejoicing – until Doe managed to regain control, hunt down Quiwonkpa and have him kicked and hacked to death, followed by even harsher crackdowns on the population, which including victimisation of the entire Gio tribe which Quiwonkpa came from.

In 1989 another former colleague, Charles Taylor, led a militia into Liberia from neighbouring Ivory Coast, thus commencing a guerrilla war against Doe. Doe sent out death squads to devastate villages in the regions Taylor had seized. Taylor armed children (‘Small Boy Units’) and told them to kill everyone. The country descended into barbarity.

Bolstered by cane spirit, marijuana and cheap amphetamines, youths and boy soldiers evolved into psychopathic killers, adorning themselves with women’s wigs, dresses, fright masks and enemy bones and smearing their faces with white clay and make-up in the belief that this gave them supernatural perception…’It’s a children’s war,’ said a senior United Nations observer. ‘Kids get promoted in rank for committing an atrocity. They can cut off someone’s head without thinking. The troops move into a village. They take everything and kill and rape. They stay a couple of weeks and then move on.’ (p.558)

It’s interesting to read that many of the stoned fighters thought that wearing wigs or dresses i.e. adopting two identities, would confuse enemy bullets. Traditional African values. Reminds me of the website I found last time I was reading about this subject, a collection of photos of the surreal garb of drug-addled psychopathic militia men.

In 1989 a colleague of Taylor’s named Prince Johnson split off from Taylor’s army to set up the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, with the result that Liberia became caught in a three-way civil war. Or just – war. Marauding soldiers from each side burned, looted, raped and massacred at will. Half the population fled the country. Nigeria sent a peacekeeping force which didn’t establish any kind of peace but secured a few buildings in the capital Monrovia. When Doe drove down to the port to greet them, he was captured by Prince Johnson’s men.

Johnson ordered a video to be made of his men torturing a badly battered Doe, including the moments when they sliced his ears off. The video became a bestseller across West Africa. You can watch it on YouTube and reflect on the speeches of Kwame Nkrumah explaining how African values would civilise the world.

Inevitably, the African peacekeeping force turned out to be every bit as corrupt and lawless as the militias they were sent to police, giving warlords weapons in exchange for looted goods, leading to the joke that ECOMOG stood for ‘Every Car Or Moving Object Gone’.

Taylor established control everywhere outside the capital, and came to commercial arrangements with western companies to allow trade to continue. In two years he’s estimated to have raked off £200 million from these gangster deals.

Sierra Leone

The chaos from Liberia then spilled over into neighbouring Sierra Leone. This country was already a basket case due to the 17-year, one-party rule of President Siaka Steven whose regime made a fortune trading diamonds via Lebanese dealers, while the economy languished, government employees went unpaid, and gangs of youths filled the streets looking for a cause. The usual.

The force Taylor sent into Sierra Leone in March 1991 called itself the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and was led by the psychopath, Foday Sankoh. This was the group Anthony Loyd writes about terrifyingly in Another Bloody Love Letter. Child soldiers became a key feature of Sierra Leone’s civil war. They were given drugs, indoctrinated and taught to kill. Some had to kill their own parents as an initiation test. Some hated it, wanted to leave but were afraid of themselves being killed. But others loved it. As researchers Krijn Peters and Paul Richards concluded:

‘The pay may be derisory but weapon training pays quicker dividends than school ever did; soon the AK47 brings food, money, a warm bath and instant adult respect. The combat groups substitutes for lost family and friends.’ (quoted page 563)

Like the white overseers in King Leopold’s Congo, the RUF took to hacking off the hands and limbs of civilians, at random, purely for the terror it created. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes. A coup in the capital brought Valentine Strasser to power. He paid a firm of mercenaries, Executive Outcomes, to clear the capital Freetown in exchange for rights to the country’s diamond mines. Executive Outcomes fighters cleared Freetown in one week, testament to the shoddy, amateurish character of the African fighters on all sides.

More splinter groups, more coups, more fighting, 14 attempts at a ceasefire, tens of thousands more hand choppings and mutilations. A final ceasefire brought UN intervention. But when the UN went to seize the diamond mines, in 2000, the RUF captured 500 of its peacekeepers. It was now that Britain sent in a full battle force to release the UN troops, seize government buildings and train the SL army. Sankoh was arrested and the RUF splintered into ineffectual groups. In the wake of the British intervention, the UN deployed 18,000 troops to bring about a comprehensive peace.

Eleven years of war had left 50,000 dead, 20,000 mutilated, three quarters of the population displaced, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the league of human development. Back in Liberia, Charles Taylor amassed a huge fortune from illegal diamond trading. His overthrow in 2003 was as violent and brutal as his coming to power, with two more factions, groups or militias murdering and raping their way to the capital. Eventually Taylor was forced out but flew peacefully to Nigeria to take up life in a comfortable retirement villa. There is no justice on earth, nothing like justice.

30. No Condition Is Permanent (Nigeria)

Meredith describes the brutal rule of General Sani Abacha, military ruler from 1993 to 1998. His crackdown on all opposition. The rise of organisations representing the Ogoni people of the oil-rich Niger Delta who had seen none of the tens of billions of oil money generated around them, only the pollution and destruction of their environment. The work of the popular writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was eventually arrested, accused of organising an anti-government conspiracy etc and, despite international protests, executed in November 1995.

Abachi’s death in 1998 is the opportunity for a review of how far the country had fallen. Despite annual oil revenue of $280 billion, income per head was less than a third of what it had been in 1980, at $310; half the population lived on less than 30 cents a day and had no access to clean drinking water. Half of under fives were stunted due to malnutrition. Nigeria was regularly judged to be the most corrupt country in the world.

What this litany of disasters begins to impress on even the most sympathetic reader is that Africans do not seem able of running their own countries. Catastrophic wars, epic corruption, barbaric violence resulting in crushing poverty, if the generation of independence campaigners had seen the future would they have been in such a tearing hurry to gain independence from their colonial masters?

Abachi’s death didn’t bring peace and light: the end of the military regime led to an explosion of political parties across the country, which themselves exacerbated ethnic rivalries, and also the rise of Islamic militancy, which led to clashes between Muslims and Christians. Despite free elections in 1999 and again in 2003, observers wondered whether Nigeria, a country of 120 million made up of 250 ethnic groups, was ungovernable. [That was in 2000. Nigeria’s population in 2023 has almost doubled, to 215 million.]

31. The Honour of Living (Sudan)

General Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in 1989 and declared his commitment to creating an Islamic state. This was followed by the arrest of all opposition figures, torture including burning, beating and rape, the usual behaviour of leaders promising to build a better society – first you have to lock up a lot of people. 1991 saw the introduction of a new Islamic penal code: women were hounded out of public life, segregation of men and women was enforced in all public places, there was a ban on music, cinema and the compulsory Arabisation of all culture.

The ideologue of all this was Hassan al-Turabi, founder of the National Islamic Front and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the first Gulf War, in 1991. Turabi set up the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference to bring together thinkers and leaders to fight back against America’s ‘colonisation’ of the Arab World. Sudan became a refuge for anti-western terrorist groups. This is very important. It marks the start of a new type of aggressive new anti-western ideology, of the war on America.

Meredith gives a good short description of the career of Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the blind cleric sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman organised the bombing of the World Trade Centre. Extremists trained in Sudan undertook assassinations and attacks across the Arab world. In 1998 activists trained by al Qaeda attacked hotels in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people. Now we enter ‘the modern world’, the era we still live in in 2023, the era of unceasing conflict and Islamic insurgency across the entire Arab world.

Their Islamic ideology justified the Bashir regime in intensifying the war against southern, Black, Christian rebels. Villages were bombed, populations massacred and sold into slavery, with the blessing of Islamic scholars. The southern forces split into two parties who had a civil war between themselves in which tens of thousands of civilians died, which triggered a famine in which hundreds of thousands perished (p.594). Humans, eh? Impressive species.

Alongside massacres in the south went the discovery and exploitation of oil. The Khartoum government reaped a huge bonanza and spent it on…arms. By 2002 the civil war had left an estimated 2 million dead. But after 9/11 the Americans became active. Sudan was identified as a training base for Islamic terrorists and Bashir had to back down and promise to comply.

32. Black Gold (Angola)

The crushingly depressing history of Angola in the 1980s and 1980s, a country destroyed by an endless civil war between the supposedly ‘Marxist’ MPLA government based in Luanda, and the madly self-centred, narcissistic, overweening arrogance of Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA.

Land mines, aerial bombing, indiscriminate massacre, burning, looting, rape of women and children. Maybe 5 million died, many more had legs blown off by the millions of landmines, the country was laid waste – all while Eduardo dos Santos and the elite of the MPLA lived like kings by salting away the revenue derived from the huge oil deposits found just offshore. Getting on for half the annual oil revenue, billions of dollars, was stolen by dos Santos and his clique, while the children starved to death in the streets. As with Congo, or Nigeria, why give aid to oil- and resource-rich countries which have enough natural income to invest in infrastructure, roads, markets, clean water, schools, but which they either steal or spend on arms and weapons?

33. A Degree In Violence (Zimbabwe)

The slow descent into paranoid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. I hadn’t realised that he was initially conciliatory towards the white minority, and even his arch enemy Ian Smith, for the first two or three years of his rule because his first priority was eliminating all his black rivals, starting with Joshua Nkomo and his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). It was called the Gukurahundi campaign (Shona for ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’). During this campaign Mugabe’s notorious Fifth Brigade, trained by North Koreans, rampaged through ZAPU’s heartland, Matabeleland, and massacred thousands of civilians accused of being ‘dissidents’. Some estimates say as many as 80,000 were killed during the 5-year campaign.

Slowly Zimbabwe became like all the other African one-party states, a machine for redirecting wealth into the pockets of a small elite around the figurehead leader. As the economy collapsed and inflation and unemployment rose, so did Mugabe’s deployment of racist, anti-white rhetoric, focused on the policy of farm reclamation, seizing back land from the white farmers who owned a disproportionate amount of it. As Meredith explains, it’s all Mugabe had left, rabble-rousing racism to distract attention from the complete failure of his leadership.

Mugabe’s successive rounds of farm seizures spelled the end of commercial farming as a major industry in Zimbabwe. Many of the confiscated farms didn’t go to the deserving poor but to friends and family and tribal supporters of Mugabe, who then stripped and sold off their assets or left them to rot. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks who worked on the confiscated farms were thrown out of work. Land lay fallow. Food production collapsed. Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, became dependent on food aid.

By 2003 the economy had collapsed and an estimated quarter of the population had fled the country. Three-quarters of the remainder lived on less than a dollar a day. Meredith covers the coming together of opposition movements in the Movement for Democratic Change and the rise of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the elections he contested in 2002 and 2008, elections Mugabe comprehensively managed with intimidation, violence and hectoring messages through state media.

Opposition activists were hunted down, beaten, tortured and in some cases murdered. (p.646)

Meredith’s narrative takes the reader up to 2008 when Mugabe, despite spending 28 years utterly devastating his country, was still in power. It was very depressing to switch to Wikipedia and see that Mugabe continued to rule the country he had ruined for another nine years, till he was overthrown in 2017.

34. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (South Africa)

The books and movies all focus on Nelson Mandela‘s long march to freedom. Not so many examine the calamitous challenges he faced on taking power in 1994: trying to reverse the best part of a century of totalitarian racism which had entrenched grotesque inequality between the affluent whites and the crushingly poor Black population; trying to integrate millions of badly educated young Africans into the economy, trying to introduce Blacks into every level of a 100% white political and civil administration and into SA’s commercial life. The army, the police, the education system, everything needed reforming.

Plus the expectations of activists at all levels who had spent a lifetime working for the ‘revolution’ which would create a land of plenty. There was an epidemic of strikes and protests or just straightforward crime. To all this Mandela had to react much like Mrs Thatcher, explaining that the state just didn’t have the resources to make everyone rich. There would have to be belt-tightening. It would take time.

Meredith has an extended passage describing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how it struggled to find its way, was a compromise in nature and intent, but ended up unearthing far more than anyone expected. Its impartiality was emphasised by the way it was reviled by both sides, both stalwarts of the apartheid regime and the ANC itself, found guilty of murdering white civilians, Black opponents, of prosecuting a civil war with Inkatha, and the 400-plus victims of ‘necklacing’.

Meredith’s account of Mandela’s sustained efforts to achieve reconciliation between the races at every level bring a tear to the eye. What a hero.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, elected unopposed to lead the ANC in 1997, was not a hero. Despite having been raised a communist, Mbeki promptly announced a set of neoliberal capitalist policies designed to boost the economy, namely strict fiscal discipline, lower government deficits, privatisation and liberalisation of state industries.

But Mbeki will go down in history as the man who adopted a minority view that HIV did not cause AIDS, promoted this view at every opportunity, refused to support AIDS awareness campaigns, refused to license anti-HIV drugs, for year after year, in the face of mounting criticism both within SA and internationally.

Mbeki insisted on playing the race card i.e. insisting that the global scientific consensus about HIV/AIDS was a racist attack on Black Africans on a par with apartheid. His obstinate refusal to allow anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients and pregnant women was calculated, by 2008, to have led to the premature deaths of 365,000 South Africans.

The greatest political challenge facing every nation is not to end up being led by idiots.

Mbeki undertook a more aggressive strategy of getting white businesses to include Black partners but, far from lifting the entire Black population out of poverty, this tended to enrich just the small number of educated, well-connected Blacks. The strategy developed into crony capitalism. Perceiving that they were being discriminated against, some 750,000 skilled whites just left the country, replaced by less qualified or experienced Blacks (p.679). Services decayed. Poverty grew alongside rising violent crime.

South Africa now has exceptionally high rates of murder, gender-based violence, robbery and violent conflict. It has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Mbeki turned into a typical African leader. He created a climate of fear in the ANC. He emasculated parliament. He appointed officials for their loyalty to him, not their abilities. He shamefully supported Robert Mugabe even as Mugabe turned into a dictator and reduced his country to beggary.

And, falling into line with traditional African leaders, Mbeki and his cronies became involved in corruption, in particular creaming off hundreds of millions of dollars from state defence procurements. The ANC became split between the Mbeki faction and one led by Jacob Zuma, who himself was charged with money laundering, fraud and rape.

In 2007 Zuma stood against Mbeki and won the post of ANC leader, then stood for the presidency in 2009. The party split, but corruption became more embedded. The gap between rich and poor grew. Crime became the only way to survive for millions. After this book was completed Jacob Zuma went on to be elected president and serve from 2009 to 2018.

Incidentally, Meredith has written a series of books about South Africa, including a biography of Mandela, which explains the authoritativeness of his SA chapters:

  • In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa In The Post War Period (1988)
  • South Africa’s New Era: The 1994 Election (1994)
  • Nelson Mandela: A Biography (1999)
  • Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth (2001)

35. Out of Africa

Decline

In 2001 the Organisation of African Unity was replaced by a new African Union. Same old dictators, though. Same corruption, same tribalism, same civil wars. Same population explosion which means half the population live below the poverty line, same huge unemployment, with millions permanently on the brink of starvation. 250 million Africans are undernourished; school enrolment is falling; life expectancy is falling. [This appears to be wrong, now; life expectancy in Africa is, apparently, 63.]

MDGs

By some estimates the West has spend £1.2 trillion in aid to Africa. There has often been little to show. In the 2000s there was a flurry of activity with the creation of the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005 Bob Geldof created a huge media event around the Live 8 campaign and gigs. But the West has donor fatigue. Pledges made under MDGs and Live 8 weren’t carried through. African countries have promised to reform and then utterly failed to do so too many times.

China

Into the breach has stepped China, which has been signing trade deals across Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). By 2010 China-Africa trade had leapt to $115 billion. A million Chinese had moved to Africa.

The Arab Spring

And then, just as Meredith was completing this book, along came the Arab Spring leading to the overthrow of ageing dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and on into the Middle East i.e. Yemen, Bahrein, Syria. And yet within a few years, Egypt was back in the hands of the military, Libya had collapsed as a state, Syria fell into a ruinous civil war; only Tunisia survived and flourished as a democracy.

Kenya

Meredith ends with the calamitous recent history of Kenya, which threw out Daniel arap Moi and his cronies (known as the Karbanet syndicate) after 23 years of looting the country. However, his successor, Mwai Kibaki, merely instituted a new kleptocracy for his tribe and supporters (who came to be known as the Mount Kenya mafia). Corruption reached scandalous new heights with some $4 billion a year, or one third of the national budget, being raked off by the corrupt elite.

When Kibaki refused to accept the results of the 2007 election i.e that he had lost to opposition leader Raila Odinga, he plunged Kenya into tribal bloodshed which left thousands dead, the economy damaged and Kenya’s reputation for stability in tatters. It had become just one more African country, ruined by its corrupt rulers’ inability to cede power.

Africa’s wounds are self-inflicted. Africans have proved ruinously incapable of running their own countries. Meredith ends his book by describing the majority of Africa’s rulers as ‘vampires’ who have converted all the instruments of the state into money-making scams, who use rabble-rousing ethnic rhetoric or state terror to remain in power, while their populations slip ever backwards into poverty, sickness and starvation.

Thoughts

Some pretty obvious themes emerge from this 700-page odyssey but in the last 5 or 6 chapters something bigger than the themes struck me, which is that this is a very negative view of Africa. Often it is very harrowing and dark indeed, as when the subject matter is bleak, as in Algeria, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola.

But it took me a while to grasp how much this is a journalist’s not a historian’s or academic’s point of view of the subject. And, like all journalists, Meredith accentuates the negative. Man buys a puppy for his kids, who love it, is not news. New puppy attacks children, that is news.

I know it’s an obvious and well-known journalistic principle, but in the last 100 pages it really struck home that Meredith focuses relentlessly on the bad news, on countries with long-running wars and political crises, the ones we read about in the newspapers: Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, settings for horrible wars, massacres, genocides even. On the basis of this book it would be tempting to write all of Africa off as an irredeemable disaster zone. But there are 50 or so countries in Africa, and not all of them are having civil wars all the time. Some of them might even be doing rather well. Many people might be living ordinary lives, doing jobs, getting married, having parties. Despite the impression Meredith gives, life expectancy across Africa is actually rising.

Anyway, that was my one Big Thought: that if you only read this book you would be left with the impression that Africa is a vast abattoir of eternal massacre and mutilation, vampire leaders and epic corruption. I don’t think Meredith intends to be biased and I’m sure everything he writes is absolutely true. But by the end of his book I began to think that it’s not necessarily the complete truth, about the entire continent, and all its countries, and all the people who live in them.

Credit

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith was published in England by the Free Press in 2005. A revised edition was published by Simon and Schuster in 2011. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on November 10, 2023

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The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar (revised edition, 2015)

This is a hefty 480-page account of the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring by a highly experienced BBC correspondent, so why did it feel such hard work, and why did I find myself heartily disliking the author long before the end? There are several reasons.

To begin with, I was deterred by the patronising, facetious tone of the opening chapter (examples below). Then, in the following, more serious chapters, Danahar does two interrelated things: he arranges the material about each of the countries he surveys (Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria) in a surprisingly non-chronological, apparently arbitrary way, which makes it difficult to follow the course of events or understand causal relationships or even be clear about key turning points. And this is exacerbated by the second element, namely Danahar’s apparent determination to name-drop every politician, commentator or local he’s ever met or interviewed.

When Michael Ignatieff interviews politicians in Empire Lite, his questions, the answers, and his reflections on them, are beautifully focused on the ideas and issues he is exploring. But in this book, although the politicians or generals or religious leaders Danahar interviews obviously speak more or less to the topic at hand, there is no discernible thread or focus to their comments. The result of these tactics is that each chapter turns into a porridgey morass of disconnected dates and unrelated soundbites. Danahar makes so many hundreds of minor ephemeral points that the main issues are buried.

Patronising and bad comedy

The first chapter, about the collapse of the old Middle East, is written in a patronising, would-be comic style, characterised by facetiousness and sarcasm. It’s a terrible example of what happens when BBC journalists are told to make their work ‘more accessible’ and, as a result, attempt to make subjects simple and funny.

Thus, when he explains that the Arab Spring was the expression of the frustration of the young generation in each of its countries, he doesn’t give any facts or figures or statistics, he just mocks and ridicules the old dictators of these countries:

But then these were old men who probably needed help from their grandchildren to operate the DVD player. (p.22)

The dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria tightly controlled the traditional media (press and TV) but:

The Grandads were too blind to see that their political class didn’t control the message any more. By the time they tried to turn the Internet off it was too late. (p.22)

This comes over as patronising and condescending and stupid. It lacks anything useful in the way of evidence, data, statistics, facts and analysis. It is a silly, cartoon version of the world and it is the dominant tone of this introductory survey.

A few weeks before the NATO jets began to rev up their engines to drop their first payloads on the regime of ‘the world’s most famous dictator’, the man who would soon soar up the charts to grab that title from him was still pretty confident that he faced no serious trouble at home. (p.27)

He’s talking about Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, but in the language of Top of the Pops. Why? Does he think it will make the subject more ‘accessible’? It doesn’t. It just comes over as patronising and childish. Here’s another, typical gag:

We in the West need to understand this region, because Vegas rules do not apply. What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. (p.17)

Here he is explaining why democracy is important:

Democracy is a safety valve. The ability to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and wander down the street hurling abuse at your leaders is a good thing for society. Without it the pressure just grows. (p.41)

The Internet. The Grandads. The Strong Men of the Arab World. Democracy. Everything is capitalised as for children. Janet and John. Blue Peter. BBC Bitesize.

We all know George W. Bush was a twerp but that’s no excuse for writing twerpishly about him. Here is Danahar describing George Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ and Bush’s apparently sincere belief that he was on a mission from God to bring peace to the Middle East:

He [Bush] pushed for elections in the region but then the Arabs started voting for the wrong people, Islamists. That wasn’t the plan. So Western government supported economic reform instead, but that only helped the dictators steal even more money. So Western aid money started to go back into civil society projects that seemed like a nice safe way of doing something while, critics said, not doing very much at all. The ‘mission from God’ became rather less driven. Instead it sort of ambled about a bit, took in the view and told the Arab people to be patient. (p.36)

See what I mean by patronising and condescending? Note the complete absence of facts or dates. Instead there’s just Danahar’s cheap sarcasm. Here is his cartoon summary of America’s puzzlement at the Arab Spring:

America not only doesn’t understand the rules of the game, it can’t work out what winning might look like. Since the revolts it has been roaming around the table looking at everyone else’s hand, offering advice on which hand to play, but because it acted like it didn’t have a stake in the game, nobody was really listening. (p.7)

Not helpful, is it? Weak attempts at humour are no substitute for intelligent analysis. Here is his explanation of why the Arab Spring kicked off in Tunisia:

Middle-class people don’t riot, or at least they didn’t before the Arab revolts. Middle-class people, by definition, have something invested in the system. It might not be much but it is theirs. So when trouble breaks out their instincts are normally to moan, not march. But nothing upsets the middle-classes like a show-off. And if the flashy neighbours are showing off with your money, the gardening gloves come off!

This is what happens when journalists think they’re stand-up comedians. ‘The gardening gloves come off!’ What a prannet.

Anti-West

Another reasons for disliking this book is that Danahar pins most of the blame for the failure of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions not on the actual inhabitants of the countries in question, but on ‘the West’. According to Danahar, ‘the West’ doesn’t understand the Arab world. ‘The West’ uses racist stereotypes of Arabs. ‘The West’ propped up dictators like Saddam and Assad for generations (p.21). ‘The West’ preaches democracy but then rejects it as soon as Islamist parties are elected (p.22). ‘The West’ projected its own facile wishes for a liberal third way onto the revolutions (p.23). When someone in ‘the West’ called them ‘the Facebook revolutions’ it’s because ‘the West looked for labels it could understand to explain a region it did not’ (p.22). Silly old, stupid old West, eh?

On and on goes Danahar’s barrage of accusations. ‘The West’ preaches democracy and human rights but conveniently forgets them when it has to do deals with Saudi Arabia for its oil (p.31). ‘The West’ ‘bought the line’ peddled by the old dictators that it was them or chaos, them or dangerous fundamentalists (p.34). Silly old West.

