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Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff (2003)

Nobody likes empires but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions. (p.11)

Nations sometimes fail, and when they do only outside help – imperial help – can get them back on their feet. (p.106)

A bit of biography

In the 1990s Ignatieff managed to combine being a tenured academic, a journalist making extensive foreign trips, and a TV presenter. Without planning it, Ignatieff fell into a rhythm of publishing every 2 or 3 years short books chronicling the unfolding of the failed states he visited, and the chaos which engulfed some countries after the end of the Cold War.

These short but engaging studies build up into a series of snapshots of the new world disorder unfolding through the 1990s and into the post 9/11 era, mixed with profound meditations on the morality of international affairs and humanitarian intervention:

  • Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (1994)
  • Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1997)
  • Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000)
  • Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (2003)
  • The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004)
  • The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017)

Ignatieff’s disappearance from British TV and radio around 2000 is explained by the fact that he moved  from London to America to take up a post at Harvard. The gap in the sequence of books listed above is explained by the fact that in 2005 he was persuaded to stand as an MP in the Canadian parliament, that in 2006 was made deputy leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and in 2009 became Liberal Party leader. Under his leadership the Liberals lost badly in the election of 2011 and Ignatieff quit as party leader. He went back to teaching at university, in betweentimes undertaking extended trips to eight non-Western nations which form the basis of his most recent book, The Ordinary Virtues published in 2017.

Empire Lite: Introduction

Three of the four chapters in this book started out as magazine articles published in 2002, so very soon after the seismic shock of 9/11. The premise of the book as a whole is that America is an empire which refuses to acknowledge the fact.

The Americans have had an empire since Teddy Roosevelt, yet persist in believing they do not. (p.1)

But America is not like any previous empire, it doesn’t have direct control of colonies, it is an ’empire lite’, which Ignatieff defines as:

hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risk of daily policing. (p.2)

Nonetheless, America is the only global superpower, spends a fortune on an awesome array of military weapons and resources, and uses these ‘to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests’ (p.2). Imperial activities.

In this book Ignatieff sets out to look at the power and, in particular, the limits of America’s informal empire by looking at three locations he knows well and has covered in previous books, in former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Previously he has covered states collapsing into anarchy and attempts to bring peace, now he moves on. This book:

deals with the imperial struggle to impose order once intervention has taken place. (p.vii)

It focuses on the dilemma that many states in the modern world are failed or failing and some kind of intervention is emphatically required – and yet intervention is dogged with problems, notably:

  • the practical limitations of what can be achieved
  • the tension between what the intervening power (almost always America) wants to achieve, and the wishes of the local population

After 9/11

This book was written during the year following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, after George Bush had declared a ‘War on Terror’, and just as America was limbering up to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein on the controversial pretext of confiscating his weapons of mass destruction. This book was completed and sent to the publishers in January 2003 and the invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003.

In other words it was conceived and written in a very different climate of opinion than his pre-9/11 works and 9/11 dominates its thinking. Ignatieff says ‘the barbarians’ have attacked the imperial capital and now they are being punished.

And yet he warns that the ‘War on Terror’ may turn into a campaign without end. He quotes Edward Gibbon who, in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attributes the fall to what is nowadays called ‘overstretch’, trying to extend imperial control to regions beyond its natural borders. The Americans cannot control outcomes everywhere. This book sets out to examine the ragged edges where American hegemony reaches its limits.

Ignatieff says the terrorists who attacked on 9/11 co-opted grievances and the rhetoric of Islam into an unabashed act of violence. Violence first, cause later. What is worrying is the huge wave of support they garnered in parts of the Islamic world which feels it has been oppressed and humiliated for generations. It’s not just the obvious example of the Palestinians, oppressed by America’s client state Israel (Ignatieff mentions the pitiful inadequacy of the 1990 ‘peace treaty’ which set up the Palestinian Authority) but of dissident voices all across the Arab world.

9/11 highlighted the limitations of American control in Islamic states. America has poured billions of dollars into Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and yet Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and the Pakistanis founded, trained and supervised the Taliban which was giving Al Qaeda hospitality at the time of the attacks. And, as we have seen just a month ago, the Taliban were to prove impossible to extirpate and have just retaken Afghanistan after 20 years of supposed ‘nation building’.

America may have unrivalled power but it has not been able to build stability wherever it wants on its own terms. (p.10)

Problems of empire

Ignatieff bubbles over with ideas and insights. I was struck by his idea that the central problem of empires is deciding which of the many demands for the exercise of its power, it should respond to. This is a fascinating insight to apply to the history of the British Empire, which was a continual one of never having enough resources to properly deal with the endless flare-ups and problems in the numerous countries it claimed to manage. Eventually it became too expensive and too complicated for a country brought to its knees by two world wars, and we walked away. The mystery is how we hung on for so long.