This all gets very tiresome very fast. Danahar’s pose of blaming ‘the West’ for everything is itself a stereotype, a Guardian-reader cliché, precisely the self-hating condescension towards his own country and culture which a certain kind of university-educated, white, Western, middle-class liberal deploys in order to feel smugly superior to it. When Danahar berates ‘the West’ for its racist ignorance or its hypocrisy he obviously isn’t including himself in ‘the West’. He is not part of the racist West. He is not part of the hypocritical West. He is perfectly attuned to the Arab world. He understands everything. After all, he works for the BBC and so is a god.

At one point he says ‘the West’ only reports on violence in the Arab world, thus fuelling the stereotype that the Arab world is violent (p.21). Well, er, isn’t he himself a, you know, journalist? Hasn’t he himself ever reported on violence in the Arab world? In fact his book overflows with reportage about revolution, insurgency, intifada and civil war all across the Arab world. So isn’t he, in other words, a fully paid-up member of the system which he opens his book by sarcastically criticising?

Plainly, Danahar considers himself an exception to the rule; when he reports on violence it is not how other reporters, those ghastly riff-raff, report on violence – he reports on it from above the fray, from the lofty vantage point of a BBC correspondent. This is exactly the tone of smug superiority which runs through another BBC foreign correspondent, Fergal Keane’s, self-congratulatory book about Rwanda. Maybe it’s a requirement for the job.

Israel, again

After the deeply off-putting introduction, the book goes on to long, rambling, often confusing chapters about the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Egypt, Palestine, Israel. There’s a chapter about America’s attempts to cope with the course of events, and then on to reviews of events in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The Arab Spring affected the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and changed the dynamic affecting the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas. And it had some effect in Israel although, despite reading the Israel chapter twice, I couldn’t tell you exactly how. Maybe unnerved the Israeli government and army as they watched to see who would end up running the countries around them.

My main thought on Danahar’s chapters about Palestine and Israel was – why, at just over a hundred pages, is a quarter of a book which is meant to be about the Arab Spring devoted to the Israel-Palestine question?

The bias in international reporting

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme, I was the ‘Asia’ editor. I produced discussion pieces about the tail end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988) through to the first Gulf War (1991). In between, I tried every week to get items on the air about other parts of Asia, for example, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, or south-east Asia such as Thailand, Laos, Vietnam or Indonesia, but found it difficult-to-impossible. Even getting stories about China onto the programme was virtually impossible since, back in those days, the only reported events were the stiflingly boring Communist Party congresses.

No, the three countries that appeared on the programme week in, week out, with mind-numbing inevitability, were America, Israel and South Africa. Atrocities could happen in Indonesia or Cambodia, political arguments in India, elections in Bangladesh, riots in Kyrgyzstan – my editor and the commissioning editor weren’t interested. But one settler got shot in Israel or the South African police opened fire on a group of black protesters and, whoosh! We’d immediately schedule ten-minute discussions assessing the state of the never-ending peace process or have yet another talkfest about the apartheid regime. And an American senator or congressman only had to make a controversial remark or a judge somewhere in Kansas make a ruling about abortion or civil rights and, whoosh! off we had to go to America for yet another in-depth report about America America America.

What I learned from working on an international affairs programme was the enormous in-built bias in the media towards certain countries and certain stories and against most others. There are at least four reasons for this. 1) It’s easier to get stories out of countries where journalists and film crews can operate freely. So Israel and South Africa, for all the shortcomings of their regimes, were First World countries with excellent transport and power and communications infrastructure. Sometimes a bit perilous, but basically very good countries to report from.

2) Everyone already knows the narrative. The Arab-Israeli conflict has taken on the character of a fairy story (a particularly Grimm fairy story) with an extremely clear, black-and-white narrative about the conflict between the Goliath of the all-powerful, unpleasantly right-wing but recognisably democratic Israeli state and the David of the plucky underdog, the downtrodden oppressed Palestinians, all too often represented by awful terrorist organisations, first the PLO and now Hamas. The simplicity of the narrative makes it easy to conceptualise, describe, and analyse. It’s Easy to package. Same used to be true of apartheid South Africa. Apartheid authorities = evil; black freedom fighters = heroes and martyrs; Nelson Mandela = a saint.

They were pantomime narratives with pantomime goodies and baddies. Easy to understand, easy to write about, easy to feel moral indignation about, easy to go on marches about.

Compare and contrast the difficulties I had trying to persuade my editor to do an item about the general election in Bangladesh, where 17 different parties were standing, and the ruling party was riven by corruption accusations, or the latest political scandal in Indonesia. I never stood a chance of getting those kinds of stories on the show because 1) the countries were difficult to operate in and get stories out of, 2) the situations were complex and unfamiliar, so would take some time to explain properly by which time, it was assumed, the audience would have turned over to watch Love Island.

Incidentally, it was even worse for my friend who was the Africa editor. She was initially angry, frustrated, tried to make a change, protested, and eventually slumped into sullen acceptance of the fact that she would never get a story on the programme about any other African country but South Africa. During the apartheid years, any speech by a government minister, any shooting in a black township, any announcement by the ANC got more coverage than entire wars in Chad, Sudan, Congo and so on. Because it was easy to report from (five star hotels, excellent satellite links) and the narrative was fairy-tale easy to cover in a short studio discussion.

3) Related to the points above is the way that Western journalists and editors shared the same basic assumption that these places mattered to their audience. Regarding Israel, maybe because of residual British guilt at having mismanaged our mandate over Palestine, probably more to do with the active Jewish community in Britain, it was assumed that British audiences had a kind of vested interest in what goes on in Israel. In the same way, many British firms had business connections and investments in South Africa; lots of pukka Brits have lived and worked there. Again it was assumed the audience had various kinds of attachment to the place in ways they just didn’t to Indonesia or Malaya or Bangladesh.

(In fact, some 650,000 people of Bangladeshi origin live in the UK, or 1% of the UK population, twice as many as Jews, about 370,000 or 0.5%. So it’s not a case of raw numbers. And obviously the British Empire ruled Bangladesh as much as it ruled between-the-wars Palestine; facts which reinforce my theory that it’s to do with ease of access and simplicity of narrative.)

4) Lastly, over and above these points, there was what you could call the student-level, Guardian-reading and Labour Left feeling that we, the British government, ought to be doing more in both places to bring about justice, democracy etc. A moral and political commitment to these places. Remember all the marches and rallies and speeches about apartheid during the 1970s and 80s? And the marches and speeches and rallies which still go on about Palestine? Left and progressive politics was and is committed to the injustices in those places in ways that just don’t apply to injustice and grievance in Indonesia or Bangladesh.

So these 4 reasons help to explain why just a handful of foreign countries were (and their modern equivalents still are) vastly over-represented in the British media while others, in fact most of the countries in the rest of the world (Chad, Guatemala, Angola, Tajikistan) go virtually unreported in the media from one year to the next.

I wouldn’t say this is conscious racism – the two countries I’ve highlighted as dominating the headlines in the early 1990s included Arabs and Jews and blacks – and in fact all bien-pensant liberals were falling over themselves to speak up for Palestinians and black South Africans, so it’s not racism in the obvious sense.

But the four reasons I’ve listed above go some way to explaining why there is a kind of institutional and deeply embedded bias in all reporting of world affairs by almost all Western media. Some countries are easy to report from and feature simple black-and-white narratives (Russia = invading bully; Ukraine = plucky underdog) and so they tend to get the headlines. Countries which are harder to move around freely, or lack a good comms infrastructure, or where the issues are complex and require a bit of explanation – not reported so much, or hardly at all.

Hopefully, you now see the point of my heading ‘Israel, again’. I was hoping this book would provide a good narrative account and analytic explanation of the revolutions in countries I don’t know that much about (Libya, Syria), describing the Arab Springs which were carried out in Arab countries by Arab peoples.

Instead, as Danahar’s text set off on a long rambling account of the Arab-Israeli conflict which included all kinds of historical digressions – taking in the Balfour Declaration, the first Temple, Mohammad ascending into heaven from the Dome of the Rock, Abraham, descriptions of the three Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, the various intifadas, Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, its invasions of the West Bank, rocket attacks, illegal settlements blah blah blah – I found myself thinking: why is a quarter of this book about bloody Israel (again)?

As to the actual content, it can be summarised thus: Israel has been becoming more right wing, with the ongoing rise of intolerant religious/sectarian political parties and groups in society, and Supreme Court rulings which are tending to define Israel more and more as an exclusively Jewish state, increasingly excluding and alienating the 2 million citizens of the country (total population 8 million) who are not Jewish.

Some commentators blame the fiercely right-wing turn Israeli society has taken (and the collapse of the old Israeli Left) on the sizeable influx of Russian immigrant Jews, who are more fiercely anti-Arab and pro the illegal settlement of the occupied West Bank than the average population. These Russian immigrants are blamed for fundamentally changing the nature of Israeli society (p.224). If Danahar’s correct in this description, then the liberal, democratic and progressive Israel I grew up admiring has vanished forever.

Rambling text

Danahar arranges his chapters in long repetitive, unstructured and emphatically unchronological narratives. So in the Israel chapter, one minute we’re in 1917 (Balfour Declaration), then in 1982 (invasion of Lebanon), then it’s 1967 (Arab-Israeli war) and suddenly 2003 (US invades Iraq), in no particular order, as his train of thought rambles over the subject.

On one level this makes the text quite enjoyable, a bit like Tristram Shandy. Every time I opened the book I came across sections I couldn’t remember reading, and had no idea where I was in the story, since the narratives in each chapter deliberately follow no chronological or logical order. Pot luck. Spin the wheel.

On a more practical level, however, it meant I got to the end of the chapter about, for example, Egypt, with no clear idea what happened during the Arab Spring protests there. I think the street protests in spring 2011 led to the overthrow of Egypt’s long-time authoritarian leader, Hosni Mubarak; after a period of confusion, elections were held which returned the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood to government. They, and their leader, Mohammed Morsi, turned out to be terrible at running a country, at trying to balance and reconcile all the opposing factions, and began to behave increasingly autocratically while at the same time street crime/lawlessness increased. Until eventually the army, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in July 2013 stepped in to end the chaos, deposed Morsi, and imposed yet another round of military rule. I think.

In the same way, the two connected chapters about Palestine-Israel ramble all over the place, burying the impact of the Arab Spring under layers of digression about every other conceivable subject. For example, the Israel chapter includes long passages about some of the extreme orthodox Jewish groups and parties which seem to be growing in Israel, passages which weren’t really about the Arab Spring at all, but fit more into Danahar’s broader thesis that the entire region is becoming more prone to religious sectarianism and extremism.

I registered this idea, processed it and then thought – hang on; what about the Iranian revolution of 1979? I was alive at the time and remember it having a huge, seismic impact, far more game-changing than the Arab Springs. Ten years later, when I worked on the international affairs programme, many of the experts I spoke to associated the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the creation of a theocracy based on Sharia law with the advent of a completely new phenomenon – Islamic fundamentalism.

This was then echoed and amplified by the example of the mujahideen in Afghanistan who, for ten long years (1979 to 1989), brought the concept of Islamic fighters into the front room of anyone in the West who owned a telly and watched the news. In other words, I thought this phenomenon, the rise and rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic sectarianism had been becoming slowly more widespread for 30 years or so before the Arab Spring.

I suppose it’s possible to argue that the Arab Spring came after the experience of Iraq collapsing into bitter sectarian civil war and ethnic cleansing from 2003 onwards had ramped up sectarian bitterness a notch; but this had been prepared decades earlier when Sunni Saddam went to war with Shia Iran in 1980, by Sunni-Shia clashes in the Lebanon, by the uneasy rule of the Shia minority Alawi sect over a majority Sunni population in Syria and many other Sunni-Shia clashes across the Arab world.

And as to extreme religious orthodox groups in Israel, I swear to God I’ve been watching TV documentaries or reading articles about them for decades. In fact a stock part of any debate about whether we should have proportional representation in the UK is to cite the example of Israel where PR means that the tiny ultra-orthodox parties can have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers or democratic mandate.

So this is another reason I didn’t like this book. Not only does Danahar go on at extraordinary length about issues and historical events which are peripheral to the nominal subject of his book (what have extended interviews with the Israeli haredi community got to do with the Arab Spring?) but many of the ideas he derives from it seem surprisingly, well, stale and obvious. Religious fanaticism is on the rise in the Middle East! Haven’t we known this for decades and decades?

America, again

What I wrote above about Israel and old apartheid South Africa is a million times truer of America. Regular readers will know of my dislike of the way the arts and media industries in the UK slavishly kowtow to all things American (the Barbican, Radio 4). I was surprised to realise just how much this lickspittle adulation extended, during the Iraq and Afghan wars, to politicians like Tony Blair and the entire staff of the British army who went out of their way to suck up to the Americans. According to Jack Fairweather and Frank Ledwidge the only reason the British chiefs of staffs recommended deploying the British Army to Afghanistan in 2006, and Blair and Reid enthusiastically agreed, was to try and rebuild our reputation with the Americans after we fouled up so badly in southern Iraq. British military policy was dictated by keeping in with the Yanks.

So it irritated me that a) Danahar places his chapter about American policy in the Middle East before he gets to the actual Arab Spring events in the key states of Libya and Syria; and b) that the chapter about America is longer (52 pages) than the chapters on Iraq (43), Libya (44) and only just eclipsed by Syria (56). America, as usual. America, again.

Mind you he isn’t a fan. The reverse. Danahar’s America chapter is 50 pages of snarky sarcasm about how quickly the Americans were wrong-footed, told in Danahar’s trademark Horrible Histories style:

Perhaps it was the moment America’s old and decrepit foreign policy in the Middle East found itself caught in the headlights, just before the juggernaut driven by a generation of young Arab youths turned it into roadkill. (p.231)

History as sketch show.

Then I was further disheartened to discover that half the America chapter is – guess what? – predominantly about America’s closest ‘ally’ in the region, Israel (again!), with page after page after page chronicling Barack Obama’s difficult relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. OK, there is some coverage of Saudi Arabia, about its break with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about its (apparent) lack of any home-grown talents or industries apart from oil; and about Israel and Saudi’s common interest in fearing Iran’s nuclear programme. But Israel, America, America, Israel, God spare us.

According to Israeli military figures, Israel carried out a decisive attack on Syria’s nuclear programme in 2007, a devastating attack which destroyed the programme and which both sides have kept hushed up (p.377). Danahar explains how Netanyahu sees his historical role as being the man who saved Israel from Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and how he has consistently called for bombing runs to destroy Iran’s facilities, but how Israel isn’t strong enough to do this on its own, it needs America. And how Obama refused to countenance such a thing and preferred to work through sanctions.

This is interesting enough, but I was hoping for more analysis of Arab countries in a book about the impact of the Arab Spring; not to read page after page after page after page about America or Israel or both.

(As I finished this review, 5 July 2023, America launched an incursion into the West Bank, ostensibly to liquidate ‘militants’ but, inevitably, resulting in civilian casualties and triggering a car attack in Tel Aviv. Just as I’m about to publish this, Hamas launched its atrocious pogrom against Israelis living near Gaza and Israel is responding with a full-spectrum assault on the whole of Gaza whose brutality many Israelis are starting to doubt. So it has gone on during my entire life, and will continue long after I’m gone.)

A blizzard of interviews

By page 300 I’d noticed a verbal tic of Danahar’s which I thought was very symptomatic of the book’s shortcomings. On page after page he says he interviewed this, that or the other senior figure in this, that or the other relevant country, and records how they ‘told him’ their view or take or version.

The more I pondered all these ‘told me’s’ the more symptomatic I realised they are. Danahar is a journalist. Journalists work on relatively short ‘stories’ which they file one at a time to newspapers and magazines or TV or radio, generally on a quick turnaround. It is a badge of achievement to add into these stories that you interviewed or got access to very senior figures in the army or government or whatever relevant part of the administration as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, ordinary people like teachers taking part in protest marches or innocent citizens whose house has just been bombed etc. Quoting one or two of these in every ‘story’ wins you brownie points, shows how well ‘in’ you are with people in the know and/or have done the legwork to get piping hot eye-witness accounts.

My point is that this entire approach, which is a central aspect of journalistic technique, doesn’t work so well in a book. Instead, having two or three extensive quotes from a galaxy of sources, on every single page does the opposite to what it does in an article – it makes the narrative cluttered and confusing. So many people are quoted saying so many things that it becomes very difficult remembering who’s who, what they said and why.

The people quoted in Michael Ignatieff’s books (which I regard as a kind of gold standard) speak to the issue under consideration, and their quotes are chosen in such a way as to elaborate and elucidate the central topics and ideas, to sustain a train of thought. Ignatieff selects and edits his quotes very carefully in order to further and deepen his analysis.

By contrast, Danahar just quotes people because they shed a bit of light on this event, have a view about this or that personality, saw this thing happen, knew that person, are a paid commentator or protester or whatnot, have a bit to chip in. Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. When he quotes Nikolas Sarkozi and Obama being caught by microphones at the UN agreeing that they both hate Netanyahu, I realised a lot of these ‘exclusive’ interviews are little more than high-level gossip. Crucially, his quotes don’t contribute to the narrative, they rarely shed much light. Instead, the sheer number of people popping up with this or that comment on this and that turn of events are a major reason why the text feels so dense and confusing.

Danahar has spoken to hundreds of the right people and yet has somehow, magically emerged with next to no interesting or useful analysis. In his series about contemporary international affairs Michael Ignatieff interviewed far fewer people but his interviews have a laserlike precision; Danahar’s build up a huge, colourful and completely confusing mural.

‘I was there’

This is related to another aspect of the book, which is fine, which is very creditable in journalism but also doesn’t work in a book, which is constantly telling all his readers that he was there. Danahar was there when Obama made his big speech in Cairo, and again at the UN (p.265). Danahar was there when Colonel Gaddafi addressed his General People’s Congress for the last time on 2 March 2011 (p.342). Danahar interviewed Gaddafi in person after the revolt had begun (p.353). The Great Leader even put his arm round Danahar’s shoulders (p.354), and, a few months later, Danahar was at the morgue to see Gaddafi’s mutilated corpse (p.358). Danahar interviewed Bashar al-Assad (p.371). Danahar was there in Baghdad when the Americans entered the city (p.283). Danahar was there in the West Bank as the Israeli rockets flew overhead, he was there, he saw it with his own eyes.

All this is fabulous in an immediate, rushed, eye-witness piece for a newspaper or magazine, but boring and distracting in a book with pretensions to analysis. I don’t care whether he choked on teargas in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian protests, or ducked under incoming fire in the West Bank. That’s irrelevant to what ought to be an objective analysis of the events and their meaning.

But Danahar can’t leave his journalistic mindset behind. He has spoken to hundreds of people and he is determined to quote every single one or die in the attempt; and he was there to eye-witness this invasion and that firefight or this key speech or that momentous signing, and he’s not going to let you forget it.

Indeed, most of the chapters open, not with a significant moment in the events he’s chronicling, but with a personal story of him being on the spot in Egypt, or Israel or Iraq.

‘Even if you win, it is difficult to rule an angry people,’ he told me. (Introduction)

‘I can’t believe we’ve won, I can’t believe we’ve won,’ shouted a man to me over the noise of the chants and firecrackers as Cairo’s Tahrir Square exploded into an ecstatic mix of joy and relief. (Chapter 2)

My ears were working perfectly so I could hear him screaming: ‘Made in the US, look! Made in the US.’ (Chapter 5)

It started for me mid-morning on a quiet street, much like any other, in 2003 in central Baghdad. (Chapter 6)

The bursts of fire from the anti-aircraft gun blistered their way across the field towards the lines of government forces dug in on the other side. The deafening noise and the smell of cordite suffocated my senses. (Chapter 7)

The village sat nestled among cornfields and green pastures where sheep grazed in the crushing midday sun under the watchful eye of local shepherds. A dusty little road wound its way up through the surrounding fields to the small grey-brick homes sitting on a rocky outpost overlooking the countryside. As I entered the house from the dazzling light outside, it was difficult at first to understand why my boots were sticking to the ground in the dark little room. (Chapter 8)

So not only is the text confused and rambling and so stuffed with quotes it feels like an old mattress, but it is continually punctuated with grandstanding reminders of how clever Danahar was to be in the right place at the right time. Fine if you like magazine journalism. Distracting and, ultimately, irritating if you’re looking for analysis.

Anthony Loyd’s war books contain as much or more about himself, and candid revelations about his personal life far in excess of Danahar’s, BUT…a massive but…these personal passages are balanced by intelligent, insightful, priceless analyses of what was going on in the wars Loyd reported on, and why. Loyd’s analyses give you a real sense of what was happening, and how politics and warfare work on the ground. I remember much of his stuff about Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kosovo because it was so insightful, he really helped me to understand those wars.

In addition, Loyd’s complex mingling of reportage with autobiography give you insights into the trade of foreign correspondent, insight into what drives pampered westerners to seek out warzones and scenes of atrocity. They manage to be not only excellent war reporting, but subtle meditations on the trade of war reporting itself. There’s nothing that subtle or interesting here.

Initial facts about the Arab Spring

The Arab nations are disproportionately young. In many, half the population is under 25 (p.7). In all the chapters, about all the major Arab states, Danahar repeats the same point: there is not enough work for these young people to do and no work means no marriage, no family, no identity, no future (e.g. Libya, p.364).

It began in Tunisia. Tunisia was ruled by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power for 24 years and had erected a huge security apparatus to keep it that way. His family ran everything and were known as The Family. The whole thing was dominated by his infamous wife, Leila Ben Ali.

It began on 17 December 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street trader, poured petrol over himself and set himself alight in protest at having his street trader goods confiscated by the corrupt police. This incident was distributed like wildfire via social media and triggered protest marches which turned to riots in January 2011. The marches and protests became so large that, when some of the army and security forces began to show their support for the protesters, Ben Ali and his family fled the country. The example of Bouazizi was beamed round the Arab world and was, arguably, incited and inflamed by the Arab-focused news media, particularly the Qatar-owned TV channel al-Jazeera.

Iraq

Saddam was toppled so that the region could be reformed. Instead it was convulsed. (p.324)

I’ve now read half a dozen books about Iraq. Danahar’s account suffers from several trademark flaws. For a start, he devotes a lot of time to rehashing the well-known story of the buildup to the American invasion of 2003, the looting which followed, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, his decision to sack every member of the Ba’ath party from their jobs and dissolve the army and all Iraq’s security forces, two of the worst decisions made anywhere ever, the collapse of the country into insurgency and then sectarian civil war – all old news by 2015, and even older as I read it in 2023. But Danahar tells all this in his usual arsey-versey manner, mingling dates and events in single sentences, sweeping past issues I know to be complicated with just a phrase.

And, of course, the buildup, invasion and then catastrophic mismanagement afterwards are almost entirely American affairs so it’s yet another example of America, again. George Bush again, and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, again.

For me his account only gets interesting when he gets to Obama, who took office in January 2009, because Obama isn’t covered in the accounts of Thomas Ricks and other early histories I’ve read.

So it was useful to read Danahar’s take on Obama’s attempts to extricate America from Iraq, along with the baleful impact of the billions America invested there i.e. ongoing terrible infrastructure collapse, and long-standing resentment, even hatred, among all those who lost family members in the terrible violence.

America left no friends behind in Iraq. (p.322)

Danahar is more critical of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki than other authors I’ve read have been, for the simple reason that he is writing later (2015) as the evil caused by Maliki’s shameless sectarian support of Shia militias and his sustained attacks on Sunni politicians and communities had led to dire results. Most notable of these was the rise of ISIS, which was an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, itself manned by disaffected Sunnis, including former Iraqi Army officers.

The Iraqi army was in no shape to deal with this because, according to US assessments, by then al-Maliki had ‘hollowed out big chunks of the Iraqi military. He de-professionalised it, moving out some of the competent leadership, moving in people loyal to him who didn’t know what they were doing…’ (p.322)

So when ISIS forces stormed across the border from Syria in June 2014, Maliki’s army turned tail and fled. Soldiers threw off their uniforms and ran away.

The Iraqi army was proving itself not to be much of an army at all. (p.414)

Four Iraqi army and federal police divisions disintegrated, abandoning all their expensive US-supplied weapons to the jihadists. Black humour doesn’t come much blacker. So that by mid-2014 ISIS found itself ‘governing’ a large part of eastern Syria and north-western Iraq, and was a magnet for every (Sunni) jihadist who truly believed the caliphate was being restored and the end times were at hand. (See my review of ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger.)

Danahar appears to agree with Emma Sky’s view that Obama went to the opposite extreme from Bush and his neocons, by withdrawing American forces too fast; in too fast, out too fast. Obama wanted to be shot of the whole problem but in completely withdrawing US troops and leaving Iraq to the tender mercies of al-Maliki, he was partly responsible for the vacuum into which ISIS burst. And promptly found himself dragged back into Iraq to try and sort out the mess.

After trying to ignore the rise of ISIS during 2013, Obama was finally forced to take notice when ISIS captured the major city of Mosul and began to carry out well-publicised atrocities in its new territory. In June 2014 he sent the air force to pound ISIS strongholds and US special forces back into Iraq to assist Kurdish forces in taking on ISIS. Obama painfully learned the truth of the laconic remark Powell allegedly made to Bush back before the invasion even took place: ‘You broke it, you own it.’

Anyway, the final page of Danahar’s Iraq chapter has little to do with Iraq itself because, without quite understanding how, we are back discussing America, again. Danahar’s final thoughts are all about the US of A. He makes the intriguing suggestion that, had the invasion of Iraq achieved its goal (creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East) it might have tempted the Americans on to the kind of over-reach which marks the end of empires. Instead, the invasion and occupation were such a crushing failure that they forced the entire US establishment, politicians, civil servants and military, to pause and rethink their interests and goals.

Fair enough, interesting point – but this thoughtful conclusion does seem like … America, again.

Libya

Four big takeaways: 1) Gaddafi created a cult of personality more total and far-reaching than any other Arab leader. He was the Arab world’s longest-serving leader (42 years; p.327). He smothered all freedom of debate, political parties and civil society. So, when he was overthrown, there was a bigger vacuum.

2) It was triggered by one man. Just as Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader, triggered the revolt in Tunisia, so Libya kicked off after a human rights lawyer, Fathi Terbil, was arrested in Benghazi on 15 February 2011. Protesters organised a ‘Day of Rage’ on 17 February and that is the date which became associated with the uprising (p.329).

3) There is a major split between east and west Libya, which were originally two distinct provinces of the Ottoman Empire and only yoked together as a result of Italy’s violent colonisation in the 1930s (p.334). When the revolt against Gaddafi broke out, there were two distinct groups of rebels, who didn’t interact. According to Danahar the National Transitional Council (NTC) based in Benghazi in the east, proved reluctant or incapable of helping the rebels in the west, Gaddafi’s powerbase. They also didn’t come to the aid of smaller towns in their region, a failure which encouraged local militias to believe it was every man for himself i.e. to split the anti-Gaddafi forces into lots of fragments (p.333). So that’s part of the cause of the civil war which lasts to this day.

4) ‘The NATO intervention was unquestionably the deciding factor in Libya’s civil war,’ (p.358).

Timeline

17 February 2011 – Day of Rage

27 February 2011 – National Transitional Council set up in Benghazi

21 March 2011 – NATO forces intervene i.e. bomb Gaddafi / Libyan army positions

27 June 2011 – International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant against Gaddafi and his entourage

20 August 2011 – Gaddafi ousted from power in Tripoli and withdraws to his home town of Sirte which he declares the new capital of Libya

20 October 2011 – Sirte captured by rebel forces, Gaddafi found, lynched and murdered

End of the first Libyan civil war

Start of the second Libyan civil war

11 September 2012 – al Qaeda forces attacked the US consulate in Benghazi killing the US ambassador and 3 others leading to a government crackdown on Islamic and rebel militias which had lingered on after the war, and slowly escalated into a new civil war

Libya became split between the House of Representatives, also known as the ‘Tobruk government’, which is internationally recognised as the Libyan Government, and the rival Islamist government of the General National Congress (GNC), also called the ‘National Salvation Government’, based in the capital Tripoli.

The last pages of the Libya chapter give an entertaining overview of the chaos the country descended into by 2014. It’s worth quoting Danahar’s explanation, at length:

Things got so bad so fast because the Gulf states would not stop interfering. Qatar kept funneling money to the Islamists and its favoured militias in Misrata. The UAE and Egypt found their own proxy in the form of an old Libyan army general named Khalifa Haftar. Egypt first got involved because President al-Sisi didn’t want a country led by the Brotherhood on his doorstep. Hatred of the Brotherhood also motivated the UAE, which sometimes cut out the middle man and used their own fighter jets to bomb Libyan militias. After Islamist extremists beheaded twenty-one Coptic Christians working in Libya, al-Sisi started air strikes too. (p.367)

It’s nice to see Danahar calling the Arab League a joke. That was our view back in the early 1990s but I note that it’s now acceptable to say it openly. Why? Because the League promotes a unicorn called ‘Arab unity’ while all across the region Arabs are at each others’ throats, often literally (see al Qaeda beheadings in Libya, Syria and Iraq). Tot up the dead and injured from the civil wars in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq:

  • Syrian civil war: 570,000+ killed and counting
  • Iraqi insurgency, civil war, and ISIS war: 220,000+ killed and counting
  • Yemeni Civil War: casualty figure at 350,000+ killed and counting
  • Libyan Crisis: 40,000+ killed and counting
  • Egyptian Crisis: 5,000+ killed and counting

Arabs have killed about a million other Arabs in the last decade. Some unity. Instead there is a complex web of interference in all these conflicts by other Arab states, often lined up behind opposing factions, supplying arms and bombing each other’s militias.

Their differing objectives meant that Saudi Arabi and Qatar were, behind the scenes, at each other’s throats over Syria. The US tried, and failed, to get them to co-operate. (p.376)

And Arab incompetence. Not my view, Danahar’s:

Within weeks of Mubarak’s overthrow the institution which had symbolised much of what is wrong with the Arab world during his rule [the Arab League] was suddenly in danger of losing its hard-won reputation of being utterly useless in a crisis. (p.235)

By the time his book went to press (2015) Libya looked increasingly like a country in name only, being split down the middle with two governments, two armies and two sets of foreign sponsors, with some towns and cities under no one’s control but the scenes of ongoing urban warfare and terrorist attacks.

Characteristically, Danahar winds up his Libya chapter by reflecting on America (again). It was NATO bombing which halted and ‘degraded’ Gaddafi’s army, allowing the rebels to seize territory. But Danahar ends with President Barack Obama regretting, in retrospect, that the West hadn’t worked out a plan for what to do after Gaddafi’s overthrow. It beggars belief that 8 years after they made that gross mistake in Iraq (what do you do after you overthrow the dictator), America admitted it had made the exact same mistake in Libya. History is the blackest of black comedies.

Syria

Danahar makes one big point about Syria, which is that when protests against the authoritarian rule of Bashar al-Assad began and then turned violent, a sizeable proportion of the Syrian population did not join the protests because they had seen what happened in neighbouring Iraq when a tyrant was overthrown i.e. descent into sectarian civil war. This was particularly true of non-Muslim minorities such as the sizeable number of Christians in Syria and the minority Alawi sect identified with the Assad family. Therefore a notable percentage of the population acquiesced in Assad’s rule, not because they supported him but because they were terrified of what would happen if he was overthrown. Therefore the protesters, rebels and insurgents couldn’t muster the widespread popular support they needed. Therefore Assad was able to keep enough of a powerbase to launch increasingly violent war against his own people (pages 321 and 375).

It started in March 2011 when 15 schoolchildren in the town of Dera’a were arrested and tortured for writing on a wall the slogan ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime’. On 18 March, after Friday prayers, some of the population gathered to protest the brutal treatment of the children whereupon the security forces opened fire and killed four. At the funeral of these dead, the security forces opened fire again, killing even more unarmed civilians. And so the city rose in rebellion, which spread to other cities.

Once again, the Arab League cocked it up:

‘Everyone missed the train on this crisis,’ a diplomat in Damascus told me. ‘The UN did not show up, the Europeans and Americans did not show up. They left it all in the hands of the Arab League. Then the Arab League started messing it up from day one. They are the ones who radicalised it.’ (p.379)

Three reasons why the Syria civil war is so intractable:

  1. Syria is a regionally, ethnically and religiously fragmented society. The opposition to the regime could never be united into one group, not by the UN or the US, not by the most proactive Gulf states Saudi and Qatar, not by the patronage of neighbouring Turkey; but obstinately persisted in fragmentary militias and parties.
  2. This was played on by Assad who sowed division between neighbour and neighbour, carrying out atrocities (massacring men, women and children in one village and blaming it on the different religion or ethnic group in the next village. Bosnia. Balkanisation. Spreading fear. Massacres, reprisals, revenge).
  3. The number of outside countries piling in to support their own groups and agendas, namely (pro-Assad) Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Russia; (against Assad) Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And then, of course, the hapless West in the shape of the bewildered Yanks, drawn into yet another Middle Eastern conflict they couldn’t resolve.

Sides in the Syrian civil war

Pro Assad

Russia had supported the house of Assad back in the Cold War days, Russia had business investments in Syria and a Russian naval base at Tartus. Russia sees Assad as a secular leader battling a sea of Islamic fundamentalists.

Iran supports Assad because a) Assad’s Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam and b) as a major regime in the Arab world beholden to them and thus a counterweight to anti-Iran Saudi Arabia.

Anti Assad

Saudi Arabia‘s main foreign policy concern is the rise and rise of Iran as a regional power; Iran quickly came to the aid of Assad, threatening to create a Shia arc of influence from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria, and on into Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. The Saudis, despite their instinctive dislike of popular rebellion (which might threaten their own conservative monarchy) nonetheless opposed Iran’s ally Assad and began payrolling and supplying Islamic militias.

Qatar supplied arms and ammunition to Islamists with a view to creating a new government run by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Turkey, led by the Muslim populist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and antipathetic to Assad’s secular militaristic regime, condemned Assad’s brutality, supported the rebels and, led by paranoia about the knock-on effect of Syrian Kurdish separatism for their own Kurdish region, has ended up occupying northern parts of Syria.

As so often, I wondered why America feels so obligated to get drawn into these toxic conflicts. Why doesn’t it just walk away and let them all slaughter each other? If this is what Arab culture amounts to – endless sectarian slaughter – why don’t America and the West leave them to enjoy it?

Danahar’s encouragement to intervene

The world

In his coverage of Syria Danahar did something which really pissed me off; he indulged in precisely the high-minded, moralising blackmail which dragged us into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all considered disastrous. What I mean is he uses the kind of emotionally charged rhetoric which journalists can throw around without having to bother about the consequences:

Homs was where the wider world first learned of the savage brutality of the Assad regime and then realised it didn’t care enough to do much about it. Homs was where the world began its betrayal of the Syrian people. (p.379)

This is meretricious grandstanding. Who is this ‘world’ he talks of? Is he talking about you and me, did you betray the Syrian people? Or does he mean major international organisations like the UN and the EU? Well, the UN made repeated attempts to find a settlement but failed because of the intractable nature of the conflict: Assad refused to back down, the opposition weren’t united or strong enough to overthrow him, the backers of both sides (Iran and Russia versus Saudi and Qatar) also wouldn’t back down.

What does Danahar think ‘the world’ should have done so as not to betray the Syrian people? Invaded Syria and overthrown the tyrant? Joined the war as yet another outside player, and bombed the Syrian army into oblivion? We all know what happens when the West begins an air campaign (see Kosovo), within a matter of days it’s bombing civilian convoys or blowing up the Chinese embassy and its hands become as sullied as anyone else’s; and it may, eventually, lead to a ceasefire but not to a real solution (Kosovo).

Christopher Phillips book on Syria shows that everyone was delighted when the French-led bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in Libya emboldened the opposition and led to the dictator’s capture and brutal murder (October 2011) but then…Then the opposition collapsed into rival warlords and civil war, not unlike the chaos which followed the overthrow of Saddam eight years earlier, and now, 12 years later, Libya is in effect a failed state, divided into two feuding regimes.

The criticism made of ‘the West’ is that it didn’t follow up on the air strikes, didn’t engage with, fund and organise the opposition enough and steer them towards a unified settlement. But could they have? How much would that have cost? Should Barack Obama have gone to Congress and asked them to provide tens of billions more to send troops to supervise the reconstruction of Libya? Like they supervised the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan? How many troops? For how long?

The one great conclusion of all the books I’ve read by Jack Fairweather, Frank Ledwidge, Thomas Ricks, Rory Stewart and Michael Ignatieff is that ‘the West’ needs to acknowledge that 1) it can intervene a lot less effectively in conflict zones than it used to think, 2) that its interventions are almost always counter-productive, and 3) its interventions always lead to more lives lost, not least among Western armed forces but also, always, among the local people.

So Danahar made me really cross by playing to the gallery and striking this bleeding heart pose of caring journalist stricken that ‘the world’ was just standing by and letting Assad murder his own people. What should we have done instead, Paul? Bomb Syria? Invade Syria? Assassinate Assad? Or should we have ‘cared’ more? What does that even mean?

The cavalry

Danahar concludes his Syria chapter with:

If the Arab Spring and the years that followed had been a revelation to the world, it had been an education for the Syrians too. The most important thing they had learned was this. While the war raged there would be no foreign cavalry marching over the horizon to save them. Until the fighting ended the Syrian people were on their own. (p.425)

This is objectionable on at least three grounds. 1) ‘Foreign cavalry’? He is, of course, talking about the much-maligned West but why, why, why should British and American (or Canadian or Danish) soldiers die in their hundreds because Bashar al-Assad is a murderous tyrant? We had a go at ‘saving’ the people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan and you know what? Within weeks they had united in attacking the infidel crusader occupiers. This is Tony Blair’s line in his infamous Chicago speech where he put the case for humanitarian intervention if a dictator is massacring his own people; this was precisely the rationale behind his decision to back Dubya and send hundreds of British troops to their pointless deaths in Iraq. We intervened in Libya and fragmented the country.

Has Danahar learned nothing?

Why should ‘the West’ save the rest of the world? Libya, Iraq and Syria aren’t screwed-up disaster zones because of western imperialists from a hundred years ago, but because they were ruled by extremely typical Arab dictators who suppressed every form of civil society for decades so that, when they fell, none of their people knew how to run anything, all they knew was how to seize power for themselves, generally using extreme violence, and creating a political vacuum into which flooded psychopathic Islamic extremism. Well, the Arabs are welcome to the world they’ve created. There are 22 countries in the Arab League, including some of the richest in the world. Let them sort it out. Or, to turn it around, if Arabs can’t sort out Arab problems in Arab countries, why should anyone believe that non-Arab, non-Muslim outsiders can?

2) Anyway, Danahar is wrong. It’s not that there is no cavalry riding over the hill to save the Syrian people (good God, these trite Hollywood metaphors turn so many writers’ brains to mulch); it’s that there are too many cavalries riding over the hill. Danahar’s entire Syria chapter describes the intervention in Syria of Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, plus numerous jihadist factions (al Qaeda, ISIS). The problem isn’t lack of cavalry; Syria is overrun with cavalry.

(And I am just reading Christopher Phillips’s long and mind-bogglingly detailed account of the Syrian civil war which lists in great detail precisely how much manpower, money and materiel poured into Syria from the half dozen main foreign players and beyond. Dozens of cavalries rode over that hill and then all started attacking each other.)

3) Anyway, ‘the world’ did try to save Syria. Repeatedly. Christopher Phillips’s account goes into great detail about the repeated attempts of the UN, the EU, the Arab League, America and various other outside players to broker some kind of ceasefire and peace deal. Skimming through the Wikipedia article about the Syrian peace process gives you a good sense of the immense amount of diplomatic work which went in to repeatedly trying to find a solution. But Phillips’s account gives you a powerful sense of why all of them fell short, breaking on the complete intransigence of the Assad regime itself, or the vested interests of key players, namely Russia, Iran and Turkey.

So it seems both morally despicable to me that Danahar ends his long rambling book by slamming the West for not ‘riding to the rescue’ of yet another Arab country, as if ‘the world’ is as simple as a Hollywood movie. And it seems plain factually incorrect of him to say that ‘the world’ abandoned Syria, when ‘the world’ (UN, US, Arab League) made repeated, sustained efforts to stop the fighting.

Europe endured hundreds of years of barbaric wars until we finally fought ourselves to a standstill in 1945 (although plenty of low-level conflicts raged on for decades afterwards). Maybe other regions of the world are going to go through the same process, agonisingly, for centuries.

Or maybe this is just what human beings are like. Everywhere. And the fortunate billion who are lucky enough to live in the peace and plenty of Western Europe and the Anglosphere are enjoying a blip in history, a window of relative stability, before the big impacts of global warming start to kick in and the entire global population collapses into growing instability and violence.

Maybe our idea of ‘human nature’ in ‘the West’ is hopelessly partial and incomplete because of the accident of history, the relative peace and plenty, we happen to be living through. And the people of Libya, Syria and Yemen, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo, of Bosnia and Afghanistan, of Sri Lanka, Timor, Cambodia and Myanmar, have a better grasp of what human beings are really like.

Conclusions

1. Overthrowing Arab dictators leads to worse repression…

Danahar’s book confirms what I thought at the time, when the Arab Spring revolts broke out back in 2011, as I followed events in the news. Naive young middle-class ‘revolutionaries’ took to the streets in spontaneous protests which weren’t centrally organised but snowballed and gathered their own momentum, leading to the overthrow of the ailing regimes and aged rulers in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

But being naive young fools who, apparently, had never read a history book in their lives, none of these impassioned demanders of freedom and democracy appear to have had an inkling that, when you overthrow a dictator, once all the partying and midnight rallies and wild drives through the capital honking your horn are over, the old brute isn’t automatically replaced with a government of liberals and progressives, as so many of the young urban protesters and their sympathisers in the West expected. Instead, he is likely to be replaced by the quickest to organise and most ruthless in seizing power (p.24).

Thus the overthrow of Charles I led to the repressively Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell; the overthrow of Louis XIV led to the repressive dictatorship of Robespierre; the overthrow of the Czar didn’t lead to the arrival of a moderate, modernising Duma but to a coup by the best organised and most ruthless party in Russia, the Bolsheviks. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown he wasn’t replaced by a moderate, sensible etc but by the repressive religious fundamentalism of Ayatollah Khomenei. And so on, forever.

(This pretty obvious point, that in a revolution the moderates are overwhelmed by the extremists, is made by Christopher Phillips in his excellent book ‘The Battle for Syria’, page 189, as he explains the logic which led moderate protesters to be outflanked by extremists until the extemest of the extremists, Islamic State, seized huge swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq.)

2. Or, alternatively … chaos

Or you get scenario two: if there is no single organised party in waiting to step into the vacuum then … there will be chaos. In 2003 Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq. Result? Chaos, rise of religious intolerance, civil war and ethnic cleansing. Apparently, the protesters who marched against Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, and Assad in Syria, were unaware of the example of Iraq, an Arab country like theirs, where a dictator just like theirs was forcibly overthrown. I appreciate they thought their countries would be different, and that they weren’t initially marching for regime change just for reform to make their lives less unbearable. What I’m struck by is how many of them, and their naive backers in the West, were so surprised when what happened in Iraq proceeded to happen in their countries, too.

In 2011 Gaddafi was overthrown. Result? Chaos, civil war, division of country between rival warlords. In 2011 the good people of Syria tried to overthrow their ‘Grandad’, Bashar al-Assad. Result? Syria became the most fought-over place in the world, with at least 12 different parties, factions, militias, ethnic groups and neighbouring countries all fighting each other.

I’ve just finished reading Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger’s book ‘ISIS: The State of Terror (2015) towards the end of which they make one simple but dazzlingly important point:

The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all. (ISIS: The State of Terror, p.237)

Or, as Barbara Bodine one-time US ambassador to Yemen puts it in Danahar’s book:

‘I don’t know anybody who liked dealing with dictators but there’s a perverse simplicity to it.’ (p.3)

Or as Danahar himself puts it:

In Egypt, where revolutionaries failed to smash the old regime, its remnants quietly nurtured and nourished those insecurities and plotted a return. In Libya, where the regime was destroyed, young men with guns bullied their way into the vacuum. In Syria, where the state held firm, it did so by unleashing the most appalling violence. It plotted to divide its opposition by setting neighbour against neighbour until no-one knew whom to trust…The Iraqi leadership [Nouri al-Maliki] pulled its country back into the sectarian abyss. The regional mayhem left many longing for the miserable certainties of their old lives under dictatorships. (p.4)

3. A cause of points 1 and 2 is the lack of democratic leaders in the Arab world

There’s a third aspect to the problem, which is less attention-grabbing than the previous two but equally if not more important. In Jack Fairweather’s book about the West’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he makes the simple point that, once the Coalition had overthrown Saddam Hussein, it discovered that … there were no moderate, democratically-minded leaders to step into the breach.

America, as it always does in these situations (see Korea, see Vietnam) favoured a long-time exile from the country in question to become leader, in the case of Iraq, Ayad Allawi mainly because he’d spent decades lobbying and brown-nosing in Washington, cultivating the right people and persuading them that he would favour US interests. The only catch was that Allawi was almost completely unknown in Iraq and had no constituency. So when Allawi was imposed on the political turmoil post-Saddam, the only interest he was seen as representing was the invader’s.

Meanwhile, potential leaders who had remained in country during the dictatorship, often did so because they represented intractable constituencies which were too big for the dictator to tackle directly and could rely on a long tradition of resistance to central rule.

When change came, these local, often tribal leaders carried on representing their constituencies against what they perceived as just one more form of centrally imposed government, just as they had opposed all previous forms of central administration. This category includes the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had fierce support among Iraq’s impoverished urban Shi’a communities, but also rogues like Abu Hatem, the self styled Prince of the Marshes, in the south, or the leaders of the two main Kurdish guerrilla armies in the north.

Thus Iraq had political ‘leaders’, but none of them the kind of democratically minded, technocratic, moderate politicians who, in western countries, can be assigned responsibility for government departments and expected to run them with a modicum of ability and fair mindedness. Nothing like.

Fairweather’s point is that there was an almost complete absence of those kind of people in Iraq and a total absence in Afghanistan. Instead, as this account suggests, you had a squabble of figures who had historically only represented one tribe or religious group or region. None of them had a national perspective and it was hoping too much to expect them to put national interests first, above the very community loyalties which had brought them to power and sustained them, sometimes for decades.

Therefore, it was entirely natural and predictable that into the vacuum created by overthrowing the old dictator did not step a cohort of Scandinavian-style, well-educated and democratically-minded politicians and technocrats, but instead a squabbling rivalry of warlords, drug barons, ethnic and religious sectarians, whose sole concern was representing the interest of ‘their’ people, placing as many of ‘their’ people in ministries and positions of power as possible, and then stealing as much money as possible from the state, for themselves and to pay off their chief backers and supporters.

Frank Ledwidge can barely bring himself to call the Afghan government a government at all, referring to it instead as a gang of warlords and drug barons who the international community gave tens of billions of dollars to, which the crooks used to build up property portfolios in the West, salt away in Swiss bank accounts and pay off their entourages. Danahar, also, refers to ‘atrocious leadership’ as being one of the basic political facts of the Middle East (p.4).

Christopher Phillips, in his detailed book about Syria, points out that, although the opposition rallied round the idea of getting rid of the wretched Bashar al-Assad, nobody – not the Americans, the Saudis, the Qataris, none of the rebels armies or jihadist groups – could think of a suitable replacement, could think of an alternative leader for the country, which goes a long way to explaining why the Syrian civil war rumbles on to the present day.

Before you start campaigning to overthrow your dictator have a plan about who you’re going to replace him with.

So: these are three well-established realities which should have informed everyone’s thinking about the so-called Arab Springs. Anyone bearing them in mind would not have been in the least surprised when overthrowing Gaddafi led to the collapse of Libya into civil war, when protests in Yemen led to civil war, when the uprising in Syria led to the bitterest civil war anywhere for decades. Egypt got off lightly when the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been clamouring for power for generations, turned out, once handed power, to be rubbish at ruling and were replaced within two years by yet another military regime. Given the chaos erupting in countries to the west and east and south (with yet another civil war kicking off in Sudan, as of spring 2023), I’d say the Egyptians got off lightly. An oppressive authoritarian state is miles better than no state at all.

4. Should the West intervene?

No. Read any of the last ten books I’ve reviewed about Britain and America’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to understand why. The fundamental reason is not that Arab nations refuse to be ‘democratised’ by outsiders, or that Arab nations are particularly unsuited to ‘democracy’, or that we in the West are staggeringly ignorant and simple-minded in our understanding of Arab culture – though all these things are true.