Now the Americans face the same problem. Ignatieff interprets the crisis in Afghanistan as a result of the way the Americans spent ten years lavishly funding and supporting the anti-Soviet resistance (in reality a congeries of regional tribal groupings which we gave the blanket name the mujihadeen). Then, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, so did the Americans; walking away and letting the highly-armed tribal groups collapse into prolonged civil war, out of which emerged the extremist Taliban who were to give shelter and succour to al-Qaeda ten years later.

Another way of putting this is that America hoped, with the end of the Cold War, to benefit from a ‘peace dividend’: to reduce its armed forces, withdraw from various strategic parts of the world, job done. On the contrary, as Ignatieff’s previous books have shown, imperial withdrawal from countries around the world did not lead to an outburst of peace, love and understanding but to the complete or partial collapse of many states and the emergence of new kinds of conflict, of ethnic wars, ‘ragged wars’, chaotic wars, and widespread destabilisation.

In these zones of chaos have flourished enemies of the West, and of America in particular and now, in 2002, as Ignatieff was writing these pieces, American rulers have to make some very difficult decisions about where to intervene and how much to intervene, and for how long.

Chapter 1. The Bridge Builder

The bridge in question is the bridge over the River Neretva in the centre of the town of Mostar in southern Bosnia. The town actually takes its name from the bridge, which is called the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Serbo-Croat and the bridge-keepers, known as mostari, who guarded it.

The Stari Most was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, is one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most visited landmarks, and is considered an exemplary piece of Islamic architecture. It was erected in 1566 on the orders of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin.

During the Yugoslav civil wars Mostar suffered two distinct conflicts: after Bosnia-Herzogovina declared independence in April 1992 the (mostly Serb) Yugoslav Army went in to try and crush its independence. They were opposed by militias set up from both the Croat and Bosnian Muslim population (which both made up about a third of the city’s population). In June 1992 the Croat-Bosniak forces successfully attacked the besieging Yugoslav Army and forced them to withdraw. Lots of shelling and shooting resulted in the town’s historic buildings getting badly knocked about, but not the bridge.

The bridge was destroyed as part of the second conflict, for after jointly seeing off the Serbs, tension  then grew between the Croats and Bosniaks. In October Croats declared the independence of a small enclave which they called ‘the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia’, supported by neighbouring Croatia and this triggered the Croat–Bosniak War which lasted from 18 October 1992 to 23 February 1994.

The Old Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces on November 9, 1993 during a stand-off between opposing forces on each side of the river. It’s said that more than 60 shells hit the bridge before it collapsed. The collapse of the bridge consolidated the complete ethnic compartmentalisation of the city into Croat west bank and Muslim east bank.

What’s amazing is the enmity that lingered on after the ‘end’ of this small war. The town actually had six bridges and some of the others survived but adult men were forbidden from crossing over to ‘the other’s side. Ignatieff tells the story of a Muslim lad who drove over one of the surviving bridges to visit a Croatian girl he’d known before the division. On the way back he was shot in the back of the head by the Croat checkpoint guards and his car slowed to a halt half way across the bridge as he died (p.33). To understand the Yugoslav catastrophe you have to get inside the minds of the soldiers who did that.

While UN peacekeepers eventually moved in to supervise the fragile peace, the European Union considered how to repair the devastated infrastructure all across the former Yugoslav states. Ignatieff meets the man charged with rebuilding the famous Mostar bridge, a French architect named Gille Pequeux. Ignatieff spends time with him, learning how the Frenchman is doggedly studying whatever architects plans still survive, analysing the ancient techniques the Ottomans used to cut the stone and carve runnels along the inward-facing sides which were then filled with molten lead to tie them together, in every way trying to make the reconstruction as authentic as possible.

Ignatieff drolly points out that the president of Turkey offered to fund the rebuilding the bridge as a symbol of Turkey’s long-term presence/contribution/imperial occupation of this part of Europe. The EU politely turned down the offer and insisted it was done by one of their own. So it is drily ironic that the much-lauded rebirth of this ‘symbol of multiculturalism’ entailed a diplomatic rebuff of an actual gesture of multiculturalism (p.36).

But rebuilding bridges and houses and hospitals and mosques is easy. Reconciling the people who live and work in them is much harder. Ignatieff is blunt. The EU and America have spent over $6 billion ‘reconstructing’ Bosnia but it is still ruled by the crooks who rose to power during the wars and a big part of the aid money, like aid money anywhere, is routinely creamed off by corrupt leaders and administrators.