The main objection is simply that we’re useless at intervening. As Stern and Berger put it in their book about ISIS:

The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, page 238)

On Radio 4 today I heard a woman journalist in Afghanistan passionately reporting on the oppression of women in Afghanistan. Taliban government. Fundamentalist Islam. Oppression of women. Which bit comes as a surprise?

The only interest in listening to her piece came from wondering: what, exactly, does this woman journalist expect us to do about it? Invade Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and put in place a moderate, modernising regime? Reconstruct the country’s infrastructure and be greeted everywhere as friends and liberators?

Um. Didn’t we just get through trying that? In Iraq and Afghanistan, both? And how did they turn out? Social collapse, bloody civil war, mass refugees, while a) losing lots of Western soldiers killed by ‘insurgents’ , b) killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, c) stoking civil war and ethnic cleansing, and d) achieving nothing permanent in the way of ‘reconstruction’ or ‘development’, despite e) spending over $2 trillion in both countries. Shall we try that again? No.

Maybe we will finally learn the hard lesson which Michael Ignatieff’s series of books about the new world disorder lead up to, echoed in Frank Ledwidge’s two analyses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the moral of Rory Stewart’s detailed, acerbic account of his time as governor of an Iraqi province – which is that western governments and international bodies need to be much, much, much more realistic about the pitifully little that they can achieve by intervening in the internal affairs of failing states; and much, much, much, much more cautious about where we intervene and why, and what we can realistically expect the outcomes to be.

The harsh reality is that our interventions are almost always catastrophically counter-productive. We are, quite simply, useless at ‘nation building’, for the scores of reasons listed in Ignatieff, Ledwidge, Fairweather and Stewart’s books.

So the girls and women of Afghanistan will suffer from the oppressive behaviour of the men of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Just as the people of Syria, Yemen and Sudan will continue to endure unending civil wars, the Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans will suffer under China’s oppression, the Amazonian Indians will be wiped out, hundreds of thousands of people will starve to death each year in Africa, and any country neighbouring Russia is likely to be invaded and devastated by Putin’s brutal armies.

That’s what the world is like. I didn’t create it. I don’t approve of it. I’m just trying to understand it by unsentimentally studying the facts of how we humans actually behave.

Credit

The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar was published by Bloomsbury Books in 2013. References are to the revised 2015 paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 30, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 30, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/30/the-new-middle-east-the-world-after-the-arab-spring-paul-danahar/

Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War by Frank Ledwidge (2013)

Before the British burst onto the scene, Helmand was ‘stable’ in the sense that there was almost no Taliban presence and little prospect of any. After three years of British presence, the province was the most savage combat zone in the world. With British forces and their commanders out of their depth, it was only the intervention of a powerful US force of marines that brought some level of control to the situation.
(Investment in Blood, page 217)

This is by way of being the sequel to Ledwidge’s critically acclaimed book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars (2011). Ledwidge is formidably well qualified to discuss the issues. He has had an impressively wide-ranging career both in and outside the military. He started life as a barrister, then served as an intelligence officer in the naval reserve in Iraq before going on to act as a civilian justice adviser in Afghanistan. These days he’s an academic.

The true cost

Nowadays you can just google ‘cost of Afghan war’ and get a host of topline figures. Delve into a few articles and you quickly get a sense of the quagmire of conflicting estimates and figures.

According to the top result, from Brown University, as of 2023, since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has spent $2.313 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As to the UK, I came across this BBC page ‘Afghan withdrawal a dark chapter for UK, says Defence Committee chair‘ which puts the cost to Britain of its Afghan adventure at nearly £30 billion. Everyone has an axe to grind, everyone has an angle.

So why read a book about a subject so readily available on the internet? Well, for two reasons: 1) because books give context, angles, interpretations and, above all, ideas, in ways which ‘objective’ sources like the BBC, Wikipedia, newspaper articles, generally don’t. And 2) for the style and personality and character of the author, enjoyable, fluent, enlightening or dim and patronising, as they may be.

Investment in Blood is in three parts.

Part 1. Casualties

Chapter 1. Why we went there

And why a small peacekeeping force found itself thrown into a full-scale war. For Ledwidge a leading reason the heads of the British Army wanted to deploy to Afghanistan had nothing to do with peacekeeping or tackling the opium trade, it was a self-interested wish to keep Treasury funding coming, to bolster the business case for maintaining the army the size it was, to hang on to battalions which were threatened with being disbanded, on the principle of ‘use them or lose them’ (pages 21 and 120).

Chapter 2. The human cost i.e. army casualties

Starting with the 454 British dead, then the thousands who suffered life-changing injuries, especially amputations, and then the psychological impact, especially the much-vaunted post-traumatic stress disorder.

Chapter 3. Afghan civilian casualties

Abdul Zia has been living for six years in the dirt-poor camp of Nasaji Baghrami, set in sea of mud, excrement and pathetic tarpaulins…It is located in Kabul’s particularly dirty and unpleasant fifth police district…There was a time when life for Mr Zia was much better: he used to have a small farm and seven children. That farm was in the Lashkar Gah district of Helmand. But then one day in 2006, shortly after the British entry into Helmand, for no reason that he can fathom his house was hit by a missile or a bomb from a NATO plane. Whatever it was, it killed six of his children. (p.94)

Afghan dead

Ledwidge explains his methodology which restricts itself to Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces according to reliable, certifiable sources then proceeds through each year, carefully accrediting the numbers. He reaches a total of at least 542 Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Compare and contrast with these figures from the US Institute of Peace: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (probably a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters.

Afghan wounded (p.91).

He has no figures and so gives anecdotal evidence of the number of wounded civilians attending the NGO-run civilian hospitals. Other sources claim numbers to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Afghan refugees

Then there are the refugees forced to flee their homes (p.93). According to the UN Refugee Agency, as of December 2021, the total number of people displaced by conflict inside Afghanistan is 3.5 million.

Part 2. Financial costs

Chapter 4. The cost of the vast logistical effort of installing and maintaining a brigade in Afghanistan

The American government is admirably open about the money it spends on its military campaigns, the British government is secretive and hostile to researchers.

This turns out to be impossible to ascertain because of the byzantine and different methodologies used by the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury. Ledwidge quotes several army officers and civil servants saying nobody really knows the cost of a war like this. Instead there is a confusing range of estimates depending on accounting methods and definitions, but some of the figures cited are staggering.

According to the MoD’s own figures it costs about £400,000 to keep one soldier in the field for one year, plus about £60,000. In 2012 a parliamentary question revealed the ‘net additional cost’ of military operations since 2001 as £17.3 billion. Between 2006 and 2012 it cost about £15 million per day to maintain the UK’s presence in Afghanistan.

The most gobsmacking fact, for me, was the chief of logistics to General Petraeus saying the cost of air conditioning alone to all US army bases in Iraq and Afghanistan was over $20 billion.

He has a passage describing the scale of the vast Camp Bastion in Helmand which, at its peak, was home to 22,000 troops and support personnel for 12 different nations.

The blackly Catch-22 aspect of the war is that most of the supplies are not flown in but driven into landlocked Afghanistan by brave lorry drives, much of it contracted out to security companies. Much of this is through Taliban-held territory so many of the security companies have come to arrangements with local tribal and Taliban leaders, paying them retainers not to attack their convoys. So UK taxpayers money goes to the Taliban to bribe them into not attacking the supplies being sent to the British Army so they can carry on fighting them (p.113).

Billions of pounds were spent on kit – transport, guns, ammunition – which we handed over to the Afghan police and army and which, in 2021, they handed over to the Taliban without a fight. Ledwidge predicted this would happen in 2012 (p.117).

Chapter 5. The cost of caring for the wounded and the role of charities

There used to be a number of hospitals run by the armed forces solely for military casualties. One by one these have been closed due to government cuts and now there are none. Instead there are Ministry of Defence Hospital Units, or MDHUs, embedded within civilian National Health Service hospitals. Ledwidge explains why it is quite a loss in security and psychological well-being for veterans not to be treated in units entirely staffed by their own people, who understand what they’ve been through. Ledwidge repeats reports that some wounded veterans have been barracked by other patients in NHS hospitals.

A lot of care for wounded soldiers, whether physical or mental, has been funded by charities, especially the high profile and successful Help for Heroes, founded in 2007, which complements the work of older service charities such as the Royal British Legion.

In his Afterword, written in March 2014, Ledwidge explains his methodology for calculating that the cost of supporting the nearly 3,000 troops who were evacuated from Afghanistan and the thousands more who will apply for medical and psychiatric help, for the rest of their lives, will probably cost some £10 billion (p.238).

Chapter 6. The civilian efforts i.e. the cost of development: has it really gone to help ‘the poorest of the poor’?

An eye-opening account of the work of the Department for International Development which Ledwidge calculates to have spent over £2 billion in Afghanistan. The obvious problems are that the majority of that has gone to the Afghan government, which is a byword, both among its population and internationally, for corruption. In fact it’s debatable whether it is even a government at all in the normal sense of the word or a collection of regional warlords and narco-bosses (of ‘gangsters and warlords’, in Ledwidge’s words, p.170). So that, in the words or a security officer:

‘The only Afghan lives I’ve seen transformed by western aid agencies are warlords who’ve used siphoned funds to build mansions, amass huge overseas property portfolios and arm private militias.’ (p.148)

The other thing about aid money is the surprising amount of it which is spent on freelance aid consultants, earning £500 to £1,000 a day. Whenever these leave a fortified camp i.e. Camp Bastion, they must be accompanied by armed security guards who cost much the same amount, per guard, per day. The fatuousness of so many misguided ‘development’ projects is brought out by the next chapter.

Neocolonialism not colonialist enough

Ledwidge makes a point also made by Jack Fairweather, and quotes Rory Stewart among others making the same point: which is that, in imperial times, imperial administrators of a province would make it their life’s work, often stayed in post for a decade or more, learned the language, got to really know the local people, culture, religion, economy and maze of feuds and tribal allegiances. Slowly they built up a sense of what is possible and how to do things with the locals’ consent.

That entire approach has been lost. In modern ‘nation building’, advisers and consultants and experts are flown in for short-term placements, often with little understanding of the local culture, to implement off-the-peg ‘development projects’ which they’ve applied in Sierra Leone or Uruguay or some other completely different culture (p.157).

Thus Ledwidge gives the comic anecdote of a senior British woman official instructing a provincial governor what to do in front of his Pashtun colleagues, which amounted – in their culture – to a public humiliation and guaranteed that he would not do what she was telling him (p.153).

He also hints that so-called ‘experts’ hired for development and nation building don’t know what they’re talking about. He met experts in his own specialist subject, international law, who had never done a day’s work abroad i.e. hadn’t a clue (p.157).

To return to the first point: we laugh at them, we criticise them, we abhor them; but our imperial forebears were much, much better at this kind of thing than we are. The British government spent £40 billion, lost 440 soldiers and killed thousands of civilians and…for nothing.

Part 3. Assessment of what was won or lost

Chapter 7. What was achieved in Helmand?

Did the British Army presence bring peace and security? Did it eliminate the Taliban threat? Is the improvement, if any, sustainable? Did we eliminate opium as the mainstay of the economy, as Tony Blair promised we would? The answer to all these questions is a resounding no.

At the time of writing, Afghanistan had received tens of billions of dollars in international development assistance plus at least $900 billion from the international community and yet: according to the UN development index the country was ranked 181 out of 182; it was the poorest country for which reliable figures exist; it came bottom on lists for access to safe water and enrolment in all stages of education. It had the third highest infant mortality rate in the world and the lowest life expectancy, at 43.6 years. 42% of the population live on less than a dollar a day (p.168).

More importantly, the relentless focus on finding a military solution i.e. fighting the Taliban, has led to a new level of the militarisation of society.

The executive director of the charity War on Want believes that ‘Western intervention has managed to produce a country which, even after the 20 years of civil war which preceded it, is even more fractured and militarised than it was before’. (p.170).

One of the many reasons for the failure of Western efforts is because they were built around the idea that the central government was ‘elected’ and therefore had a ‘democratic mandate’, and all efforts flowed from this premise, two leading ones being a) training the Afghan police force and b) giving the majority of aid money to this government and training them how to run a country and disburse it responsibly.

Unfortunately, the ‘democratically elected’ government is little more than a bunch of ‘gangsters and warlords’ (p.170), who sent their aid money straight on to their Swiss bank accounts or to buy real estate in Europe or to pay their tribal supporters, while the Afghan police continued to be a byword for uselessness and corruption with a lot of rape and child abuse thrown in.

Afghan legal officers – Ledwidge’s area of expertise – had a habit of being assassinated (p.172). In practice, lots of local legal officers and enforcers quietly made deals with the Taliban about what they were or weren’t allowed to do i.e. in effect, the Taliban ran law and order (p.172).

Ledwidge says policy makers in theses nation building efforts bang on about building schools and hospitals to win over hearts and minds, but this policy has two very obvious flaws: 1) it’s relatively easy to build the buildings, but then who staffs them? Training doctors and teachers will take years and years. In fact, the allies had to stop building schools and hospitals in Afghanistan because there was no-one to man them, a problem euphemistically referred to as ‘overbuilding’ (p.173).

2) Northern Ireland had an insurgency for 30 years and it had all the schools and hospitals you can imagine. That wasn’t what the people needed. What they needed was a political settlement which would offer security for all. That’s what the people in all these trouble spots want first and foremost. Security. And that’s what the coalition forces failed to provide in either Iraq or Afghanistan (p.173).

Fascinatingly, the Soviets did understand the long-term nature of this kind of commitment and took tens of thousands of Afghan doctors, lawyers, soldiers, policemen, prison officers and so on back to Russia and trained them over many years. With the result that many of the current Afghan officials Ledwidge met as part of his work spoke fluent Russian. But none of the occupying powers were prepared to make that kind of commitment (p.174).

He tells a funny story about UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband visiting Helmand and inviting two Afghan ministers for dinner. In all innocence he asked these ministers how long he thought central government officials, civilian and military, would remain in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, after the NATO forces withdrew, and they replied…about 24 hours (p.174). Exactly. And this is indeed what happened when the Americans withdrew their last forces in August 2021. The security forces fled or melted away and the Talinan was back in power within days.

Opium

The Taliban almost completely banned Afghan farmers from growing opium (p.176). As the incoming NATO forces pushed the Taliban out, opium growing returned and, Ledwidge asserts, this time around the Taliban allowed it to and took a cut to pay for their weapons.

By 2007 Helmand, just one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, supplied over half the world’s poppy crop. He makes the basic point that, at the time of writing, a hectare of wheat was worth £475 to an Afghan farmer, whereas the same area of opium might be worth £6,500 (p.177).

Ledwidge has a good handle on this because when he served as a ‘justice adviser’ in Afghanistan he was actually paid out of the UK’s counter-narcotics budget (p.178).

Women’s rights

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan they attempted to develop its economy and modernise its society. A key aspect was promoting women’s rights in this fantastically conservative, patriarchal society. By the time they quit the country in 1989, some 70% of teachers, 50% of government workers and 40% of doctors were women (p.184). The point is, the West armed the mujahideen for ten long years in order to overthrow the Soviet occupation and eventually succeeded. Whereupon the country collapsed into civil war, from which chaos emerged the Taliban who, as we all know, plunged the country back into the Dark Ages, part of which was sacking all women from all jobs and banning them from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative.

Which regime was better for women, Soviet rule or Taliban rule? Their Afghan adventure was seen as the Soviets’ Vietnam, and the long drag on their national resources, and the social unrest it caused contributed, maybe, to the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Still. It makes you wonder whether life for many Afghans, and pretty much all Afghan girls and women, would have been immeasurably better if the Soviets had been allowed to continue their rule of the country.

By the end of this withering chapter it’s hard to avoid the thought that Afghanistan exists as a kind of mockery of all notions of international development, state building, foreign aid and so on. Or, as Ledwidge puts it:

The attempt to impose Western-style government and legal systems on a country that has no real inclination to adopt either – and to do it a matter of a decade or so – was always doomed to failure. (p.187)

Poll results

Ledwidge shares the hilarious results of opinion polls which have been from time to time carried out on the Afghan population. In one just 8% of Afghans living in Helmand Province (Helmandis) had even heard of the 9/11 attacks in New York. This is really important because it indicates the way that hardly any of the population understood why the NATO forces were there; most of the population thought they were just the latest in a long line of murderous invaders. Further, only 30% believed that NATO protected the population from attack, while 65% believed NATO killed more of the population that the Taliban did. When informed that the main aim of NATO forces was to introduce democratic values, 72% of those polled couldn’t explain what that meant (p.188).

These and other stats help explain why so many young Afghan men didn’t understand any of our high-falutin’ ambitions about nation building and development and democracy and all the rest of it, and just thought of themselves as patriotic heroes combating the latest wave of brutal, destructive invaders, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them.

Chapter 8. Have we in Britain been made safer by both wars?

Are we ‘safer’ as a result of Britain’s involvement in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as Tony Blair and Defence Secretary John Reid claimed? Was it ever in out best interests to pursue these wars?

No. Ledwidge claims that most army officers know the simple truth: that both the wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, were fought primarily to satisfy Tony Blair’s misguided wish to keep in with the Americans (p.205). The second campaign, in Afghanistan, was mainly fought because the army desperately wanted to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of our American masters after ballsing up big time in Basra. Neither had any relevance at all to Britain’s actual, present or future security needs. Fighting the Taliban was always a stupid, stupid thing to do. Ledwidge quotes a former NATO official at the time:

‘[The Taliban] pose no threat to Britain and not one Afghan has ever been involved in any terror attack in Europe or the US. It is simply rubbish to assert that British soldiers are fighting impoverished opium farmers and $10 a day gun-for-hire insurgents in Helmand Province to protect the British people from terror attacks. These Afghans are fighting our soldiers because they just don’t like foreigners and never will.’ (quoted page 198)

In the event, both Ledgwidge and Jack Fairweather give plenty of evidence that the British Army’s dismal failures in Basra and Helmand irreparably damaged the so-called ‘special relationship’ with America. Ledwidge cites former Chief of Staff of the US army, General Jack Keane, addressing a conference at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2013:

‘Gentlemen, you let us down; you let us down badly’ (quoted page 233)

And this is the view widely held in the US military. Then again this may be no bad thing if it forces the UK political and defence establishments to distance ourselves from America and think through our likely defence threats and strategies from a purely British position. Don’t hold your breath, though. The ludicrous embarrassment of Brexit was proposed partly by Conservative politicians convinced that our future lies with America, 4,000 miles away, rather than with the continent just 20 miles away.

The people who run the British establishments, in politics, the military, the arts and media and many other sectors, will continue to kiss American arse for the foreseeable future. As Ledwidge puts it: ‘The results of this are toxic and go far beyond the military’ (p.206).

The so-called ‘special relationship’ has led Britain into the invasion of two Islamic countries. Her confused and inconsistent strategy (or the lack of any strategy) in the ensuing wars and her over-enthusiastic and totally uncritical following of US policy have been intensely damaging to British (and Afghan) interests. The policies pursued have been entirely counter-productive and literally self-defeating. (p.208)

As a result of tagging along behind America on these two misguided interventions we in Britain have been made less safe in two ways. 1) We have generated a home-grown generation of angry young men here in the UK, outraged by our invasion of Muslim countries and killing of Muslim civilians. Some of these have carried out terrorist attacks on our own soil as a result of British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Pakistan and security expert Anatol Lieven puts it:

‘UK policy has been an absolute disaster in the perception of the Muslim population and has produced a significantly increased terrorism threat.’ (quoted page 210)

The second way in which these disastrous wars have made us less safe is we have wasted billions investing in the wrong kind of armed forces. In particular all the money has gone to the army (which, it turned out, was incapable of supplying its soldiers with the kind of equipment they needed) at the expense of the other two branches of the armed service, the navy and air force.

This explains why, when NATO wanted to support the anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya, it was the French who led the attacks – because they have a fully functioning aircraft carrier and lots of planes; we don’t.

By emasculating the Royal Navy to pay for the army and its operations in the Afghan desert, the UK has jeopardised the defence of our island nation’s vital interests. (p.213)

All the time, intellect, energy, money, material and resources ploughed into fighting badly organised peasants 5,000 miles away have completely distracted attention from the very real threats we face from a) larger, more conventional armies i.e. Russia, fighting in Europe and b) the serious emerging threat of cyber-attacks.

Thoughts

Out of date

The most obvious point is the book is fabulous as far as it goes, but is now out of date. Ledwidge wrote it in late 2012-to-early 2013 i.e 10 long years ago. Since then, residual units of the British Army racked up more time in Afghanistan alongside the much bigger US presence, and the fight against the Taliban ground on, with accompanying NATO losses and civilian collateral damage, for another 8 years. And it all led up, of course, to the humiliating US withdrawal which concluded in August 2021.

So most if not all Ledwidge’s figures are out of date. What remains valuable, though, on a procedural level, is his careful structuring of the entire subject and his explanations of the methodologies he used; and on a conceptual level, the questions he asks and the searingly critical conclusions he comes to. All of these shed new light and angles on the story of the war.

Slow starting, ferocious ending

The second point is that, at least to begin with, this is a less impressive book than its predecessor. It feels more hurried. In the first book he took the reader with him, his points were carefully argued, we shared his slowly growing sense of disgust and horror, so there was a dynamic aspect to the narrative.

In this book he takes his anti-war attitude for granted and so doesn’t so much take us on a journey but just restates his disgust. An example of this is the way he uses the same small number of negative quotes from people involved in the wars not as the punchline of extended arguments, but as short-hand, as quick reminders, and uses them repetitively. So he tells us more than once that the former UK ambassador to Afghanistan Sir Sharrard Cowper-Coles thought the war was a waste of time. These kind of quotes are used as a kind of shorthand, summarising the more extended forms of the arguments he gave us in the preceding book.

That said, the final two chapters, 7 and 8, finally become really angry, rising to the level of evidence-based excoriation found in the first book and leaving you shaking with fury at the idiocy and incompetence of British politicians and army leaders. What a shambles. As an Afghan friend of Ledwidge puts it:

‘We were promised good governance: where is it? We were promised economic growth: where is it? We were promised stability: where is it? (p.190)

454 British troops killed, thousands badly injured and crippled. Tens of thousands of Afghan dead. Tens of billions of pounds wasted. And a week after we left, the Taliban rolled back in and took power again, as if nothing had happened. It’s hard to think of a more complete definition of futility.

Credit

Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War by Frank Ledwidge was published in 2013 by Yale University Press. References are to the 2014 YUP paperback.

Related links

New world disorder reviews

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by Simon on October 25, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 25, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/25/investment-in-blood-frank-ledwidge/

A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq by Jack Fairweather (2012)

This is an outstandingly thorough, factual and authoritative account of the British Army’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe the most comprehensive, detailed and balanced account available.

Jack Fairweather

Jack Fairweather covered the Iraq War as the Daily Telegraph‘s Baghdad and Gulf correspondent for five years. He and his team won a British Press Award for their coverage. He went on to be the Washington Post‘s Islamic World correspondent. By the time this book was published he had become a fellow at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies.

It’s a solid work of 430 pages, consisting of 32 chapters with good maps, thorough notes, a list of key players, a useful bibliography, index and so on. Well done to the publishers, Vintage, for such a professional package.

However, something (obviously) beyond their control is that, having been published in 2012 means the narrative does not include the rise of ISIS and the chaos that ensued. Fairweather’s narrative is now over ten years out of date, a factor I’m coming to realise is vitally important when reading about this disastrous part of the world (Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan) and, in particular, putting the entire conflict in Afghanistan into context, given the swift collapse of the Afghan government and return to power of the Taliban in 2021.

Companion piece to Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco

Having read Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s highly detailed accounts of the US decision making and planning leading up to the war, it’s fascinating to follow the same storyline from the British government point of view. For example, how the UK government made the same mistake of failing to consider or plan for the aftermath of the war, but for different reasons.

Tony Blair was the first British premier to be fully aware of modern media and how to use them. He and Alistair Campbell were all about focus groups, opinion polling and managing the news cycle and this is all short term thinking. Fixated as he and his team were on the media, they were obsessed that concrete proof the UK was planning for war shouldn’t leak out. Therefore Blair forbade the Department for International Development from officially commissioning post-invasion planning (the kind of thing it specialises in) in case someone leaked it (p.13). Similarly, Blair forbade the Army from placing orders for the kind of kit it would need for a large-scale deployment abroad (p.14). So Blair’s obsession with media management prevented him from properly, fully considering the post-conquest management of Iraq, from commissioning adequate plans for reconstruction, and from planning for the post-invasion policing by the British Army. Inexcusable.

Key points

Fairweather covers every detail, every aspect of the story, in calm, measured, authoritative chronological order. This really feels like the account to read.

1997 Tony Blair elected Prime Minister.

1998 Blair supports the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign against Saddam. New Labour make  the first increase to the military budget after a decade of Tory cuts.

March 1999 Blair succeeds in pushing the US and NATO to intervene in Kosovo with a bombing campaign against Serbia (with mixed results; see Michael Ignatieff’s book on the subject).

April 1999 Blair makes his Chicago speech making the case for intervention/invasion of countries on a humanitarian basis if dictators are massacring their people.

The 9/11 attacks change everything. President George W. Bush immediately starts planning an attack on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In October 2001 US forces began their attack, supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban government. The Taliban overthrown by December 2001. George Bush phones Tony Blair to sound him out about attacking Saddam Hussein.

The long tortuous process whereby the US tries to bamboozle the UN Security Council into agreeing a resolution allowing the invasion, and the New Labour government began its campaign of lies and deception, resulting in the dodgy dossier of fake intelligence, cobbled-together scraps from a PhD thesis including the ludicrous claim that Saddam could launch ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in 45 minutes. It was indicative of the way New Labour were obsessed by media and presentation and paid little attention to substance.

20 March 2003 The ‘coalition’ invasion of Iraq began. During the build-up, a variety of figures in the military and civil service discovered there was no plan for what to do after the invasion. It was mainly the Americans’ fault, Bush only set up an Office for Post-War Iraq a few weeks before the invasion and ignored advice contained in documents like Tom Warrick’s ‘the Future of Iraq’ project (p.15). Reconstruction was handed to retired general Jay Garner who rang round his pals to ask if any of them knew how to rebuild a country. Planning was ‘shambolic’ (p.21).

In London, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith had to be cajoled into reluctantly agreeing that invasion was legal without a second, specific UN resolution stating as much. How much he must regret that now (p.19). Alastair Campbell bullied ministers into kowtowing to Blair’s determination to march alongside the Americans i.e. be Bush’s poodle (p.19). Claire Short, Secretary at the Department for International Development, let herself be persuaded not to quit, something she regretted ever after.

Haider Samad and Iraqi stories

It’s worth highlighting that unlike most other books I’ve read on the shambles, Fairweather goes out of his way to include the stories of actual Iraqis. The first we meet is a man named Haider Samad. We hear about his family background, his wish to marry, intertwined with the history of Shiite religion in the southern part of Iraq. Samad will volunteer to become an interpreter for the British Army with ruinous consequences for himself and his family and Fairweather will return to his story at various points during the narrative as a kind of indicator of the British occupation’s broken promises and failures.

Names

Another distinctive feature of the book is the extraordinary number of named individuals Fairweather introduces us to, on every page, and their extraordinary range. Chapter 3 opens with Major Chris Parker patrolling Basra six weeks after the successful invasion has overthrown Saddam, to his commanding officer, Brigadier Graham Binns, a Scots Dragoon Officer Captain James Fenmore, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Ashmore, paymaster Ian Jaggard-Hawkins, Lieutenant Colonel Gil Baldwin of the Queen’s Royal Dragoons, the army’s top lawyer in Iraq Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, SAS commander Baghdad Richard Williams and hundreds and hundreds more.

On one level the book is a blizzard of individual names and stories of soldiers engaged in this or that aspect of the occupation, which is what makes his nine-page list of Dramatis personae at the end of the book invaluable.

Back to the narrative

Defence Minister Geoff Hoon made as light of the epidemic of looting which broke out in the aftermath of the invasion as Donald Rumsfeld did, claiming the looters were ‘redistributing wealth’, which was a good idea. Idiot (p.29).

The thing is, the British had invaded Basra before, back during the Great War when we were seeking to defeat the Ottoman Empire which had allied with Germany and Austria. Hence the Commonwealth War Cemetery which Sniper One Dan Mills discovered in al-Amarah and gave him a fully justified sense of ‘What are we doing back here a hundred years later’? Now, as then, after overthrowing the ruling elite, the British discovered there weren’t many capable native Iraqis to run anything, even to form a town council. Eventually, they picked on a Sunni tribal leader to run a majority Shia town, Basra, an error of judgement which, of course, immediately triggered widespread protests (p.31). Ignorance.

Fairweather details how, struggling with the number of detainees and ‘suspected terrorists’ they were being sent, British military police and soldiers came to abuse and intimidate the rapidly increasing number of ‘terrorist’ detainees, set up kangaroo courts and deliver summary justice (p.33). This led to the scandal surrounding Corporal Daniel Kenyon and colleagues who took photos of themselves abusing Iraqi prisoners at ‘Camp Breadbasket’, which leaked out, led to their arrests and trial and conviction (pages 46 to 48). The British version of the Abu Ghraib scandal. All the politicians’ claims about moral superiority of the West went up in smoke.

After less than 2 months flailing to run an office of reconstruction, Jay Garner was fired and replaced by L. Paul Bremer who was the ‘right kind’ of Republican i.e. a devout Christian and neo-conservative (p.40). He was put in charge of the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority. He was to prove a relentless, impatient workaholic who took catastrophic decisions and plunged Iraq into a civil war and vicious ethnic cleansing.

Fairweather chronicles the key role played by Douglas Feith (under secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005) in persuading Bremer to completely disband the Iraqi army and remove everyone with high or mid-level membership of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party from their jobs. At a stroke this threw half a million well-trained young men (the army) onto the dole queue and a hundred thousand people with managerial experience (Ba’ath) ditto. Bremer refused to listen to the argument that most Ba’ath Party members cared nothing about the party’s ideology, that being a member was simply a requirement of holding senior posts like hospital consultant or head of the power or water systems. Bremer didn’t listen. They were all fired. Chaos ensued.

From these angry men whose lives were ruined by L. Paul Bremer sprang the insurgency. Tim Cross, a British logistics expert who worked with Garner till he quit in disgust called American efforts ‘chaotic’ and a ‘shambles’ (p.41).

Britain contributed 40,000 troops to the initial invasion. By mid-summer 2003 half had returned to Blighty. General Sir Mike Jackson became head of the British Army.

September 2003 the BBC Today programme quoted an anonymous source claiming that New Labour officials ‘sexed up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ which we went to war on, infuriating Alastair Campbell. The label was to stick to this day (p.50).

A section about the history of the Marsh Arabs, going back to the first occupation of Iraq by the British during and after the Great War. The exploits of Gertrude Bell, who crops up repeatedly in Emma Sky’s account of her time in Iraq (p.52). The Marsh Arabs’ history of independence and revolt against central authority. The disastrous way they were encouraged to rise up against Saddam by President George Bush who then failed to provide any support so that tens of thousands were slaughtered by Saddam’s forces. Then Saddam’s decade long project to drain the marshes altogether and destroy their way of life, which he had just about achieved by the time of the 2003 invasion.

Maysan was the only Iraqi province to liberate itself from Saddam’s security forces and had no intention of kowtowing to the foreign invaders. Into Maysan province, came the Third Battalion the Parachute Regiment, famous for their gung-ho approach. Fairweather quotes Patrick Bishop’s description of the paras from his book ‘3 Para’ (2007) which I’ve reviewed.

Angry protests against the occupying forces started straight away, with stones being thrown, and then the first shots being fired. It was Northern Ireland all over again, but without the half a dozen crucial elements which made Northern Ireland, in the end, manageable (itemised in Frank Ledwidge’s outstanding book on the subject). In Basra, unlike Ulster, there was a lack of clear government authority, and the lack of a reliable police force to work alongside, the lack of a shared culture and language, and the lack of enough men to do the job.

In a series of incidents which he described in great detail (‘From the rooftop Robinson shouted, “Remember lads, you’re fucking paratroopers”‘), Fairweather traces the quick degeneration of the ‘peacekeeping’ mission into a fight for survival against hostile crowds and growing numbers of highly motivated, highly armed local ‘insurgents’.

The soldiers of 1 Para were only faintly familiar with the region’s history and how it had bred a culture of suspicion of outsiders. (p.55)

Fairweather gives a detailed forensic account of the killing of six military police by an enraged crowd after they got trapped in the police station of Majar al-Kabir on 24 June (pages 55 to 63). Critics focused on the lack of equipment, specifically a satellite phone to call for help, and their insufficient ammunition. Having read Lewidge’s book, though, I understand how the soldiers had been put into a completely untenable position by the naive over-optimism of the politicians (Blair) and the failure of the army general staff either to stand up to the politicians (to say no) and then to provide adequate intelligence, adequate equipment but, above all, a clear strategy to deal with the worsening situation.

Fairweather describes the arrival of a new British civil servant, Miles Pennett, sent to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad and the chaos he found there created by teeming hordes of graduates all fresh out of American universities and selected solely for their adherence to right-wing neo-conservative Republican values (p.69).

(In his book ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone’ , American journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran tells us candidates for the CPA were interviewed about their views on abortion or neo-liberal economics rather than any technical qualifications or experience whatsoever. This explains the CPA’s reputation for chaos and incompetence.)

While things fell apart in Iraq, Tony Blair flew to the States to receive a Congressional Gold Medal and make a grandstanding speech to the Congress. It shifted a complete change in the aims of the occupation. Gone was mention of the weapons of mass destruction which had so feverishly justified the invasion. Now, it turned out, the occupation was about bringing universal values of democracy, human rights and liberty to ‘the darkest corners of the earth’ (p.70).

In other words a) indistinguishable from Victorian rhetoric about civilising India or Africa which justified control and occupation; and b) bullshit, because i) quite a few ‘places’ don’t particularly want ‘democracy, human rights and liberty’, they want food and water so they don’t starve to death and, next above that, security: maintenance of law and order so it’s safe to walk the streets. That – basic security – comes a million miles before Western values and, in the event, the occupying forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be unable to provide them.

And ii) because as explained at the start of this review, Western-style democracy was never an option for Iraq, with its complex and corrupt matrix of tribal, ethnic and religious allegiances; and never, ever a possibility in Afghanistan.

Pride comes before a fall. The day after Balir received his congressional medal the body of David Kelly, the weapons expert, was found in a wood. He had committed suicide. He had been the source for BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s story about the ‘sexed up’ dossier about WMDs the government used to deceive MPs into voting for the war. Hoon and Campbell had pressed for Kelly’s name to be leaked to the press in order to discredit him. It never actually was leaked but enough information was provided for the press to be able to identify him. Snared in a political mesh he could see no way out of without ruining his reputation, Kelly took his own life. Alastair Campbell was forced to resign. The New Labour government was snared in scandal (pages 70 to 73).

All this distracted from the worsening situation in Baghdad. Fairweather’s account is super-detailed. He gives precise names, careers, quotes for hundreds of the personnel deployed to the CPA in Baghdad and to run Basra Province. It was the usual cobbled-together, last minute list of candidates as had characterised the hurried creation of Jay Garner’s short-lived Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance: a former director at a merchant bank was appointed finance minister, a public schoolmaster was appointed minister of education, an internet entrepreneur was made minister for trade and industry (p.67).

The advent of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN, now despatched to the court of Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional Authority and the difficulties he encountered, namely the Americans steamed ahead doing whatever they wanted to (dissolved the 500,000 strong Iraqi army, sacked 100,000 Ba’ath Party members from their jobs, delayed elections) and ignored him.

The Anglo-American relationship that Blair had gone to war to strengthen was coming under serious pressure. In fact it was increasingly difficult to find areas where British and American views matched. (p.79)

America’s disastrous early efforts to ‘train’ a new Iraqi police force, handed to Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner (p.79). Rumsfeld tries to reduce the budget required to train a new army. Fairweather strikingly calls Rumsfeld ‘a bully’ (p.80).

Typical neo con plans to privatise Iraq’s hundreds of state-own industries in one fell swoop, to be masterminded by former venture capitalist at Citicorp, Tom Foley (p.80). Chandrasekaran is very funny about the complete lunacy of this ideas and its ruinous impact on an economy already on its knees.

As a presidential election year approaches, the politicking in the US, Bush reshuffles his team.

Rumsfeld, whose grasp on the chaos he had created was tenuous, was removed (p.83)

Condoleeza Rice takes over. Arguments about the new Iraqi constitution, when it should be drawn up, who it should be drawn up by, whether or not it could form the legal basis for elections, when those elections should be held, what kind of form they take (Bremer preferred US-style electoral colleges rather than a simple poll).

By the end of 2003 Iraq fatigue had set in in London. Blair’s entire personality was built around can-do optimism and so found it difficult to cope with the relentless bad news from Iraq. And he’d lost Campbell, his key advisor and media manipulator.

By October 2003 the British administration in Basra accepted the fact that it was, in effect, an imperial occupation, and moved into Saddam’s palace. Fairweather shows us how it worked through the eyes of Sir Hilary Synnott, Regional Coordinator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Southern Iraq from 2003 to 2004.

The problem of the UK Department for International development, populated by progressives who strongly opposed the war, and the occupation, were desperate to escape accusations of imperialism, but were entirely dependent on the military pacifying the place before they could do a stroke of ‘development’ work.

When development minister Hilary Benn and permanent undersecretary Suma Chakrabarti flew into Basra it was to discover the army commander, Major General Graeme Lamb, mired in controversy because some squaddies from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had just arrested seven Iraqis, took them back to base, hooded them, abused and beat and tortured them, till one of them, Baha Mousa, died (p.86). What was it Tony Blair was saying about bringing universal values of democracy, human rights and liberty to ‘the darkest corners of the earth’?

Meanwhile the other provinces of southern Iraq needed governing. Fairweather introduces us to the men selected for the job, being: Mark Etherington, former paratrooper; old Etonian Rory Stewart, whose account of his time in the role I’ve reviewed; old Etonian John Bourne; Emma Sky, former British Council worker, whose account I’ve also reviewed (p.89).

Fairweather makes the simple but penetrating point that a certain type of posh Englishman has always ‘loved’ and identified with the Arab way of life because it echoes the primitive hierarchy and independence (for tribal leaders) which used to exist in Britain, in medieval to early modern times. They instinctively identified with the feudal setup which reminded them of their own country estates and venerable lineages.

Anyway, these Brits were handed entire provinces to run, exactly as in the high days of empire when jolly good chaps ruled provinces the size of France or more. Their efforts were so amateurish it’s funny. Adrian Weale was handed the task of organising elections in Nasariyah. He had no idea how to do this so emailed his wife, a borough councillor in Kensington and Chelsea (of course), and asked her to send him guidelines for local elections in Britain, to be adapted for Iraq. Making it up as they went along.

None of this stopped Stewart, in Maysan, having problems with the self-styled ‘Prince of the Marshes’, Abu Hatem, while Etherington, 100 miles north, appointed governor of Wasit, whose northern border touched Baghdad, was beginning to have trouble from the followers of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his devoted followers. In a telling sentence, Fairweather says: ‘Sadr was organising faster than the British’ (p.91). Sadr established his own parallel provisional government for Iraq and declared any government created by the British or Americans illegitimate (p.91).

In November Etherington attended a conference of US business donors in Baghdad and was astonished at how out of touch the CPA was. Even the US military was surprised at being kept out of the loop by Bremer and his secretive cabal of advisers.

Back in Amara Stewart was involved in a complicated sequence of events which led to rioters looting the office of the local governor, who had been inserted into the job by the egregious Abu Hatem. British troops found it hard to contain brick-throwing mobs. Stewart reflected that his Victorian forebears believed in their mission and were committed to the long-term development of their countries. Deep down Stewart knew that wasn’t true of Britain.

2004 uprisings

All the allies had growing misgivings about the growing power of Muqtada al-Sadr. In March 2004 Bremer took the publication of a series of articles lambasting the Coalition Provisional Authority in Sadr’s newspaper, Al-Hawzat as a pretext to shut it down. On 3 April US troops arrested the editor, sparking protests. On 4 April fighting broke out in Najaf, Sadr City and Basra. Sadr’s Mahdi Army took over several points and attacked coalition soldiers, killing dozens of foreign soldiers. This was the start of the Sadr Uprising in the south of Iraq.

What made the situation ten times worse was that on 31 March gunmen ambushed four American contractors outside Falluja to the west of Baghdad, beat them to death, burned their bodies and hung them from a bridge over the river Euphrates. Footage was beamed round the world. Bush was horrified and vowed revenge.

Suddenly the occupying forces were faced with a Sunni uprising in the so-called Sunni Triangle to the West of Baghdad, and a parallel but separate uprising by violent forces loyal to Sadr in every town in the south.

Fairweather details the experience of Mark Etherington in the Cimic compound at Kut as fierce fighting breaks out between the Shia militia and the Ukrainian UN troops. Here and in all the other towns of south Iraq, the UN and CPA compounds came under intense fire. The Americans’ actions against Sadr in Baghdad effectively plunged southern Iraq into war. Etherington knew all about the catastrophic defeat of a sizeable British Army at Kut by Ottoman troops during the First World War one hundred years earlier (p.109). Fairweather gives a brilliantly vivid and nail-biting description of Etherington and his staff abandoning the compound at Kut. The same kind of thing was happening at Nasariyah under its Italian governor, Barbara Contini.

Meanwhile, the President had ordered the US army to enter the town of Fallujah and find the people responsible for the murder of the civilian contracts. This ridiculously impossible task of course led to all out war and the First Battle of Fallujah. All round the world were beamed footage of houses being destroyed, terrified civilians being rounded up, and thousands of refugees fleeing the city as the civilian casualties grew into the hundreds. All round the Arab world young men decided they had to go to Iraq to fight these genocidal invaders.

Fairweather quotes part of a George Bush speech which epitomises one of the American’s conceptual stupidities, where Bush says: ‘the American people want to know that we’re going after the bad guys’ (p.111). These simple-minded dichotomies, the binary polarities of a thousand Hollywood movies, which divide people up into the Good Guys (John Wayne, Bruce Willis) and the Bad Guys (wearing black hats), governed US policy throughout the twentieth century. This worked fine when there really were Bad Guys, like the Nazis, but not so well in societies riven with complex ethnic, religious, social and political divides, such as Vietnam or Iraq where there’s a wide variety of bad actors and it becomes impossible to figure out who the ‘good’ ones are, if any.

Obviously, in order to bring the ‘murderers to justice’ many times more US troops were killed and injured than the original 4 contractors. In the end 37 American soldiers were killed and over 600 Iraqi civilians. Huge parts of a major city were devastated. Inevitably, the supposed murderers of the contractors were never found.

Apart from the obvious security issues, it caused a political issue because the entire Sunni membership of the provisional Iraqi government which Bremer was trying to cobble together threatened to quit, and could only be made to support coalition forces with an extreme of arm-twisting and promises of money and influence.

Meanwhile, in the south of Iraq, US forces retook the CPA compounds in Kut, Amarah and Nasariyah, but the British consuls who returned to their posts had abandoned all thoughts of reconstruction and development. Not getting killed became their number one priority (p.113).

Bremer was strongly critical of the British failure to secure the south, exacerbated by negative coverage of the American butchery in Fallujah in the British press, plunging American-British relations to a new low and this led to a significant outcome. Bremer banned British representatives from the ongoing discussions with local politicians about the forthcoming constitution and elections.

Britain’s effective involvement in shaping Iraq’s political future was over. (p.114)

In late April the photos of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the notorious prison at Abu Ghraib to the west of Baghdad emerged. I’ve described it elsewhere. Bringing ‘universal values of democracy, human rights and liberty’ eh?

For a spell Fairweather’s text overlaps the narrative of Sergeant Dan Mills, sniper with the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, in his bestselling book, Sniper One. Mills describes how, on the very first patrol on the very first morning of the very first day of their deployment, Danny and his patrol parked up outside the local headquarters of Sadr’s Mahdi Army or Jaish al-Mahdi as it was properly called, JAM as the Brits called it. Mills’s patrol did this in complete and utter ignorance of the local geography, town layout, and local sense of bitter resentment of the infidel occupiers.

The JAM attacked, using machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and mortars, and Danny and his mates found themselves in the middle of a series of intense firefights and attacks which continued on a daily basis until their eventual withdrawal from the Amarah government compound four months later.

The Americans had now surrounded al-Sadr who was holed up in the Imam Ali Shrine in the holy city of Najaf where their attempts to break in had damaged some parts of the shrine. Shia anger was off the scale. Danny and his mates and all UK forces across the south of the country had to deal with the consequences. Fairweather gives a series of absolutely gripping, vivid, terrifying eye witness accounts of the running battles and firefights which followed.

The Prince of the Marshes, Abu Hatem, threw in his lot with the Sadrists. When the Brits made a raid to capture insurgents and took prisoners back to their prison, the detainees were subject to abuse and heard screams and torture sounds from other cells. When eventually released these stories helped recruit more insurgents and incentivise existing ones into a life or death struggle against the invader. Public relations catastrophe (p.123).

Escape to Afghanistan

In January 2004 the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death acquitted the government of blame and BBC Director General Greg Dyke resigned, but much of the media accused the report of being a whitewash. Fairweather quotes cabinet colleagues who noticed the impact the strain was having on Blair’s face. Hs hair started to turn grey.

In June 2004 a NATO conference decided the US-led mission had languished because of the focus on Iraq and volunteered NATO forces to take a more active role in Afghanistan. Why? Use it or lose it. NATO had big budgets from member countries who periodically wondered why they were spending so much. This would give the organisation the sense of purpose it needed.

In London Blair and his team saw it as an opportunity to regain the initiative. In Iraq we were not only visibly losing but being sidelined in every way imaginable by the Yanks. Deployment to Afghanistan offered the British Army a chance to redeem its damaged reputation and Tony Blair a way of restoring his reputation as an international statesman.

In fact the Americans had specifically asked the Brits to relocate NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps to the south of Iraq. It was crunch time. Fairweather describes the nitty gritty of discussions, with pros and cons on both sides. But the Brits decided to cut and run. Iraq was a swamp where the Americans disrespected us. Afghanistan offered a second chance. But could we fight a war on two fronts? The decisive view was given by director of operations at the Ministry of Defence, Lieutenant General Robert Fry. He argued that troop deployments to Afghanistan would be ramped up as troops in Iraq were drawn down. This was ratified by Chief of the Defence Staff Michael Walker. They’re the men to blame.

Fairweather gives a detailed analysis of the politics around successive Defence Reviews, with the Treasury constantly trying to cut the military budget and the top brass looking for any arguments to increase it. This in turn was meshed with the bitter rivalry between Blair the international grandstander and Gordon Brown, morosely hunkered down as Chancellor of the Exchequer. So another reason for the Afghan Adventure was entirely due to Whitehall politicis, in that the deployment forced a reluctant Treasury to release more money to the Ministry of Defence.

Chapter 13

Cut to a fascinating chapter about dismal attempts to train a new Iraqi police force, told through the eyes of Brit trainer William Kearney, 12 years in the Special Branch and now manager of ArmorGroup security, one of the many contractors who worked in Iraq. Compare and contrast with the American approach which was to flood the streets with poorly trained ‘police’ provided with uniforms, guns and ammunition which they quite regularly sold onto the insurgents.

We meet up again with Iraqi Haider Samad who is working for the Brits in Basra as an interpreter and the time he was beaten to the ground by four strangers who tell him next time they’ll kill him if he carries on working for the infidel. Haider’s experience is a peg to introduce the wider issue that many, many of the new ‘police’ being recruited at such speed in order to make Western politicians happy, were themselves members of the Shia militias.

Chapter 14

Introduction to the leader of Jaish al-Mahdi in Basra, Ahmed al-Fartosi, and his aim to utterly destroy the British occupation. He was convinced the Brits wanted to extend their occupation forever because their real aim was to steal Iraq’s oil. He had spent some time in exile in Lebanon and so on return to Basra reorganised the militia along the lines of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. That said, Fartosi was no fan of the Iranians who had fought Iraqis in a bitter eight-year-long war. Half a million Iraqis died in that war and Iran came close to capturing Basra.

Another one of Fairweather’s gripping descriptions of a firefight which broke out on 9 August in Basra between British forces and the Shia militia led by Fartosi who ambushed a patrol forcing them to take refuge in nearby houses and call for backup etc.