Leaders of the rival communities never meet and rarely talk. They only get together for the photo opportunities required to make a show of unity for the press and EU officials to ensure the all-important foreign aid cash keeps flowing.

For our part, the West is disillusioned. Real reconciliation has not taken place. Corruption is endemic. Some of the refugees have returned to their homes but for many ethnic cleansing achieved its goals. Many of the locals still hate each other.

And so Ignatieff points out that rebuilding the bridge is as important for the morale of the interventionist West as for the locals. We need it to prop up our delusions that opposite sides in a civil war can be reconciled. That our costly interventions are worthwhile.

This lovely essay rises to a poetic peroration:

The Western need for noble victims and happy endings suggests that we are more interested in ourselves than we are in the places, like Bosnia, that we take up as causes. This may be the imperial kernel at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise. For what is empire but the desire to imprint our values, civilisation and achievements on the souls, bodies and institutions of another people? Imperialism is a narcissistic enterprise, and narcissism is doomed to disillusion. Whatever other people want to be, they do not want to be forced to be us. It is an imperial mistake to suppose that we can change their hearts and minds. It is their memory, their trauma, not ours, and our intervention is not therapy. We can help them to rebuild the bridge. Whether they actually use it to heal their city is up to them. (p.43)

Beautiful rhythm to it, isn’t there? Lovely cadences. The flow of the prose beautifully embodies the flow of the thought which is both clear and logical but also emotive and compelling. Ignatieff writes like this everywhere: he is lucid, logical, but also stylish and evocative. He’s the complete package.

Chapter 2. The Humanitarian as Imperialist

Opens in 2000 with Ignatieff attending a press photo shoot given by UN representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, and a Spanish general, who have persuaded two local Kosovar politicians, one of them a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army nicknamed ‘the snake’, to accompany him to the site of an atrocity. In the night someone laid a landmine. This morning a van driving between two Serb villages ran over it, it detonated, killing two outright and blowing the legs off the one survivor. The two Kosovar politicians say the required words, about the need to change hearts and minds. Koucher delivers his patter. The photographers snap, the new crews record, then it is over and everyone jumps into their cars and speeds off.

Ignatieff accompanies them to a Serbian monastery. Father Sava, the head of the monastery has been chosen as a ‘moderate’ leader of the minority Serbian community left in Kosovo when the war ended in 1999. Attacks on Serbs are continuing on a daily basis. Kouchner and the Spaniard assure Father Sava they are doing everything they can. It doesn’t much matter since the simmering Serb community doesn’t believe either Sava or the UN. Not when members of their families are blown up or shot every day.

The international community is having to rebuild Kosovo from the ground up, rebuilding its entire infrastructure, economy, everything, making it ‘the most ambitious project the UN has ever undertaken’ (p.51).

Once again Ignatieff repeats that the West ‘want’s noble victims and doesn’t know how to cope when the victims turn on their former oppressors.

Bernard Kouchner

All this is by way of introduction to a long profile of Bernard Kouchner. Being Ignatieff, he sees Kouchner not so much as a person but as a walking embodiment of the way the entire doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ has changed and evolved over thirty years.

Ignatieff says Kouchner came of age during the heady revolutionary days of Paris 1968. In a change-the-world spirit he volunteered to go serve as a doctor with the Red Cross in Biafra. However, he drastically disagreed with the Red Cross ideology of neutrality, non-intervention and non-reporting, removed his Red Cross armband and was among the founder members of the French organisation Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders. These guys are more prepared to call out aggressors and killers. Ignatieff considers the pros and cons of the two positions, Red Cross’s studied neutrality, Médecins’ engagement.

Ignatieff claims Kouchner also pioneered the involvement of the media in humanitarian aid, realising people need to be shocked out of their complacency by images of horror and starving children on their TVs. He has been involved in various publicity stunts which drew down a world of mockery from liberal commentators but do, generally, publicise his causes.

It is Kouchner, more than anyone else, who created the modern European relation between civic compassion, humanitarian action and the media. (p.61)

Kouchner parted from Médecins when the latter won the Nobel Prize in 1999. This is because Kouchner had moved on from thinking aid organisations should speak out about evil, murder, massacre, human-engineered famine and so on, but had progressed to a more assertive position – that humanitarian organisations needed to get involved in political attempts to combat evil.