Amara Fairweather cuts to the similar situation in Amara where sniper Mills and his buddies were included in the 150 or so coalition troops defending the Cimic House compound from daily attacks and hourly mortar bombs. After a particular intense firefight all the Iraqi cooks and ancillary staff leave, taking as much loot with them as they could carry. Fairweather then gives his version of the siege of Cimic House, the intense battle which forms the centrepiece of Mill’s book, Sniper One (pages 155 to 158).

Soon afterwards al-Sadr caved to majority Shia opinion and called off his insurgency. The far more influential cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani had returned to the country, gone to Najaf and seen the damage to the shrine which he, and moderate Shia opinion, blamed on Sadr. Hence his climbdown.

Fairweather switches from his intense description of combat right up to the highest level of politics and the scheming by Iraqi exile Ayad Allawi to curry favour with the Americans and get himself appointed new president of Iraq. All the accounts I’ve read describe Allawi as a plausible swindler who promised Bush and Rumsfeld whatever they wanted to hear, thus materially aiding the misconceptions and lack of planning on which the invasion was launched.

Fairweather drolly explains that this plausible chancer was put on the payroll of MI6 and ‘supplied the British government with some of the most flagrantly misleading intelligence before the war, namely the completely bogus claim that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes (p.131). This crook had Bush and Blair’s enthusiastic personal support.

In November the Americans launched the Second Battle of Fallujah with a view to exterminating Sunni insurgents and establishing the rule of law. The battle saw some of the heaviest urban combat the American army had been involved in since the ill-fated Battle of Hue City in Vietnam in 1968. 95 American and 4 British soldiers were killed, along with up to 2,000 ‘insurgents’. Over a fifth of the city was destroyed.

2005 election A general election for the interim Iraqi parliament was held on 30 January 2005. Sunni Muslims, despite being a minority in Iraq (64% Shia, 34% Sunni, 2% Christian and other) had historically held power. Saddam and his clique were Sunnis. Now, in protest against the battle of Fallujah and the perceived bias of the occupying force towards Shias, large numbers of Sunnis boycotted the elections. This was self-defeating as it gave sweeping victory to Shia parties backed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Allawi’s parties polled just 14%.

Both Americans and Brits now had to deal with an ‘elected’ Iraqi government dominated by Shias who, far from being grateful to their liberators, were deeply suspicious and resentful of them.

Chapter 16

Fairweather switches focus to a new location, the south of Afghanistan, giving us a potted history of Britain’s ill-fated military adventures here during the nineteenth century, notably the swingeing defeat at the Battle of Maiwand, 27 July 1880, heaviest defeat of a Western power by an Asian power until the prolonged Ottoman siege and massacre of the British at Kut in southern Iraq in the winter of 1915/16

Cut to 2004 as the British Army staff begin to plan a deployment to Afghanistan. Now that elections had taken place, British planners and politicians looked for a way to extract the army from Iraq. The task fell to Major general Jonathon Riley who adopted the formula of the Americans: as the Iraqi police force ‘stepped up’, the British forces would ‘step down’. Sounded good but conveniently ignored the fact that the so-called ‘police’ were very poor quality, corrupt if you were lucky, at worst – during many of the clashes of the Sadr Uprising – joining the insurgents in shooting at British troops. When the police were objective and reasonably independent, they were themselves liable to attack. In the first half of 2005 350 police officers were killed in attacks on police stations and recruiting centres.

We remeet the Brits handed the challenging job of training Iraqi police, namely William Kearney and Charlie MacCartney, police mentor of the Jamiat; SIS station chief Kevin Landers. Fairweather details the process whereby all these guys come to realise that the head of the Serious Crimes Unit (SCU) Captain Jaffar, was deeply in league with the insurgents. In fact the SCU was to become a growing bugbear in the Brits’ side, and establish itself as a centre of criminality and extortion against the civilian population.

Elections are all very well but the January 2005 ones put Sadr party members into Basra’s provincial council and into the governor’s seat. But the Brits didn’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest. They were now planning to withdraw all but 1,000 British troops from Iraq by end of 2005, with a view to redeploying them to Afghanistan at the start of 2006.

How did the Brits get deployed to Helmand, right next to the historic battlefield of Maiwand, home of the fiercest, most invader-resistant traditions in all Afghanistan? Well, remember the whole thing was a NATO operation. The Canadians had lobbied hard to have overall control of the deployment to south Afghanistan and called first dibs on the biggest town, Kandahar. Considering the alternatives, the Brits learned that Helmand Province had now become the biggest single source of heroin, which would please the army’s civilian master, Tony Blair. And it was also the historical homeland of the Taliban, so combatting them would also give political brownie points to Blair, keen to rehabilitate his ailing reputation.

Chapter 17

At this point Fairweather cuts away to catch up on the career of interpreter Haider who was now working for a private security firm. His boss was William Kearney who we’ve seen trying to train the Iraqi police. Haider has saved up enough money to propose to his childhood sweetheart, Nora, whose family previously banned the match due to his lack of money.

Chapter 18

Reg Keys’s son, Tom, was one of the six military policemen murdered by the mob at Majar al-Kabir police station in June 2003. Fairweather devotes some time to chronicling Keys’s campaign to get to the bottom of his son’s death but his increasing frustration with MoD prevarication. The army board of enquiry published its findings nine months later. The families of the dead were not invited to contribute or to attend. They asked for advance copies on the eve of publication but were refused. They were given just an hour to read the 90-page report ahead of a meeting with Defence Secretary Geoff Hoons. Despicable.

Arguably the limited and obviously parti pris ‘enquiries’ into the launching of the war, the David Kelly affair and the red caps’ deaths went a long way to discrediting the entire idea of a government enquiry.

The angered parents set up a support group, Military Families Against the War (p.253). But they went further and funded Keys to stand in Tony Blair’s constituency of Sedgemoor in the 2005 general election. Fairweather gives a characteristically thorough and fascinating description of how what started as a jokey suggestion over a coffee was turned into a serious political reality, giving us lots of information about the working of modern British political parties and the media.

Just before the election Channel 4 News leaked a March 2003 memo from Attorney General Peter Goldsmith giving his opinion that he didn’t think the case for war would stand up in a court of law. Only days later a soldier in Amarah was hit by a roadside bomb and killed. The war wouldn’t leave Tony Bair alone. You broke it; you own it.

In the general election Blair’s share of the vote went from 65 to 59% and Reg won 10%. Labour’s majority in the House of Commons was cut from 200 to 66 MPs. So not a defeat. In fact pollsters considered the Iraq war a minor issue. The economy was booming and lots of people didn’t care all that much (as, arguably, most sensible people don’t care about any form of politics).

(Page 197 quote from Ibn Saud, future king of Saudi Arabia, on the irredeemably rebellious nature of the Iraqi tribes who can only be governed by ‘strong measures and military force’.)

Chapter 19. Iran

Rocky relations between the Brits in Amarah tasked with patrolling the porous border with Iran, just 50k away, and the newly elected governor, Adel Muhoder al-Maliki. More descriptions of firefights and attacks the latest troop of British soldiers come under within minutes of leaving the heavily defended Amarah air base. The point is that the incredibly brave bomb disposal officer, Captain Simon Bratcher, not only neutralised a clutch of roadside bombs but provided the first evidence that they were being supplied by Iran.

The Shia government It’s all very well organising ‘free and fair elections’ until they end up voting in people you strongly disapprove of. Two months after the January 2005 elections, Ibrahim Jaafari, the leader of Dawa, one of the two main Shia parties, was announced as the next Iraqi Prime Minister. The Interior Ministry was handed to Bayan Jabr, a former commander of a Badr Brigade i.e. one of the main Shia militias. These men continued to further Iran’s influence at every level of the Iraqi administration. The Interior Ministry was said to have set up death squads to kidnap, torture and execute former Ba’ath Party members and Sunni leaders.

Jack Straw learns of an American plan to set up death squads to ‘take out’ leading Iranian agents working in Iraq militia leaders, but vetoes it (p.. (Did they go ahead anyway?) Straw’s objections were about not upsetting the Iranians at a difficult time of negotiations with the West about Iran’s nuclear power programme. But it’s one example among hundreds of how Iraqi politics became steadily more entangled with Iranian.

Fairweather makes an interesting point. Iranian policy in Iraq often seemed contradictory – at the same time supporting the Shia-led government but also backing anti-government militias. But why shouldn’t Iran be like Western countries, with conflicting parties and factions jostling for power and implementing different, sometimes conflicting strategies? Also: why not make it a conscious strategy to back different parties and factions while it was unclear who would win (p.204). In the end, of course, Iran won.

Chapter 20. Jamiat

This was the name of the police station in Basra which had become the focal point of corruption, extortion, kidnapping, torture and militia influence. Major Rupert Jones of the newly arrived 12 Mechanised Brigade decided to do something about it and asked for a list of possibly corrupt policemen. It became an uncomfortably long list. The Brits asked for them to be removed. Nothing happened. Then they asked for Fartosi to be arrested but learned that Fartosi had been put on a ‘no lift’ list because the prime Minister didn’t want to antagonise the Sadrists on whose support his government rested.

Kidnap of two SAS officers

Then three British soldiers were killed by roadside bombs and Brigadier John Lorimer, the eighth brigade commander in Basra in two years, decided to act. On 17 September an SAS detachment infiltrated Fartosi’s home and arrested him. Two days later two SAS officers on patrol were kidnapped. Fairweather describes in detail the complex standoff which then followed as several sets of British officials ascertained that the two soldiers had been taken to the notorious Jamiat police station. When British officials went to the station they were themselves promptly arrested and detained. Negotiations involved an Iraqi judge, and an increasing battery of coalition lawyers and officers. The negotiators were themselves hustled at gunpoint to the cells where the two soldiers were being kept, as fighting broke out at the front of the police station, with Iraqi police officers who the British had spent time and money training now opening fire on British forces. British relief forces were surrounded by angry crowds throwing bricks and a succession of Warrior vehicles were set on fire.

Sergeant Long escaping from his Warrior armoured vehicle after a petrol bomb was thrown down the gun turret (source: Reuters)

Eventually the SAS men and the other Brit hostages were rescued by an attack by SAS men who were brought all the way from the regiment’s HQ at Herefordshire to help them. The political fallout was threefold. 1) Pictures of George Long on fire escaping from his Warrior tank covered the front pages of British newspapers alongside articles claiming the British softly-softly police in Basra was a shambles. 2) More specifically, it revealed that the entire concept of training the Iraqi police force which politicians from Blair downwards had put such emphasis on, was in fact a sham. 3) The Shia governor, Muhammed al-Waeli, forced to take sides, came down on the side of his Shia constituency, accused the Brits of terrorism, led a tour of the now devastated police station, and declared he would never have anything to do with the Brits again.

Fairweather is outstanding at giving detailed forensic accounts of this kind of event (compare his description of the murder of the military police at Majar al-Kabir).

Chapter 21. Helmand

7/7 suicide bombers

On 7 July 2005 four British Muslims carrying backpacks full of explosives detonated them on London Underground trains and a bus. These were the first suicide bombs on British soil. They killed 52 and injured over 700. In a pre-recorded video one of the bombers described his motivation as revenge for all the innocent Muslims the British Army was killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much for our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan making Britain safer. The exact opposite.

But when news came out that the men had been trained at terrorist training camps on the Pakistan-Afghan border, government spin doctors turned it into a justification for deploying British troops to Afghanistan.

In September 2005 Lieutenant General Rob Fry, the individual most responsible for the plan to deploy to Helmand, presented John Reid with the MoD’s plans to deploy 3,150 troops, mostly drawn from the Parachute Regiment. British forces would take over an American base named Camp Bastion in the desert north-west of the province’s capital, Lashkar Gah. He promised that Taliban fighters crossing from Pakistan would be easy to identify and eliminate. ‘The senior SIS men in the room rolled their eyes’ (p.225). Brigadier Ed Butler was chosen to command the force.

Fairweather shows the gulf between the top of the army (Fry and Chief of the General Staff Sir Mike Jackson) who assured sceptical politicians that it could be managed as long as the Brits withdrew their forces from southern Iraq at the same speed that they deployed them to Helmand – and many of the officers on the ground who thought it was madness. Defence Secretary John Reid was sceptical. ‘Won’t British troops be isolated and exposed?’ he asked (p.225). Fry assured him not. Reid was right. Fry was way wrong.

Split command

Right from the start it was ballsed up. The British formed part of a NATO force commanded by the Canadians. Because the Canadian force was being commanded by a brigadier, army etiquette demanded that Butler step aside to allow a more junior officer to command his men, and so Colonel Charlie Knaggs became commander of the British deployment. This meant Butler would have to oversee operations from Kabul. Then he discovered his headquarters would not be doing the operational planning but that a staff officer from army headquarters in Northwood would be drawing up the crucial operational plan.

Crucially, Butler would only have four Chinook helicopters at his disposal, barely enough to support one offensive mission a month and, it would prove, not nearly enough to extract British soldiers from the umpteen dangerous contact situations they were going to get into.

After the Jamiat police station siege, senior officers considered advising against the deployment, realising that the situation in south Iraq was far worse than previously understood, and would entail a much slower withdrawal than planned but they never made their opposition clear enough.

Sher Mohammed Akhundzada

Before the troops arrived the Brits made another mistake. UK ambassador to Kabul, Rosalind Marsden, persuaded president Hamid Karzai, to remove the province’s long-time governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada. He was notorious for rape, murder and involvement in the drugs trade, so getting rid of him played to press releases about Tony Blair’s counter narcotics policy. Unfortunately, Muhammed may have been a criminal but he was the only person with the contacts and authority to keep a lid on the province. Later, he cheerfully told British officers that, removed from his position of influence and no longer able to pay them, he let his 3,000-strong fighting force defect en masse to the Taliban. At a stroke the Brits made violent conflict inevitable and created a huge opposition force. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That motto should be carved on Tony Blair’s tombstone.

Fairweather describes the efforts of the chief planner Gordon Messenger and development experts to assess the province, their dismay at the illiteracy and corruption of the Afghan administrators and police they met, and their equal dismay at the ignorance about Helmand displayed by British politicians and army staff. The politicians had assigned the army a three-year deployment. Development expert Minna Jarvenpaa said it would take ten years, probably longer, to begin to develop such a place (p.233). Politicians didn’t want to hear. No-one listened.

Details of the deployment were announced in January 2006, just in time for a conference of Afghan donors’ which Tony Blair was chairing. John Reid declared we were going to spend three years in the south of Afghanistan, bringing peace and security and helping the locals reconstruct their country. None of this was to happen.

Gil Baldwin, head of the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit resigned in disgust, saying it beggared belief that Britain was preparing to go into Afghanistan even worse prepared then it had been for Iraq (p.234).

Chapter 22

Introduces us to the first soldiers to deploy to Afghanistan including Will Pike and Harvey Pynn of the Third Parachute regiment, 3 Para. This part of the narrative exactly matches the account of 3 Para’s time in Helmand (April to October 2006) given by Patrick Bishop in his rip-roaring soldier’s eye view of endless firefights in ‘3 Para’.

Fairweather repeats the surprising fact that, of the 3,500 British troops being deployed, all but 600 were support staff, engineers, cooks, drivers, quartermasters, ammunition handlers and so on. Governor Daoud wanted the Brits to deploy to protect towns in the north of the province from the Taliban. Butler was reluctant but agreed to support local Afghan army units. Development consultant Minna Jarvenpaa knew the tribal situation around Sangin was complicated with the town divided between two tribes, and both involved in rival drug operations.

In May 2006 Daoud sent the British commander, Charlie Knaggs, a desperate message that the district centre in the town of Naw Zad was being attacked by Taliban forces. A force of Paras is despatched, who were later replaced by Gurkhas. Soon Daoud was asking British troops to protect other towns and the Americans asked them to bolster the small force protecting the important Kajaki Dam. Step by step the Brits were forced into abandoning the initial plan of securing a relatively small area bounded by Camp Bastion, Geresh and Lashkar Gah in the south, and instead found their forces scattered thinly across half a dozen outposts which came under increasingly fierce attack.

Far from being a gentle peacekeeping and reconstruction exercise, the deployment was turning into a full scale war against the Taliban. Fairweather is brilliant at conveying the complex political cross-currents which led to the decisions, and the shambolic last-minute way they were carried out.

Will Pike led the deployment to the northern outpost of Sangin. As the Paras set about fortifying the district centre a delegation of town elders came and asked them to leave. They knew the Taliban would attack. They knew it would develop into a siege of attrition. They knew their town would be badly damaged. They were right on all three counts, but Pike had to turn them down. So much for listening to the locals, democracy etc. Instead of peace, the Brits brought war and destruction wherever they went.

Days later the Sangin district centre was hit, 3 killed 3 badly injured. If Butler had been in Camp Bastion maybe he’d have changed his mind but he was in Kabul where his job had evolved into trying to manage Governor Daoud and his master, Afghan president Karzai. So he overruled his junior officers’ concerns and the troops remained in Sangin in what developed into a relentless, daily barrage from the surrounding Taliban.

Already it was clear the critics had been right: a) the deployment to Afghanistan was too small; b) it had truckled to political pressure and spread its forces too thinly; c) it wasn’t going to be a peacekeeping deployment but a full-on conflict.

Chapter 23. Counterinsurgency in Iraq

Fairweather’s account of the revolution in military doctrine brought about by General David Petraeus who tries to re-orient the US Army approach from a ‘capture and kill the bad guys’ approach to a more imaginative deployment of counterinsurgency doctrine. The Americans referred to the British Army’s experience in the Malaya ’emergency’ i.e. how it handled an insurgency by revolutionary communist guerrillas. The main thing is to shift the goal from capturing or killing insurgents to winning over the general population by ensuring security. This shift in thinking is the central theme of Thomas E Ricks’s two books, Fiasco and The Gamble.

I believed all this until I read Frank Ledwidge’s devastating book, Losing Small Wars. There he points out two fundamental factors which the counterinsurgency proponents didn’t take into account. In Malaya, as later in Northern Ireland, a) there was one government whose fundamental legitimacy the majority of the population didn’t question; and there was b) an effective, impartial, well trained police force. Neither of these factors was present in Iraq or Afghanistan. On the contrary the ‘governments’ of both countries were deeply contested by large parts of the population, were widely seen as corrupt and parti pris; and the police forces in both countries were bywords for corruption and backsliding i.e. running away or turning their guns on their supposed Western allies whenever it came to a fight.

As the redeployment to Helmand began to be thought through, officers in Basra came under pressure to speed up the process of handing over responsibility to the Iraqi police and army. Only problem being, they were often corrupt and ineffective. Didn’t matter:

The army leadership was preparing to dispense with its commitment to create a competent Iraqi security force in the name of political expediency. (p.251)

Security in Basra was collapsing. The News of the World published a video of British soldiers beating detainees which triggered 48 rocket and mortars fired at the Abu Naji camp. Sectarian strife increased. A Sunni cleric was killed and new corpses turned up every day.

In January 2006 a further round of elections were held. Now, after weeks of horse trading, following the elections, Shia politician Nouri al-Maliki was finally appointed Prime Minister. He hated the British. British forces had arrested his grandfather in a 1920 Shia uprising. He saw the British presence as a continuation of its old imperial ambitions. On his first visit to Basra he told the British authorities he didn’t want to meet them.

Fairweather gives an illuminating account of the Ministry of Defence and army’s notorious problems with commissioning the right kit and equipment. While the army spent hundreds of millions on hi-tech, computerised gewgaws to fight the next world war, it neglected basic transport vehicles solid enough to resist improvised explosive devices.

Six month rotations ensured that just as each set of officers and men was coming to know the people and the job, it was rotated back to the UK and a completely new set came in. These were often led by a commanding officer determined to ignore everything his predecessor had done and implement his own pet theories. This was a recipe for inconsistency and incoherence. Fairweather cites the replacement of the bullish General Shireff with the scholarly General Jonathan Shaw in January 2007 (p.302).

He has an upsetting passage about post-traumatic stress disorder and the inadequate care the army takes of its psychiatrically damaged veterans. American studies suggest that 15% of veterans will suffer PTSD (p.256). The poor care for the physically wounded veterans at the Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham caused a scandal in the media (p.281). The scandal was to lead to the establishment of the extremely successful Help for Heroes charity (note, p.393).

The entire policy of withdrawing from south Iraq in order to redeploy to Afghanistan was thrown into doubt when the Brits handed over the main base in Muthanna province to the local security services then, a few days later, a crowd of several hundred assembled and stormed the base, the Iraqi security forces melting away as they were wont to do, whereupon the mob stripped the base of all the expensive equipment, looting all the arms and equipment the Americans had stocked it with. Farce (p.270).

In August British forces handed over Camp Abu Naji outside Amarah to local security forces. Within an hour word had spread, a few hours later a mob had assembled, and a few hours after that the crowd entered the base and comprehensively sacked and looted it. After spending £80 million trying to reconstruct the province the British were leaving it in the worst possible state. A ‘debacle’ and ‘fiasco’, the loss of Abu Naji brought the British army’s reputation among the Americans to a new low.

6 September 2006

The dreadful day when four Paras defending the Kajaki Dam in Helmand got caught in a minefield, one fatality, three terrible injuries and the heroism of Chinook pilot Mark Hammond who flew sorties not only to the dam, but to Sangin and Musa Qaleh, too (p.275). In fact it was only a week later that the elders of Musa Qaleh came to Butler and brokered a ceasefire deal between him and the Taliban. Both sides would withdraw and fighting would cease. An eerie quiet descended over the battletorn town which had been badly damaged during 6 months of fighting. The British talked about reconstruction but brought only destruction.

Meanwhile in Basra new commander, Genera Richard Shireff proposed a bold new plan of increasing his force and embarking on a policy of clearing the city neighbourhood by neighbourhood of the JAM, handing it over to Iraqi police to hold and then civilian experts to deliver high impact development projects. Of course none of this ever happened. He could never get enough British troops and the Iraqi police were useless. After some civilian contractors were killed Margaret Beckett ordered the entire DFID contingent to leave Basra Palace base and be evacuated to Kuwait.

Back to the story of Haider the interpreter. He has married his sweetheart, Nora, and had a baby. Now he is thunderstruck to be told by his sympathetic boss, William Kearney, that the security firm is pulling out of Basra. Haider is going to lose his job and become more exposed to the JAM thugs who want to kill him for working with the infidel.

Chapter 28 The Surge, 2007

General Petraeus and retired general Jack Keane lobbied and persuaded president Bush not to quit and withdraw from a ruined Iraq but to take a gamble and increase troop numbers, by 30,000, the famous ‘surge’. General Casey was replaced by Petraeus as commander in chief.

The so-called Surge coincided with the so-called Sunni Awakening which was when Sunni tribes finally sickened of being threatened and dominated by al Qaeda militias. Delicate negotiations persuaded many Sunni tribes to accept American money and support to take on the terrorist group.

Baghdad had now become the epicentre of the civil war between Sunni and Shia, with mass ethnic cleansing, 200 deaths a week, and concrete walls separating ethnic neighbourhoods. Fairweather mentions the role of British civilian and pacifist Emma Sky as an unlikely adviser to hulking American general Ray Ordieno (pages 292 to 296).

Detailed description of the negotiations initiated by British General Graeme Lamb and James Simonds to convert Sunni militia leader Abu Azzam over to the Coalition side, with a mixture of flattery, promises of jobs and money for his 1,000-strong militia. The central achievement of Emma Sky in making friends with a female member of Maliki’s cabinet, Basima al-Jadiri and from then onwards keeping lines of communication open between the coalition commander and stroppy Maliki (p.298).

The Brits had been working through the latter half of 2006 towards finally withdrawing from Basra, deceiving themselves about the readiness of the Iraqi security forces to take over, or that Shireff’s policy of clearing neighbourhoods was working. But just as the withdrawal began to be implemented the Americans were embarking on the exact opposite policy, bringing in more troops as part of their Surge. In this context British policy looked more than ever like running away.

The British were under pressure to look tough and so undertook daring missions, including seizing Jaish al-Mahdi leaders. At the same time they sought interlocutors to negotiate a peace with. Most important was to be the leader of Jaish al-Mahdi in Basra, Ahmed al-Fartosi, who they had arrested and imprisoned three years before, and whose arrest led to the reprisal kidnapping of the two SAS men.