Aid organisations talk about ‘civil society’ and the ‘humanitarian space’ but Ignatieff says Kouchner thought this was an illusion. Aid agencies are supported and enabled by nation states. More than that, some crises aren’t humanitarian crises at all, they are crimes. Thus Saddam Hussein attacking his Kurdish population, trying to exterminate it and driving it up into the mountains to starve to death wasn’t a ‘humanitarian crisis’, it was a crime against humanity. Situations like this don’t call for the discreet, neutral aid providing of the Red Cross; they must be opposed by force.

This led him to become deeply involved in French and then UN politics. In 1988 he became Secrétaire d’état for Humanitarian Action in 1988 in the Michel Rocard cabinet, then Minister of Health during Mitterrand’s presidency. He served in the European Parliament 1994 to 1997, chairing the Committee on Development and Cooperation. He became French Minister of Health 1997 to 1999 Lionel Jospin’s government, and then served as Minister of Health for a third time, 2001 to 2002.

Ignatieff says Kouchner’s positions, then, aren’t interesting conversation pieces, but have influenced French government action. Thus his position influenced the French decision to back the UN resolution to send a peace-keeping force into Bosnia, part of which was meant to protect Sarajevo and Srebrenica. This failed miserably, with the Serbs bombing Sarajevo for years, and rounding up and exterminating 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica under the noses of the 300-strong UN force.

The logic of this sequence of events is that only force can work against evil aggressors, and it was this thinking which finally led the Americans to intervene when they ordered air strikes against Serbian positions in defence of a Croat advance; and then the sustained bombing of Belgrade from March to June 1999 to persuade the government of Slobodan Milošević to stop the massacring of Albanian Kosovars.

So the appointment of Kouchner as UN Representative to Kosovo in 1999 was full of historical ironies and meanings. This was the man who had led humanitarian intervention away from the studied neutrality of the 1960s, through active calling-out towards ever-growing aggressive intervention against the bad guys. So it is the evolution of Kouchner’s theoretical positions which interests Ignatieff.

In this chapter he reiterates what are, by now, becoming familiar points. One is that the intervention is ‘imperial’ in a number of ways. First and foremost, imperialism means powerful states compelling populations in weaker ones to behave how the powerful ones want them to. But all this talk about reconciliation is far from disinterested altruism: the European nations want to sort out the Balkan issue and impose peace and reconciliation so as to remove a source of political instability which could (in an admittedly remote scenario) draw in either Russia or Turkey. More immediately, to cut off the influx of the Balkans’ most successful exports, which he drily lists as organised crime, drugs and sex slaves (p.60).

Second, as in his essay about Bosnia and Afghanistan and in The Warrior’s Honour, is that Ignatieff is very, very sceptical about the chances of anything like genuine reconciliation. The same ethnic groups are now at daggers’ drawn and will do everything they can to harm or kill members of the opposing groups. He claims that Kouchner was taken aback by the ferocity of the tribal hatred he encountered when he first arrived (p.63), and depicts Kouchner, when he’s not performing for the cameras, as an exhausted and disillusioned man.

As in the essay on Mostar, he asks why the victims should be obliged to conform to the Western stereotype of the noble-minded victim? In reality, the second they had the chance, the ‘victims’ have turned the tables and are carrying out a campaign of revenge killings and terrorist atrocities against the Serbs still stuck in north Kosovo who haven’t been able to flee to the safety of Serbia.

Ignatieff sees Kouchner as an imperial viceroy who has been parachuted in to try and rebuild the country and prepare it for ‘autonomy’. He calls it a ‘protectorate’ with a pretence of local autonomy but where rule actually stops with the imperial viceroy, as in the Raj, as in the British and French mandates in the Middle East between the wars. If that was ‘imperialism’, surely this is, too.

Once again, Ignatieff makes the point that maybe what Kosovo needs is not a moderately independent-minded Kouchner, but an utterly independent-minded General MacArthur, who was given a free hand to rule Japan as he saw fit for six years. Maybe what the Balkans need is not less imperialism, but a more naked, out and out, assertive imperialism. Do this, or else.

(In the event Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. As of 4 September 2020, 112 UN states recognised its independence, with the notable exceptions of Russia and China.)

Chapter 3. Nation-building Lite

Max Weber said a state is an institution which exerts a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory. Generally, this monopoly is channeled via the institutions of a professional police service and an army. In a Western nation the police are subject to an elected politician and their work feeds into an independent judiciary, while the army is trained and led by professionals.

In a failed state, weapons are everywhere and the use of violence is widely dispersed. Usually, after a period of anarchy, warlords emerge who control the application of violence, at least in their territories, but often only up to a point, and sometimes cannot control permanent low-level street violence.

The essence of nation-building is to get weapons out of circulation – out of the hands of warlords, paramilitaries, criminal gangs and punks on the street – and restore that monopoly of violence which is one definition of a functioning state; and in so doing to create a space in which non-violent politics, negotiation, discussion and compromise, can be encouraged. It may still be a violent and corrupt state but it is, at least, a starting point.

Ignatieff points out in The Warrior’s Honour that, in quite a few failed states round the world, this is now harder to do than ever before, because modern weapons are so cheap and easily available. Some societies have become soaked in guns and it’s hard to see a way back to unarmed civility.

Ignatieff gives specifics about the history of Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion, the West’s backing of the mujahideen who, once the Soviets left and the West walked away, degenerated into a civil war of regional warlords. But his interest, as always, is in the principles and theory behind it.

He repeats one of his central ideas which is that nation-building takes a long, long time, and gives a striking example. America’s own nation-building, starting with the Reconstruction after the civil war, arguably took an entire century, up until the civil rights legislation of 1964 finally abolished discrimination against Afro-Americans (p.85).

Reconstruction in Germany and Japan took about a decade, but in both the nation-builders were starting in states with well-defined borders, established (albeit corrupted) institutions, and ethnic homogeneity. The populations of both countries wanted to be reconstructed.

He makes the point that one of the secrets of success for an empire is the illusion of permanence, of longevity. As soon as you announce you’re leaving, all the vested interests rise up and jockey for power. This is vividly demonstrated by the absolute chaos into which Congo plunged at independence, as provinces seceded and new parties jockeyed for power using extra-political means i.e. guns and coups.

Ignatieff says the Americans have a poor track record on this issue, and a reputation for walking away from chaotic states when it suits them. This means local warlords realise they just have to mind their manners and bide their time. What Ignatieff didn’t know in 2002 is that the Americans would stay for an epic 20 years but, the same rule of permanence applies: as soon as Joe Biden announced they were leaving, people all across the country realised the Taliban would swarm back into power and began making arrangements accordingly, i.e. Afghan police, army and local governors defecting to them within days, so that the entire Afghan security apparatus melted away and the Taliban were in Kabul within a week.

Not so easy, running an empire, is it? Maybe the thousands of American academics who loftily criticise Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from Palestine or India will reflect on the cracking job their boys did in Afghanistan.

Ignatieff makes another snappy point: how can American Republican administrations, who are fanatically opposed to Big Government, find themselves spending tens of billions of dollars creating huge administrations in foreign countries? Easy. They get the Europeans to do it. The Americans are good at fighting (Ignatieff says that, in a sense, America is the last warlike nation in the West) so they handle the bombs and drones and special forces. The Europeans then move in with the peacekeeping police forces and the droves of humanitarian aid agencies, building schools, hospitals etc. Yin and yang.

Chapter 4. Conclusion: Empire and its Nemesis

He describes modern Western nation-building as ‘imperial’ because:

  • its essential purpose is to create stability in border zones essential to the security of the great powers
  • the entire project rests on the superior armed might of the West
  •  no matter how much ‘autonomy’ is given to local rulers, real power rests in Washington

In addition, he points out how all empires have to ration their interventions. It is a sage point, which sheds light on the British Empire. You have limited resources: which of the world’s endless trouble spots can you afford to address? Ignatieff points out the basic hypocrisy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which is that it is only carried out in places which are convenient or important to the West. The West is never going to intervene in Chechnya or Crimea or Xinjiang because they are the preserves of other empires.

The new imperialism is not only lite it is impatient. The British gave themselves generations to prepare the populations of India for independence. The UN gives places like Kosovo or Afghanistan 3 years before they have to hold their first elections. Hurry up! This is costing us money!

No imperialists have ever been so impatient for quicker results. (p.115)

Why? The short attention span of the modern media, always hurrying on to the next story. (It took, by my calculation, about ten days from the American departure from Afghanistan being the biggest story in the whole world to being completely ignored and forgotten about.) And the election cycle in democracies. Whatever plans you put in place now, at the next election in a few years’ time the leader of the opposition party will be promising to bring our boys home and save everyone a shedload of money.

This conclusion takes its title from a reflection on the enduring force of nationalism. In the end the European empires were defeated by the indomitable force of the colonies’ nationalist movements. This was the lesson the Americans should have learned from Vietnam. It wasn’t their weapons which won the Viet Cong victory, it was their nationalist vehemence. Nationalism always trumps empire.

Nationalism will always prove to be the nemesis of any imperial nation-building project. (p.117)

Ignatieff didn’t know this when he wrote these lines, but they apply to the American invasion of Iraq. They overthrew a dictator and promised to bring peace and plenty, so were utterly unprepared for the violence of the forces that attacked them from all sides.