The British made him a simple offer: call off militia attacks and in return the British would cease patrolling the city and release his imprisoned cadres on cohorts. The clincher was telling Fartosi he had to take the deal in order to get his men freed and enrolled in the security services before Iranian agents and politicians took over. Fartosi was Shia, fanatical Shia, he had taken money and arms from Iran – but drew the line at letting Iran take over his patch.

These are the kinds of subtleties or complexities created by ethnic, religious, tribal, warlord and gangland allegiances which the coalition failed to get to terms with. Emma Sky is described trying to persuade Ray Ordieno that he needed to stop lumping all opposition groups as al Qaeda or Ba’athists or ‘insurgents’ and learn to distinguish between them. Only then could the coalition figure out what they wanted and even start to find negotiated, political solutions to the chaos.

June 2007

Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after Tony Blair stepped down as Labour Party leader. According to Fairweather everyone in Whitehall and the military knew that Brown regarded Iraq as Blair’s folly and had no interest in throwing good money after bad. He wanted all British troops withdrawn as soon as reasonably possible. As always, politics. When the army staff told Brown cutting and running would infuriate the Americans Brown said ‘good’. In Britain, and further afield (in the European countries which were always against the war) it would draw a stark line between Brown and his predecessor, and win him kudos for standing up to the Yanks. Army planners at the British military command centre in Northwood drew up five withdrawal scenarios. Brown unhesitatingly chose the quickest (p.315).

Some top brass thought a rapid withdrawal would make the British public question the sacrifice made so far. But in the three months during which Blair had extended the British occupation to mollify the Americans, 11 more British soldiers had been killed. The opposite line was that the British had fought shoulder to shoulder with the Americans for four bloody years and enough was enough.

The Brits released Fartosi’s deputy, other detainees and complied with their side of the bargain to halt all patrols in Basra. However violent attacks continued, with relentless bombarding of the British HQ in Basra Palace. American command in Baghdad gave the British senior officers who came to explain their withdrawal timetable short shrift. As the Brits claimed that Basra’s police force was ready to enforce security, American officers laughed.

In August 2007 the deal with Fartosi began and he was given a small office in the the base prison complete with phone and fax machine. From here he organised a complete ceasefire and an uneasy calm fell over Basra. On 3 September the British commander handed over security governance to the Iraqi government general assigned the job, and 600 soldiers left Basra Palace in a convoy of Warriors, armoured cars, lorries piled high with office furniture. They drove the ten miles to Basra airport. The idea is a residual force would stay there for up to a year to continue to train Iraqi army and police force. The JAM militia held wild celebrations at the ‘liberation’ of their city.

Story of Haider the interpreter, continued

Since the start of the year a number of interpreters had been executed by the militias. Terrifying story of him attending his brother-in-law’s wedding procession of twenty or so cars when it was intercepted by trucks with no plates, armed men leapt out, ran across to the car which contained Haider and his wife but grabbed Nora’s cousin by mistake, hauled him out of the car, threw him in the trucks, and roared off while the women screamed and wept. Next day the cousin’s corpse is found with a scrap of paper telling Haider to ring a mobile phone number. Haider’s wife’s uncle, Ali, arranges for him to flee to Iran with a fake passport and a little money. Then the militiamen kidnap Ali and call Haider, saying he must return or Ali will be murdered.

Haider makes a plan, to return to Basra, collect his family and go to the British base. Gordon Brown had announced a fast track visa process for Iraqi interpreters. He takes a minivan cab and collects his wife, mother, sister and three brothers but when they get to the British base, security won’t let them through.

Anyway, it turns into a real odyssey. They walk to a gas station where an old geezer has a taxi. Haider tells them they’re refugees and the old guy takes them home and lets them sleep in his apartment. But next morning he starts getting suspicious. Haider’s contact inside the British base tells him the precise paperwork he needs, but it involves getting an old style Iraqi passport which will take ages.

Haider has a brainwave and rings up a doctor he knew at medical school. Reluctantly, the doctor agrees to house them all in a spare room in his clinic, knowing he’s risking reprisals from the militia. Haider has a phone so he rings his old boss and friend William Kearney. Kearney jumps into action ringing round contacts to get Haider’s paperwork approved asap. He commissions a journalist to write a piece about the plight of interpreters and he even – and at this point we start to realise why we’ve been hearing so much about this poor man – arranges for Haider to do an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme, from the spare room at the clinic where he’s in hiding. Atmosphere of Anne Frank’s loft. Every time they heard footsteps in the corridor they froze in fear.

There are more hurdles to jump through, judges to be bribed, paperwork to be secured, relations pressed into running round the city getting the right documents. After a week they take another cab to the British base but Haider is now told that his brothers and sister aren’t eligible. He loses his rag.

When the British had needed him he had risked his life, but when he needed their help all he got was red tape. (p.326)

And now, 16 years later, the same treatment dished out to Afghan interpreters fleeing the Taliban. What a disgraceful, disgusting country Britain is.

Abandoning Basra

So the British abandoned Basra and the Shia militia took over, quickly intimidating the Iraqi police into staying in their stations, while black hooded armed men patrolled the streets, hitting women who weren’t properly covered and embarking on a campaign of murder and extortion. The Iraqi Way. A British officer, Colonel Andy Bristow, helps the new Iraqi governor of Basra, General Mohan al-Faraji, but quickly realises the deal with Fartosi to allow us to leave in peace, effectively undermined the police i.e. bankrupted the whole reason for us being there in the first place. When Mohan found out the British had gone behind his back to do a deal with the head of the militia to release back onto the streets over 1,000 criminal detainees, he was apoplectic.

It was just the sort of double-dealing the British were infamous for during their colonial days. (p.330)

On 31 December 2007 Fartosi himself was finally released from prison and within days (January 2008) war broke out between Jaish al-Mahdi and Mohan’s police force. The British base itself came under sustained mortar attack. The deal with Fartosi had failed. Not only that but the situation in Helmand was deteriorating, Ceasefires with local Taliban commanders had failed and the fighting was fiercer than ever. The army desperately needed to move its Basra forces to Helmand.

Fairweather then gives a typically detailed account of the way the new advisor to General Mohan, the Brit Colonel Richard Iron, conceives a plan to deliver a US-style surge but just to Basra. As mentor to Mohan he is outside the British chain of command and so a) gets Mohan to present it as a request to the Basra commander, something the Brits are meant to help with, b) schmoozes with the Americans in Baghdad who love it. Petraeus is won over and the Yanks begin making plans to send troops to help the meagre British presence from the air base.

BUT. At one of these co-ordination meetings everyone is stunned to learn that Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, having been briefed about it some weeks before, has taken the bull by the horns, and ordered his own surge in Basra, using native Iraqi troops!

Long story short: the Iraqi army took on the Jaish al-Mahdi in Basra and won! Over 6,000 Iraqi troops marched on Basra and Maliki himself flew in to supervise. To begin with it was chaos, with Iraqi units disintegrating or being blown to pieces by the heavily armed and motivated JAMsters. But the Americans couldn’t allow this to fail and so diverted troops and planes south to join the fight. The British administrator on the ground was humiliatingly denied entrance to meetings between Maliki and the American commander in chief. Maliki blamed the British for letting Basra sink to this level. The American military no longer trusted the Brits to do anything. Anyway, bureaucracy and reluctance to overturn the withdrawal plans meant only a handful of British officers were available. The Iraqis and Americans got on without them. National embarrassment. Humiliation.

Meanwhile Mohan was sacked and a new Iraqi commander put in place. American General Flynn told British brigade headquarters he’d flown in to stop the Brits failing again. Fairweather calls it ‘a damning indictment’ and laments ‘Britain’s battered reputation’. The senior British officers hung their heads in shame (p.337).

Then, to everyone’s surprise, there was a ceasefire. Unknown to the Brits or Yanks Maliki had sent delegations to the Iranian city of Qom to ask al-Sadr and the commander of the Iranian al-Quds Force to broker a ceasefire. Maliki knew that the Iranians had a vested interest in seeing him re-elected, as a moderate Shia Prime Minister, whereas defeat in Basra risked plunging the south into chaos and also triggering a resurgence of Sunni resistance. On balance it was in Iranian interests to rein in their proxies. So The message came back to Fartosi to cease fire. The guns fell silent. The Jaish al-Mahdi forces disappeared. Fartosi and other notorious leaders left Iraq altogether.

A few days later Iraqi forces occupied all the Jaish al-Mahdi strongholds. The insurgency in Basra was over and it had nothing to do with the Brits or the Americans but backroom deals between Middle Eastern players. In an ironic way it was a triumph because it showed that normal Middle Eastern politics, with all its corruption and sectarian horsetrading, had been restored.

But there was nothing the British C-in-C, Brigadier Julian Free, could do ‘to restore American faith in British competence’ (p.339).

Epilogue: summer 2011

In Fairweather’s view the retaking of Basra was a watershed. The Iraqi army then retook Amara (where Sergeant Danny Mills and his sniper platoon had such a torrid time in 2006) and routed Jaish al-Mahdi from Baghdad.

In the January 2009 provincial elections Maliki’s party defeated Sadrist politicians (i.e. politicians loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr). Maybe it was even some kind of democracy. A very corrupt form of democracy, Iraq sits on the fourth largest oil reserves in the world. Fortunes are made by politicians with fingers in the pie. Leaked documents and other evidence show the Iraqi police force settling back into old Saddam methods of arbitrary arrest and gruesome torture.

In Iraq’s March 2010 elections the slippery old chancer Ayad Allawi won the popular vote, with the backing of Saudi Arabia, because he is a Sunni Muslim. (On a simple geopolitical level, Iraqi politics are riddled with the rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia to the south and Shia Iran to the east). However, in the backroom horsetrading Iran leaned on Muqtada al-Sadr to get his supporters to support Maliki who therefore re-emerged as Prime Minister in November 2010 (serving till 2014).

Through the summer of 2009 the British troops left Basra airbase. In total more than 120,000 British soldiers served in Iraq. As many as 15% of them might be expected to suffer mental illness as a consequence i.e. 18,000. 179 British personnel died, 5,970 were injured. Best guesses are that in the region of 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives.

Fairweather’s figures are that the war cost roughly £1 billion a year, total about £8 billion. Fairweather injects a political note (remember he wrote for the Daily Telegraph, what is now a very right-wing newspaper):

As schools go unbuilt in the UK, hospitals close, and tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, soldiers and policemen lose their jobs, the Iraq war has become a symbol of the profligacy and waste of the New Labour government. (p.344)

As to Afghanistan, in 2009 the Americans were forced to intervene as the British, yet again, lost control of the situation, sending a surge of 30,000 US troops to retake the province from the resurgent Taliban. The economy is still dirt poor. And there is no educated middle class to provide administrators and politicians.

As of summer 2011, 374 British service personnel had died in Helmand, 1,608 had been injured, 493 seriously. More than 10,000 Afghans had died. Gordon Brown estimated the war cost Britain £10 billion.

And Haider the interpreter, the Iraqi who Fairweather uses as a kind of barometer of Britain’s failing efforts in Basra? At the time of writing he lived in Hull, in accommodation provided by the British government, with his wife and two children. He’d like to return to Iraq but is still scared to.

The blame

As you’d expect, Fairweather holds Tony Blair chiefly to account for committing Britain to two wars it couldn’t win – but he’s harsher on the army. Senior generals gave consistently poor advice and the army as a whole was guilty of institutional failings, most importantly it’s continually over-optimistic predictions, its wrong assessments of the situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, its insistence it could carry out both deployments with what quickly became clear were inadequate men and resources. In both places they ignored the well-informed warnings of experts in the field.

Most tellingly, senior officials at the MoD and armed services have come to see war as a way of maintaining their budgets. Fairweather wonders if the fact that this is the only way the MoD can secure adequate funding explains why Britain’s armed forces have been in conflict almost continuously for the past 15 years.

Short-termism. All kinds of delusions led planners to think a 3-year deployment to Helmand would be enough. The average length of a counter-insurgency campaign is 14 years. Proper state building takes even longer. Either commit, or don’t intervene.

Summary

This is an outstanding chronological history of Britain’s deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Fairweather not only explains the complex political and financial realities at work in the British government and the fraught relationship with our American ‘allies’, but switches scene and focus with extraordinary confidence.

He gives what must surely be definitive accounts of specific firefights and battles (his 5 pages describing the murder of the six military police is exemplary) but he is just as confident describing conversations between the top power players, be they Yanks like Rumsfeld, Rice and Bremer, or Brits like Blair, Brown and Campbell.

And his narrative introduces us to an extraordinarily wide range of named individuals through whose stories and eyes we get really insider insights into every aspect of the situation, from Brits appalled at decisions in Whitehall or the chaos of the CPA, through the civilian governors struggling to control their provinces, to the experiences of scores of officers and men involved in fierce firefights on the ground.

It’s a panoramic, encyclopedic account. It really is outstanding.

P.S. A study in ignorance

Seen from another angle, this excellent book a study in several types of stupidity and ignorance.

The obvious, easy-to-see kind of ignorance, is how everyone involved in the planning and implementation of the quick invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and then the painfully slow, ineffective ‘reconstruction’ of the ruined country, had poor-to-zero grasp of the reality of Iraqi society, politics and culture. That was obvious to anyone with a brain before the war started, and became obvious to people without a brain, eventually even to the American neoconservatives who had planned and launched the war, as the years went by and their efforts became evermore expensive and futile.

The less obvious kind of ignorance is a fundamental premise of this blog and my worldview, which is that we don’t understand our own society or our selves. In his 2015 book, ‘The Soul of the Marionette’, John Gray explains that there will never be true artificial intelligence because nobody understands what human intelligence is. Sure, we can define and measure numerous aspects of intelligence like solving complex maths problems or winning at chess, but the full package of what makes a human being human, the complex interplay of calculation, hunch, guesswork, emotion and intuition – nobody understands it, how it works, let alone how it is produced by the brain.

So if we don’t understand what intelligence is, how can we artificially create it? We may be able to produce computer programs which solve problems faster than any human, and are able to teach themselves better and better techniques etc, and can answer any question plausibly, but it will never be anything like human intelligence, and those who think so are fools.

Same with democracy. Simpletons like George W Bush and Tony Blair thought all you had to do was overthrow a dictator and organise some cobbled-together elections, and you’d have yourself a functioning democracy. What this imbecile level of naivety shows is not so much that neither of them had a clue about Arab or Muslim societies, and about Iraq in particular (which they didn’t, and which this book demonstrates at humiliating and embarrassing length) – what it showed is they hadn’t a clue about how our own democratic societies work.

1. The civic basis of democracy

They didn’t have a clue about their own political evolution: about the very long history, the centuries-long evolution, through trial and error and revolutions and civil wars, and the taming of religion and the controlling of aristocracies and oligarchies, and the campaigns of working class parties and trade unions and then the long struggle for women’s suffrage – which lie behind the present form of the far-from-perfect, so-called ‘democracies’ which operate in the USA and UK.

2. The Christian basis of democracy

And that’s without going into the huge part of the story derived from religion: the slow evolution of Christianity with its emphasis on the value of the individual, through the overthrow of Catholic ideology at the Reformation, and the Protestant Revolution which ushered in new ideas about the individual, about individual agency, responsibility, rights and duties, which had to be painfully thrashed out during centuries of civil war and political turmoil, the overthrow of kings, the grudging allowance of limited forms of religious tolerance in Britain the late 17th century, which struggled against the odds throughout the 18th and inspired the American revolutionaries to their clear statement of principles in the American constitution. There’s no evidence of this kind of huge, conceptual, long-term evolution taking place in the political-religious ideology of modern Islam. The opposite: reactionary forms of Islam have been on the rise throughout the Middle East since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

3. The economic basis of democracy

And all that is without going into the economic history which lies behind our democratic societies, whose development paralleled the political, religious and philosophical strands. Modern progressives are keen to attribute the rise of the West to ruthless exploitation, to the profits from the Atlantic slave trade and the rapacity of European imperialism. The older, traditional school of history attributed ‘the rise of the West’ to a huge range of intellectual inventions, from the establishment of the Bank of England and a national debt, through the invention of copyright and business law which created incentives for innovators and inventors, to the inventors themselves who devised the seed drill or the steam engine among thousands of other world-changing technologies (ideas handily summarised in Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest).

However you combine these and other elements to explain ‘the Rise of the West’, there’s no denying that Britain, most of the other European nations, and then America and Japan, represent a level of legal, social and technological achievement which far outranks the other 180 or so nations on earth.

Neo-con delusions

Now do you get a sense of the depth of the ignorance of the American neo-cons and their poodle, Tony? They thought overthrowing a dictator and getting his dazed population to line up at voting booths would be it, job done, creation of ‘democracy’. They thought creating an unstable government and holding a few phoney elections amounted to ‘nation building’ and stood any chance at all of transforming Iraq in a few short months into a beacon of peace, plenty and democracy for the rest of the Middle East to follow.

That’s what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and their supporters thought would happen. Surely the word ‘imbecile’ isn’t forceful enough to describe this level of fatuous ignorance – not only about what Iraqi society was like, but about what makes their own country tick – about what makes the 20 or so developed western nations what they are, and why this unique religious, philosophical, legal, cultural, social, economic and technological history can’t just be bundled up into vacuum packs, flown into a developing country in the holds of Hercules transport planes and handed out to cheering crowds like bottled water. What morons!

Credit

A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq by Jack Fairweather was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. References are to the 2012 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 23, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/23/a-war-of-choice-honour-hubris-and-sacrifice-the-british-in-iraq-jack-fairweather/

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky (2015)

‘The Coalition promised regime change but instead brought about state collapse.’
(Unnamed Iraqi general quoted on page 101)

This is a disappointing book.

Emma Sky is mentioned half a dozen time in Thomas E. Ricks’s book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008. Her story is extraordinary. Aged 35 she had travelled widely in the Middle East, working for various charities and NGOs. She was working for the British Council back in Blighty when the organisation sent round an email asking if anyone wanted to volunteer to work for the new Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) being set up in the immediate aftermath of the US-led victory over Saddam Hussein in Iraq (May 2003).

Although relying on the authority of the US Army, the CPA itself was an entirely civilian organisation, charged with reconstructing every aspect of Iraqi society, battered by 8 years of war with Iran (1980 to 1988) then 12 years of sanctions after the first Gulf War (1991 to 2003), and then a second bout of disastrously accurate US bombing designed to destroy its infrastructure. The CPA was desperate. Anyone from one of the main allies with experience of working in the Middle East was considered.

Indeed Sky describes the astonishing lack of professionalism about the process whereby she applied, was interviewed, was hired, and found herself on a plane to Baghdad. No-one met her at the airport and when she reported to the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad where the new authority was still setting itself up she was casually offered the role of ‘Governorate Coordinator’ of the province of Kirkuk in the north of Iraq, and just as casually accepted it. Within days she found herself based in a military barracks in Kirkuk deep in Iraqi Kurdish territory, one of only a handful of women among over 3,500 US soldiers, and sharing an office with the military commander, Colonel William Mayville of the 173rd Airborne Brigade (p.60).

On pages 17 to 21 Sky gives a potted biography of herself. She came from a broken home whose mother, nonetheless, managed to send her to prep and private school, from where she went on to Oxford and then the British Council. So, poor but pukka. This makes the sequence of events which led to her running an Iraqi province a bit more understandable, but not much.

Little did Emma realise at the time that her destiny was to be intertwined with Iraq for the next ten years nor that she would rise to play a key role as adviser to the head of the US Army in Iraq, General Ray Odierno. To be a bit more precise Emma had two periods of work in Iraq, punctuated by roles elsewhere, before she left altogether to move into academia. Her CV goes something like:

  • 2003 to 2004 Iraq: Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk
  • 2005 Jerusalem: Political Advisor to General Kip Ward, the US Security Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process
  • 2006 Kabul, Afghanistan: Development Advisor to the Italian and British Commanding Generals of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force
  • 2007 to 2010 Iraq: Political Advisor to US General Raymond T. Odierno, Commanding General of Multi-National Corps; and to General David Petraeus on the subject of reconciliation
  • 2011 to 2012 UK: Visiting Professor at King’s College London and a Fellow at Oxford’s Changing Character of War Programme
  • 2012 America: Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
  • 2015: Director of the Yale World Fellows international leadership development program

So during her two spells in Iraq, Sky was a central figure. She worked with all the key players on the US side, and met all the powerful Iraqi politicians and religious leaders, as well as countless Iraqis lower down the pecking order, regional administrators, tribal chiefs and so on, right down to the man and woman in the street. She sat in on meetings which made key decisions about Iraq’s future, advised on many of them, had to implement ones she profoundly disagreed with.

It’s a chunky narrative (363 pages), with maps and glossary, which take us from the early days of the occupation in 2003 through to the withdrawal of US troops by President Obama in December 2011 and then through the years of Iraq’s collapse which led to the advent of Islamic State, which rose at great speed to take control of much of northern Iraq by July 2014, which is when Sky’s narrative ends.

Wow. She covers the entire period, she is a clever, independent woman with strong opinions of her own, she isn’t shy about criticising the leaders of the US civilian and military administrations to their faces. She has hundreds of good anecdotes to tell. So why is her book so disappointing?

Two reasons: the flat limited quality of her political analysis, and her pedestrian prose style. Thomas E. Ricks’s highly analytical account of the periods 2003 to 2006 (Fiasco) and 2006 to 2009 (The Gamble) proceeds by ideas or themes. Events out on the street are only mentioned insofar as they influence high-level American political or military policy, which is what Ricks is really interested in.

Sky’s narrative, by contrast, is more like a diary, like the diary of a very clever, independent-minded, sixth form schoolgirl. I did this. Then I did this. I attended dinner with so and so. I met so and so for the first time. Next day we went to meet tribal chiefs. I suggested we set up a committee to ensure better representation / rebuild the economy / provide more schools. That evening there was a formal reception. About this time a religious leader became prominent. I met him at a meeting of tribal chiefs. And so on.

Instead of being arranged by ideas or issue the narrative reads like one damn thing after another. It lacks detachment and analysis, an impression not helped by her often very naive impressions of people. She meets all the key players but her assessments are surprisingly shallow. Ricks portrays all the politicians and religious leaders in post-war Iraq jostling for power, focuses on their roles in Iraq’s poisonous power politics. It’s a rogues gallery of crooks and players. By complete contrast, Sky tells us they’re nice people and have lovely eyes (I’m not kidding, she has a thing about people’s honest trustworthy eyes). She makes friends with lots of leading sheikhs or clerics and is always bursting into tears when it’s time to leave (again I’m not exaggerating; there’s lots of crying).

Her prose style is dead in the water, flat and factual with overtones of The Little House on The Prairie.

We celebrated America’s Independence Day with the Kurds by the shores of Lake Dukan. It was apparently the largest lake in Kurdistan, created by the construction of a dam on the Little Zab River in the 1950s. I sat watching the sun set over the mountains. (p.15)

Or:

In the evenings I would often sit with Colonel Mayville in his office describing the state of the province. Our partnership developed into friendship. To my surprise I found myself growing to like the Colonel as a person and respecting him enormously. I came to realise that behind the bravado was a deep intellect – and a wicked sense of humour. (p.37)

Or:

Kara took me into Kirkuk city one afternoon. We ate in a restaurant and then walked through the market. It felt great to escape the cage from which I viewed Iraq and plunge once more into the Middle East, inhaling deeply the smells of coffee and vegetables, and feasting my eyes on the colours and peoples. (p.61)

‘Wicked sense of humour’, ‘feasting my eyes’. These are magazine clichés and have a cumulatively deadening effect. To quote linguist David Crystal, clichés are phrases which have ‘lost their meaning through overuse. They have become automatic reactions, verbal tics, a replacement for intelligent thinking…’ (The Story of English in 100 Words, 2012).

Every chapter has an epigraph. The epigraph to chapter 1 is: ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance,’ the John Lennon song. I realised at that moment that the narrative was likely to be as obvious and clichéd as that choice of song, and so it turned out.

Moments of thumping obviousness this occur again and again throughout the book and steadily lower your opinion of Sky. She comes over as the kind of person who’d think putting a sign in her office reading ‘Keep calm and drink tea’ was original and funny. Shame. This book cost a lot of money (£10), took 3 or 4 days to read, and wasn’t worth it.