Thoughts

1. So Ignatieff’s message is that if liberal humanitarians really want to intervene to do good, they should really intervene: go in hard, defeat the bad guys, disarm them, force parties to the negotiating table, and run things themselves, setting up strong national institutions and teaching squabbling factions what democracy looks like in practice. And they have to do this for years, decades maybe, until the institutions and mindsets of civic society have been thoroughly inculcated. And only then leave. In other words, imperialism. Not the kind of imperialism which exploits the native populations and rips off their raw materials. An altruistic imperialism, a humanitarian imperialism. But imperialism all the same.

2. When Ignatieff devotes a chapter of The Warrior’s Honour to the growing sense of weariness and disillusion with humanitarian intervention, I suspected he was talking about himself. This book shows a further deterioration in his attitude; I mean, he has become markedly more cynical

Across the board hopes have been crushed, ideals have been compromised, ambitions have been stymied. Much of this may reflect the appalling history of the 1990s, but I also think some of it may be a projection of Ignatieff’s own growing disillusion.

You feel this downward trajectory when he says that Bernard Kouchner arrived in Kosovo in July ‘talking about European values, tolerance and multiculturalism’ but by Christmas this had been revised down to hopes for ‘coexistence’ (p.63). Kouchner simply hadn’t anticipated the hatred and the intransigence which he found in Kosovo. So many aid workers and proponents of humanitarian intervention don’t. In Blood and Belonging Ignatieff refers fairly respectfully to ‘the international community’. Eight years later he refers to it as:

what is laughingly referred to as the ‘international community’. (p.97)

He is particularly disillusioned with the international aid industry, which he sees as almost a scam, a locust swarm of very well-paid white Western graduates, who fly in, can’t speak the language, pay over the odds for everything thus pricing the locals out of accommodation and food, stay hunkered down in their armoured enclaves, drive everywhere in arrogant white 4 by 4s, and cook up huge projects without consulting any of the locals. All the Afghans he talks to complain to Ignatieff about the NGOs’ arrogance and condescension. It is the colonialist attitude with email and shades. In this book he has taken to referring to the aid organisation community dismissively as the ‘internationals’.

In this book Ignatieff is as clever and incisive and thought-provoking as ever. But sometimes he sounds really tired.

Credit

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2003. All references are to the 2003 Vintage paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 29, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/10/29/empire-lite-michael-ignatieff/

Avenger by Frederick Forsyth (2003)

I found this an absorbing and entertaining read for the following reasons:

1. The narrative interweaves the stories of a number of different characters, which start out in different countries, times and places. Their stories are interesting in themselves, but it is also entertaining to try and figure out how they will eventually all be tied together. It has a very wide variety of location, setting, narrative, and a large number of protagonists, in contrast to some of Forsyth’s other, more monothematic fictions focused on one hero.

2. One of Forsyth’s strengths is his snappy, journalistic summary of conflicts. His early experience was in the Biafran Civil War (1967-70), which laid the basis of his ability to not only grasp the essentials of a conflict but to convey it in clear, emphatic prose. Thus, in successive chapters, Forsyth gives us brisk, journalistic summaries of the Battle of Britain, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and then Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s various terrorist attacks.

3. Forsyth’s other characteristic trait as a novelist is his fascination with bureaucratic procedure and his ability to make it not only readable, but compelling. The character Cal Dexter eventually becomes a Legal Aid lawyer in New York and in the two cases of his which are important to the plot – the defence of a poor black boy accused of computer fraud, and the case of two Cambodian refugees seeking asylum – Forsyth explains the bureaucratic processes and introduces all the official personnel involved in the cases in what ought to be mind-numbing detail, but which I enjoyed, because I found the explanations so lucid and logical. I myself work in a government agency – if only our explanations of processes and procedures were so clear and authoritative!

4. So Forsyth’s ‘characters’ may be types and stereotypes – and anyone looking for the kind of depth of character or character development associated with the ‘literary’ novel, will be pretty scornful of Forsyth’s shallowness – but I am less interested in character than situation, and I find Forsyth’s swift, confident depiction of a number of modern conflict situations fascinating and thrilling. Early in my career I worked in international current affairs ie wars and conflicts, and I produced news items about the first Gulf War (August 2, 1990 – February 28, 1991). I find Forsyth’s use of contemporary conflicts make for a fascinating read, and his quick powerful summaries of events are enjoyably muscular and virile.

How many novels do you know set in the Yugoslav civil wars or against either of the Gulf Wars? Why aren’t there more? Why are more contemporary British novels set in the court of Henry VIII or in ancient Rome than in the recent conflicts where British troops have fought and died?

Maybe because the historical settings are so long ago and far away that you can pretty much make it up. Whereas there have been lots of factual accounts of our recent wars and so weaving fiction in among its well-known intricacies is trickier. So I find Forsyth’s confident, almost reckless ability to set his stories amid recent conflicts not just fascinating but admirable.

Plot strands

American Calvin Dexter comes from a tough background, child of an itinerant builder, who volunteers to fight in Vietnam and becomes one of only a handful of ‘Tunnel Rats’. These are the US special forces trained to go down into the Viet Cong’s vast network of underground tunnels, overcome a legion of gruesome booby traps, and kill the enemy. Forsyth’s chapters describing this in documentary detail are riveting and terrifying. Calvin and his partner tunnel rat (nicknamed the Badger and the Mole, respectively) may be clichéd Hollywood heroes, but it doesn’t matter: their role is not to explore the human psyche, but to be tokens, like the pieces in Monopoly or Risk – meaningless in themselves, but important because of the matrix of situations and places they give us imaginative entry into.

In fact having given the novel another of his short abstract titles (cf The Negotiator, The Deceiver) Forsyth goes whole hog and gives every one of the thirty-three chapters an abstract name eg The Lawyer, The Killer, The Geek, and so on. In a novel like this it is the very anonymity of the characters, precisely the way they play powerful types and predictable roles, which gives the narrative its force.

Cal returns to the States and uses his GI Bill money to study as a lawyer. Practicing as a Legal Aid lawyer in the mean streets of Manhattan, he covers thousands of hard luck cases, but two are singled out – he not only gets a poor black boy from the slums off a charge of hacking into a major bank and stealing a million dollars, he hassles the bank’s CEO into hiring the boy as a security adviser. And he takes pity on a middle-aged couple fleeing Cambodia, who stowed away on a ship to New York, persuading the immigration judge to take a kindly view and let them stay in the States – even though Calvin discovers they’re not Cambodian at all, but Vietnamese, and that the husband in fact fought against Cal’s own unit! With typical Forsythian manliness, Cal says, ‘It was long ago and far away and we were both soldiers’ and moves on.

The spring of the plot occurs early on, when an idealistic young American, Ricky Colenzo, who’s volunteered to go work for a small NGO in Yugoslavia during the brutal civil wars there, kindly agrees to drive one of the Muslim staff up into the mountains to his old village to check on his family. They run into a pack of Serbian psychopaths who have already massacred everyone in the village and who now kill Ricky and his companion, by forcing them into the village cesspit and pushing them under with staves and poles, ignoring their pleas for mercy, drowning them in liquid effluent.

Ricky’s grandfather is an influential Canadian billionaire of a type familiar with Forsyth’s fiction, one Stephen Edmonds, from Windsor Ontario, a man with high level contacts in the Senate and US Administration. (It is here that the early chapter featuring two fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain finally makes sense – one of them was Edmonds, the other a senior official in the Administration who he now asks a favour from). This contact has contacts who have contacts which eventually lead Edmonds to a British firm of mercenaries, in particular an ex-Paratrooper named Phil Gracey, who specialises in finding and retrieving people, for money. In line with Forsyth’s typological approach it is easy to forget Gracey’s name because he is referred to throughout the text as The Tracker.

There is then a long and persuasive account of how The Tracker travels to the Balkans to investigate Ricky’s disappearance. There is a lot of plausible detail about false identities, fake passports, maps and travelling through the wartorn landscape. Forsyth factually but powerfully conveys the topography of warzones, and the pitifulness of its survivors. He is blunt and no-nonsense when describing the gangsters and psychopaths who made up the so-called ‘paramilitaries’ and matter of fact about the way they murder, rape and torture their victims.

The Tracker establishes when Ricky went missing and that he was probably murdered, but the trail goes cold up in the mountains and he is forced to abandon the search, sending Edmonds a full report. The focus then switches to an account of the naive Serbian young man, Milan Rajak, raised in a nice middle-class Belgrade household. He is contacted out of the blue by a friend of a friend who’s in a Serbian paramilitary which needs a radio operator. Naively believing he is doing his patriotic duty, Rajak goes off and joins the gang of a dozen hard men who he soon realises are extremely hardened psychopaths and killers. He is an eye-witness to the sadistic killing of the young American aid worker and, after throwing up and crying, asks to leave the gang. Its psychopath leader, Zoran Zilic, agrees but says if he ever breathes a word of what he’s seen and been involved in, Zoran will find him, cut off his penis with a broken wineglass and stuff it down his throat.