Looking for father figures

In the Ricks book Sky is cited as coming to enormously admire the senior US military personnel she met; in fact she is quoted as saying the US Army is much better than the country it serves. In the hard-headed, cynical context of Ricks’s narrative that feels like an astonishing thing for an outsider, and a pacifist-minded British woman, to say. Unfortunately, once you enter the world of Sky’s narrative with its tendency to gush and hero worship, it doesn’t seem at all surprising.

In this respect I came to realise that the most important fact in the book is when she tells us, really early on in the narrative, that her father left her mother when she was very small. She never knew him, she grew up without a father (p.17). In fact happened not once, but twice. After he biological father walked out her mother fell in love again, and it was this step-father who organised Emma’s education at private schools and then onto Oxford. But while she was at university this step-father ran off with another woman, ‘leaving my mother heartbroken, penniless and distraught’ (p.20). So it happened twice, being abandoned by a father.

I was an only child from a broken-down family. (p.163)

So deep was the wound that she openly tells us it was this that made her, on graduating from university, decide to set out on an adventure to North Africa, ‘to escape the grief and anxiety that family seemed to cause’ (p.20).

I’m not projecting this into her narrative. It’s she herself who devotes several pages right at the start to explaining all this. So it seems pretty reasonable to see these traumatic childhood and teenage experiences as explaining why Sky is so quick to hero worship the big, strong military men she was working with, most of whom are old enough to be, er, her father.

After a while you realise that everywhere she goes, she’s looking for Daddy. Judge for yourself this description of her first meeting with the man who would become the head of the US Army in Iraq:

I could not believe my eyes when I first caught sight of General Odierno. I had never seen such a large human being. He almost seemed a different species. His head was totally shaven. His hands were massive. Yet his face was strangely striking and his eyes were kind. (p.46)

And:

General O was our undisputed boss. He was so big, so confident, so decisive and so determined. I was in awe of him. I thought he was indestructible. As I was sure he could not be killed I felt totally safe when I was with him…(p.163)

And:

I loved travelling with General O and the Sergeant Major. There was so much warmth between the three of us and respect for what we each brought to the mission. (p.171)

And it’s not just big lovable General O. Sky finds father figures everywhere. Take General Mayville.

One evening we went to the local orphanage that we visited from time to time…After the dinner we distributed the presents that had been sent out by the soldiers’ families, keen as ever to support our efforts. It was wonderful to watch the children’s faces light up, loving the attention and gifts. Mayville naturally fell back into the role of father, playing with the kids. (p.74)

Again and again she’s quick to establish father figure-daughter relations with strong or older or important men. Sky’s concern and ability to listen impresses all the Iraqis she comes into contact with (she tells us). But quite often it’s difficult to tell whether she’s being respected or patronised.

Colonel Mayville and I decided in October that it was time to visit [prominent cleric Abdel-Fatah] Mousawi in the al-Husseini Mosque. Sheikh Agar, who frequented the mosque, agreed to take us. He brought me one of his daughter’s abayas and gave it to me as a gift. As we climbed out of the car I covered myself in the abaya, much to everyone’s amusement. Sheikh Agar beamed approval. ‘You are my daughter,’ he said. (p.64)

Or:

Somehow I never felt totally at ease with General Farouq. He kept saying that I was like a daughter to him. (p.192)

Or the extended scene towards the end when it’s announced that General O is being promoted and moving on. He asks about her plans, for example does she intend to marry, have kids maybe, a topic she finds ‘uncomfortable’, maybe because it’s none of his damned business, but also, the Freudian reader by this stage realises, because her unconscious desires (for protection and affection) are projected onto him. ‘He was being all paternal’ (p.341).

Crying

Sky not only converts the men she’s engaging with into father figures, but repeatedly casts herself as a little girl lost. When the tour of duty of the 173rd Airborne Brigade comes to an end and they rotate back to the States, Sky attends the elaborate army ceremony marking the handover to the replacement regiment and makes an emotional speech to the assembled regiment on how much she’s come to respect and admire them all. When their commander, Mayville, shakes her hand and leaves, she is inconsolable with grief. She tells us she spent the entire afternoon crying. Why? Another Daddy has left her (p.89).

Throughout the book this keeps happening; she makes close friends with the locals (pretty much 100% men) or with senior US military figures (all men); then she or they have to leave – when she moves from Kirkuk on to work in Baghdad, or when she leaves Iraq altogether – and there’s lots of crying.

Ismail Abudi came round to see me at the Northern Oil Company in Kirkuk where I was staying the night. We sat on the roof chatting…We discussed the 30 June deadline [when the CPA was due to hand over authority to the Iraqi transitional government]. I told him I would be leaving. ‘No…tell me it is not true,’ he said. We sat on the roof in total darkness with tears streaming down our faces. (p.115)

The Chinook helicopter carrying members of the CPA out of Iraq takes off and:

I had tears streaming down my face. (p.127)

Much later, when she’s leaving for the second time, she goes to visit Sheikh Anwar al-Assi to say goodbye and he tells her to write a book about her experiences. And then:

There were tears in both our eyes when we shook hands. (p.339)

The only woman among men

The other pattern which keeps repeating is the way Sky finds herself the only woman among men. This, also, stems back to her childhood. In that autobiographical sketch she tells us that when she was four her mother got a job as matron at an all-boys preparatory school near Oxford. When she was 7 she was accepted into the school as a boarder, one of only five girls in an all-boys school. When she was ten the stepfather mentioned above entered her life and took her to a new school, The Old Ride, in Bradford-on-Avon. Here she was the only girl at the school (p.17).

She claims to have hated it, saying it was a Lord of the Flies-type experience, with the boys being beastly etc. Nonetheless, it sheds great light on the experience most of this book is dedicated to describing, the way she ‘found herself’ the only woman in a US Army barracks of 3,500 soldiers in the remote north of Iraq, as if this is a completely unexpected surprise instead of, to the Freudian reader, a classic example of a lonely adult seeking to recreate the safe environment of their childhood.

What happens when you are the only woman in a US Army barracks of 3,500 soldiers? You are showered with attention. Lots of big tough men go out of their way to behave chivalrously, open doors, call you ma’am, shower you with attention. You become a very special and notable person.

Same happens when she attends the countless meetings of Kirkuki Arabs or Kurds or Turkmen, Sunni or Shia, religious officials, council meetings, army meetings, and so on: she is again and again the only woman in the room. From time to time she describes this as a great achievement but to the Freudian reader it feels like a situation she has engineered from deep psychological needs. She acquires affectionate nicknames, the Iraqis call her Emmasky, she is effusively greeted and hugged wherever she goes by sheikhs and mullahs.

On one level, obviously this all happened and she (presumably) performed an important function as adviser to the military and civil authorities, first in Kirkuk then in Baghdad. But because she herself has announced the themes of abandonment and loneliness, in some detail, right at the start of the narrative, it is hard not to read the book as the record of a partnerless young woman who again and again places herself in the almost exclusive company of men where she can be made to feel important, and showered with the male love and affection which she completely missed as a child.

I was met at the airport by an Italian colonel who greeted me with a big smile: ‘We are five hundred Italian  men with no women to dance with.’ (p.134)

Thus after her friend Sheikh Agar is assassinated, she attends the funeral and goes on to describe the way she has been virtually adopted by his family:

As I walked in I heard the whisper, ‘Emmasky has come’ being passed down the line. I spoke to the sons. The younger one, who I had often seen around the government building, had aged years. ‘Allah yarhamu,’ (May God have mercy on him), ‘Inna lillali wa inna ilaihi raji’un‘ (We are all from God and to him we return). Family members spoke to me. ‘You are our sister.’ ‘You are my brother’s daughter’. Sheikh Agar, bless him, had told all his family about me. And they were touched I had made the journey from Baghdad to pay my respects. Grief lay heavy in the air. I sat in the tent, the sole woman among so many men. (p.106)

This is just one of the surrogate families she is seeking in order to make up for the one she never knew in childhood:

I was on General O’s team. And no matter how badly we disagreed or argued he was not going to throw me out. This was a family that worked through its problems and did not break down. (p.197)

And so when her second tour of duty as adviser to General Odierno comes to an end, at the end of December 2007, there is the characteristic departure ceremony, with speeches and presents, during which Odierno very graciously thanks Emma for all her help and advice.

His loyalty towards me was extraordinary. And I knew, if ever called on again, I would follow him to the ends of the world – and that he would listen to my advice on how to get there.

Odierno is Emma’s Super Daddy. Then it’s her turn to make a speech, telling the assembled soldiers it had been an honour and privilege to be part of their team. And inside she knew:

I meant it. Amid the horror of war, I had experienced more love and camaraderie than I had ever known. (p.241)

When she has her second farewell, because she’s not just leaving Iraq, the Americans are leaving Iraq, and so she attends the passing out parade held by General O, at which he gives a long heartfelt speech to the assembled troops, then:

A long line had gathered to shake General O’s hand and say goodbye. I hung around saying my farewells to the military men who had made me feel so much one of their band of brothers. (p.342)

Solecisms

This is trivial, really, but your faith in her narrative is frequently rocked by small but symptomatic mistakes in English phraseology. Here she is describing how you ought to avoid a particular seat in an American military helicopter, the one right by the open door which is nicknamed the ‘hurricane seat’:

Whoever sat in the back right seat would have the wind soar through their face, with cheeks and mouth flapping furiously. (p.30)

‘Soar through their face’?

Then again

Then again let’s stop and take stock: Sky is a bureaucrat and maybe this is how effective bureaucrats think and write – in stock formulae, obvious clichés, with a shaky grasp of English. Thomas E. Ricks is a journalist, so he’s paid to make stories sound gripping and important, he’s paid above all to write. Sky is a bureaucrat: her job is to invite people to committee meetings, distribute the agenda, manage relationships with key stakeholders, maintain the organisation’s values, defuse confrontations, find negotiating positions. In other words, her job is to use the safe and uncontroversial language of large organisations, not to rattle cages, to soothe ruffled feathers, to seek consensus, not to stand out or be original.

Having worked in UK government departments and agencies for 15 years or so, I recognise the type and recognise the tone of voice, full of terms borrowed from the private sector – where they mean something – and imported into the public sector where they are neutered of all meaning and verve.

Thus Sky tells us that she held a series of meetings with a view to improving the ethnic balance of the Provincial Council – fair enough – but when she goes on to tell us that ‘”No change” was not an option’ you can hear the tone of the civil servant or bureaucrat, quietly priding themselves on their no-nonsense attitude and tough talk.

In reality Sky seems to have been a people person. Her key achievements aren’t setting up this or that committee (though the narrative is larded with references to them) but getting people to trust her. The stories about local leaders accepting her as family, welcoming them to meals, festivals or funerals which I’ve cited, and more like them, testify to what seems to have been her key skill: this was getting suspicious people, in very perilous situations, to trust her sufficiently that they could talk to her, make their demands clear, and then she work her magic at getting the cumbersome CPA or the military-civilian government which replaced it, to actually accede to these Iraqis’ requests and get them what they want. At which point they trust her even more, and decide to try to get their way without resorting to violence.

In this way, as the narrative develops, Sky becomes a kind of one-woman embodiment of the policy of Reconciliation which accompanied the US military surge in 2007.

And seen from this angle, her readiness to fall into father-daughter relationships with important men was a positive asset, because strong men let their guards down around their daughters, share their feelings and wishes, admit their weaknesses and worries a bit more than they would around rivalrous sons, especially in a very traditional, patriarchal society like Iraq.

Maybe she tells us about her broken family background right at the start, and drops scenes of older men hugging her and calling her their daughter throughout the narrative, because she knows that this – above and beyond all the day-to-day admin and bureaucracy and setting up meetings and getting former enemies to talk – was her secret superpower.

Factual learnings

Lack of native politicians

America was always going to struggle to find politicians and administrators to step into the vacuum they created by ousting Saddam and banning the Ba’ath Party. Most of Iraq’s educated middle class had long since fled the country and had no wish to return. Or Saddam had killed them. He took great care to wipe out potential leaders who rose to prominent in any of the country’s many ethnic or religious minorities or among his own minority Sunni community (p.49).

Debaathification

Sky repeats the account of Ricks and every other reporter, that Paul Bremer’s rash decision to ban all members of the Baath Party from holding any official position ever again in effect decapitated Iraqi government at every level, made it very difficult indeed to find new people with authority or experience to run anything, and turned hundreds of thousands of clever, educated people against the occupiers.

The Kurdish return

Sky arrives in Kirkuk to find the Arabs very pissed off indeed at what they saw as the Kurdish takeover of every level of the administration. Many Sunni Arab families had received cash incentives from Saddam to settle in the north under his policy designed to water down the Kurdish majority (10,000 dinars, p.350). These were referred to as ‘new Arabs’. But now they found the police run by Kurds, local councils run by Kurds, Kurds who had left decades previously being offered incentives to return etc. So many of the new Arabs were looking to allies across the border in Syria to help them. Arab resentment of the Kurds is the persistent theme of the first 100-plus pages of the book, covering her time in Kirkuk, and carrying through to the very last pages, where she revisits a resurgent Kurdish region in 2014.

The sectarianism of Nouri al-Maliki

Sunni leaders were convinced that Nouri al-Maliki’s government was not only dominated by Shias (after all, Iraq as a whole has a Shia majority) but included Shia figures who had spent their exile from Saddam in Iran and were thought to be actively working for Iran. Not only that, but there was evidence al-Maliki protected the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, figurehead of the murderous Jaysh al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army or Badr Corps. (On page 253 she describes al-Sadr as ‘rash and irascible’, on the next page refers to his many psychological problems.) If the book has one thread it’s the growing authoritarianism and unpopularity of Maliki which goes hand in hand with the Obama administration’s bad decision to give him their full backing.

The extremists overplay their hands

This explains why many in the Sunni community not only joined the insurgency against the American occupying forces, but also tacitly or actively supported al Qaeda in Iraq when they began recruiting and operating in Sunni areas. However, during 2006 into 2007 al Qaeda overplayed its hand and began killing Sunni leaders who opposed them. When, as part of the so-called surge, US forces made it clear they would amnesty Sunni insurgents who had been fighting them, and even set up a scheme to pay them to join local ‘citizen defence forces’, many Sunni fighters decided they preferred this option and turned on al Qaeda who, as a result, escalated their atrocities, which in turn brought more fence-sitting Sunnis into the process of Reconciliation.

Something similar happened on the Shia side. Sky reports being surprised when al-Sadr announced a ceasefire of his forces against the US and Iraqi Army but it was at least in part because many on his own Shia side had become sick of the violence the Shia militias brought and the apparently endless round of  Shia attacks and reprisals either by US forces or Sunni insurgents. Sky describes the process with characteristic brevity i.e. in not enough detail, on page 238.

The surge

Other factors were at work too, such as 1) the huge shift in attitude among the US Army to the new mode of counterinsurgency, as described in such detail by Thomas E. Ricks, by the change in policy to break up America’s supercamps and set up small operating outposts embedded within towns and cities and communities. Also 2) the fact that the US government finally saw sense, realised they didn’t have enough boots on the ground, and allowed an additional 20,000 soldiers to be sent to Iraq.

British embarrassment

On page 232 she describes the British Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, in a meeting with General Odierno, and visibly embarrassed that the British more or less gave up in Iraq while the Americans persisted and, despite their ongoing losses, were able to learn and change their tactics. (Read Frank Ledwidge’s book ‘Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars for a searing indictment of the British failure in Iraq.)

Terrible Iraqi politicians

Maybe so many of these countries are doomed because their leaders are blinkered and inept; their political class is irredeemably useless, incompetent and corrupt. This isn’t my view, it’s what many Iraqis say. Sky’s friend Abu Mohamed marvels at the way General Petraeus walked with them on a visit through the streets of a town named Jihad, not wearing body armour, talking to children, taking Iraqi dinars from his own pockets to pay for things in the market. Very clever, very savvy public relations, all of which leads a doleful Mohamed to conclude:

‘We don’t have leaders like that in Iraq.’ (p.250)

Other Iraqis make the same point. Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, former governor of Kirkuk, says:

‘Despite all the resources nothing gets done. Iraq is still going backwards. It is hard to see how the country will stay unified with such politicians in power. Iraq has good people but bad politicians.’ (p.354)

If your political class thinks only in terms of power grabs for themselves and their faction, your national politics will remain fractious. If, as soon as anyone gets power, they set about securing it for themselves, their family and clan, going to the extent of threatening and sometimes murdering rivals, then the only was a war of all-against-all can be brought to an end is by a very strong man, by authoritarian rule, by dictatorship. Which is what keeps happening again and again in Arab countries.

Iraqi politicians the problem not the solution

The American government kept hoping that once the level of violence had been brought down to an acceptable level, it would create the ‘political space’ in which Iraqi politicians could agree national plans of reconciliation and reconstruction. What the Americans were slow to grasp was that all the politicians put themselves and their tribes first and national Iraqi interest a long way second. In fact, many of the politicians were behind the violence the Americans were trying to control. They were using it to rally their own ethnic or religious communities behind them, to create followers and voting blocs to keep themselves in power. Rather as the nationalist leaders in Yugoslavia rallied their own communities and demonised other ethnicities, in order to remain in power (p.257).

Hollywood thinking

Mind you, the Americans have plenty of blind spots of their own. Sky puts into words something I noticed in Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s accounts of former Yugoslavia and Ricks’s of Iraq which is that senior American politicians and military leaders have an astonishingly simplistic, black-and-white view of the world. They think in terms of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, as if life was a Western, or a Hollywood movie. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld-level leaders are quoted talking about getting ‘the bad guys’ and helping ‘the good guys’. This incredibly naive way of thinking explains why it took the Americans at least 4 years to understand the polyphonic, multi-stranded political, ethnic and religious situation in post-Saddam Iraq, which was not only complex in itself, but continually shifting (p.230). Where are the good guys, they kept asking? But what if there aren’t any good guys?

This explains something else which is the mistaken belief that if you take out the top ‘bad guy’ you solve the problem. This betrays a complete failure to grasp that societies are complex entities made out of multiple tribes and ethnicities and religious groupings, regions and classes. The Americans were hampered by this simplistic Hollywood thinking right from the start when they thought all they had to do was overthrow the bad guy, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq would promptly turn into a shiny modern democracy like France or Germany. World class idiocy. Breath-taking stupidity and ignorance.

The same magical thinking was revealed in their over-excitement at the assassination of Osama bin-Laden, the same naive belief that if you take out the so-called leader of ‘the bad guys’ then everything will be alright. Whereas, of course a) by 2011 (the year he was assassinated), bin Laden had become irrelevant to the situation in both Iraq and the wider Middle East, which remained as fractious, unstable and violent as ever and b) al Qaeda has gone from strength to strength after his death, extending its reach far across North Africa.

Fear

Fundamentally, what drives the desperation of so many of the politicians in these countries to stay in power at absolutely any cost, is fear of what will happen to them and their people once they lose power. Arrest, exile, prison, execution is the all-too-common fate of political leaders in developing countries once they leave office. In countries like this you don’t cling on to power to serve; you cling on to power to protect yourself and your clients and lackeys from what will happen once you lose it. Fear is the key to the entire political system. Thus:

Even before the last [American] soldier had departed [at the end of 2011] Maliki had launched a political coup aimed at crushing Iraqiya. (p.345)

And Maliki proceeds to arrest, intimidate, threaten or drive into exile most of his political opponents (detailed list on page 360). Abdul-Rahman Mustafa again:

‘[The Americans] should not have tried to transplant Western democracy to Iraq. It is not possible. Iraq is not a democracy. Change takes time. There are no democrats in Iraq.’ (p.358)

Betrayal by Obama and Biden

The most surprising thing about the book is its finale. Sky comes down heavily against President Barack Obama and his Vice-President Joe Biden. Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 7 March 2010 to decide the 325 members of the Council of Representatives who would elect the prime minister and president. However, the elections didn’t show a clear winner and so negotiations for those posts proved fraught with tension and delay. A final decision wasn’t taken till November of the same year – after eight months of divisive, sectarian bickering and intimidation.

Sky’s claim is that Obama’s regime, its ambassador and envoys, proved inept at managing the situation. They seemed unaware of Iran’s growing influence in the country, and sitting Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s tendency throughout the year to become more sectarianly Shia, more prone to Iranian influence, and more authoritarian. Sky meets opposition politicians who are scared that they will be arrested, even tortured by Maliki’s security services.

And yet it was this creepy figure, Maliki, who the Americans now threw their weight behind. Obama had been elected president in November 2008, took office in January 2009, and ratified the deal signed by George W. Bush to withdraw all US troops by the end of 2011. As the Iraqi politicians dragged out the backroom wheeling and dealing about the next Prime Minister for most of 2010 Obama became impatient. He was facing mid-term elections for Congress in November and wanted a foreign policy win.

Thus it was expedient, it was the simplest thing, just to confirm Maliki in the post of Prime Minister which he already held. Thus it was that the US administration averted its gaze from Maliki’s worrying tendencies, including the embarrassing fact that Maliki was Iran’s favourite candidate to continue as Prime Minister, given that the leaders of the other parties were Sunnis.

And so it was that during Joe Biden’s flying visit to Iraq in November 2010, Sky is in the room, and at the table, and makes several attempts to get Biden to change the administration’s approach. She then accompanies him to a meeting with senior members of the Iraqiya party, a secular and diverse grouping more appropriate than Maliki’s State of Law Party. by her account Sleepy Joe Biden was already gaga, repeating an utterly inappropriate anecdote about his Irish grandfather who grew up hating the British and then applying it to the attending notables, as if it somehow shed light on the sectarian problems of Iraq. After Biden finally tottered out some of the Iraqiya Party asked Sky what he’d been on about.

Biden was a nice man but he simply had the wrong instincts on Iraq. If only Obama had paid attention to Iraq. He, more than anyone, would understand the complexity of identities and how people can change. But his only interest in Iraq was in ending the war.

I felt sad, angry and very afraid for Iraq’s future. Washington had reneged on the promises it had made to Iraqis to protect the political process and it had betrayed the very principles the US military believed it was fighting to uphold. (p.338)

Summary

As a personal memoir of a unique experience, The Unravelling is possibly, maybe, an acceptable read. But if you want to understand how the war came about, why it went so badly wrong, and how the Americans struggled to fix a terrible situation, forget it. Read Fiasco and The Gamble. Read Frank Ledwidge and Jack Fairweather.

The looting

Concrete example of Sky’s inadequate treatment: on page 98 Sky deals, in one sentence, with the central fact that the occupying forces left a security and policing vacuum right at the start, immediately after the Iraqi army had surrendered, and that the CPA was never able to recover from that initial loss of initiative and control. One sentence! Ricks devotes half his book to this fact, explaining why it came about, how it manifested itself in the first days and weeks, what the full political, military and social consequences were, returning to them again and again to give you an ever-deepening understanding of this catastrophic failure. But in Sky, just one sentence.

Abu Ghraib

Similarly, Sky records in her characteristic schoolgirl diary way, a visit with other CPA staff to Abu Ghraib prison after the photos were leaked and the scandal broke. Here is her analysis in its entirety:

At Abu Ghraib I saw evidence of the worst side of human nature. With weak supervision in the jail, a number of American soldiers had used their power to create a perverse world, breaking the monotony of their days with sadistic acts on detainees under their control. It was truly sickening. Abu Ghraib was one of those places that exuded evil. (p.94)

This is a wholly inadequate analysis, in fact no analysis at all, it’s just a comment by a tourist. By contrast, Ricks gives a detailed explanation of the complex causes of the scandal, the two most notable ones being: 1) the huge numbers of ‘insurgents’ some American forces were rounding up and indiscriminately sending to prison, instead  of questioning, assessing and probably releasing most of them in their own provinces; and 2) Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with keeping the number of US forces cut to the bare minimum and his express refusal to send out enough US military police properly trained in running prisons. In their absence, inexperienced managers and completely untrained junior soldiers were lumbered with  a job they didn’t know how to do, with the disastrous outcome the whole world got to see.

Ricks’s account is thorough, well researched, fascinating in its own right, and an illuminating insight into the importance of properly running prisons and interrogation facilities during a conflict. Sky – a one-page description of a tourist visit and a Daily Mail-level comment.

She was there. She worked with the key players. She got to know the country and the situation. And yet her analysis repeatedly feels inadequate and superficial. Making lots of lovely friends and repeatedly bursting into tears is sweet but no replacement for analysis.

Credit

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky was published by Atlantic Books in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 20, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/20/the-unravelling-high-hopes-and-missed-opportunities-in-iraq-emma-sky/

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