Back home Rajak goes into a long depression marked by anxiety attacks and sweating nightmares. He eventually shocks his parents by asking to go into the (Serbian Orthodox) church. We are introduced to monastery life and a sympathetic abbot, but the point of this plotline is that, eventually, years later, Rajak writes a full confession of the events surrounding Ricky’s murder. It comes to the attention of the authorities and, eventually, to security services who tip off The Tracker. He returns to Serbia, interviews the boy, and establishes the name of the leader of the paramilitary – Zoran Zilic.

As usual with Forsyth, there is some interesting background on the leaders of different gangs, the Serbian warlords, as well as insight into the rise and fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s ugly regime. Through this we learn that Zilic, after acquiring a fortune as thug-in-chief to the regime, realised the end was nigh when the US started bombing Belgrade (March to June 1999), and disappeared. The Tracker establishes all this and, using Rajak’s account, is able to take doctors, police and forensic scientists to the ruined village in the mountains and to the septic tank, and to recover the remains of poor Ricky Colenso. These are cleaned, put in a casket and flown back to the States for burial. The Tracker has finished his task and is paid.

Going after Zoran Zilic

It is now that Edmonds launches part two of the novel by commissioning a different man to track down Zoran Zilic. He uses his contacts to discover the existence of a freelance American fixer, codenamed The Avenger, who specialises in ‘rendition’ ie illegally kidnapping and transporting wrongdoers to the States. The way to contact him is to leave details in an obscure magazine devoted to antique aircraft. Only now do we realise the significance of the opening scene where we were introduced to ex-Vietnam vet, Cal Dexter, jogging round the neighbourhood of his house in the country. Because when he got home, had a shower and squeezed some fresh orange juice, Cal opened a copy of this magazine and saw the ad.

Through a series of front companies, secret drops, fake names etc, The Avenger takes his instructions from Edmonds. Not to eliminate Zilic – that would be too easy, too merciful. To bring him back to the US to stand trial and be locked up forever. Now begins a long sequence where we observe Cal call in favours from the miscellaneous characters we met early in the story: for example, the black kid he got off the computer hacking charge, Washington Lee, is now a successful computer security consultant and Cal asks him to break into certain databases to help his search. It turns out the wife in the Vietnamese couple is an expert forger: Cal gets her to make various passports.

Cal tracks Zilic to the United Arab Emirates where he is seen consorting with various unsavoury types including, to his astonishment, a representative of the CIA. Puzzled but undeterred, Cal makes the breakthrough in his investigation, which is to establish that Zilic has spent his ill-gotten fortune building a James Bond-style impenetrable fortress-cum-farm, a self-sufficient colony almost, on the Caribbean coast of the fictional South American country of San Martin.

This section is both tense and meticulous as Forsyth characteristically devotes a great deal of attention to the multiple identities, fake passports and backup stories which The Avenger constructs in preparation for, flying to Amsterdam to create one. But Cal’s blood goes cold when he receives an anonymous phone call tipping him off that the authorities are on to his plans; the CIA knows he’s coming.

Project Peregrine

Because unknown to Edmonds or The Avenger, Zilic is at the centre of an extremely secret CIA plot to assassinate Osama bin Laden, Project Peregrine. We now have some more lengthy backstory describing the intelligence career of Paul Devereux III. Unlike his intelligence colleagues, he wasn’t deceived that the war was over when the Soviet Union collapsed and communist regimes around the world disappeared. He was an Arabist, familiar with the thoughts and rhetoric of the Islamic world and realised a new threat was arising in that area. Forsyth, once again, gives a useful, brisk and authoritative overview of the slowly rising tide of Islamic terrorism and, in particular, a potted biography of bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

This is the plausible historical background to the rather far-fetched plot. For in the ruins of Belgrade amid the chaos after Milosevic’s fall, was some weapons grade uranium. For years Al Qaeda have been trying to get their hands on some to fulfil their aim of striking a blow against the West. The plan is this: Zilic will play the part of a murderous Serbian warlord (easy enough), rich but greedy, who stole some of the uranium before he fled Belgrade. Now he is willing to sell it to the highest bidder. Through underworld contacts he will establish contact with Al Qaeda. Negotiations will lead to a meeting with senior AQ staff. At this meeting Zilic will suddenly and unreasonably double his price. Almost certainly this will prompt the AQ VIPs to make a phone call to their boss, bin Laden, who never leaves his Afghan hideout. High overhead US spy satellites will be primed to intercept the call and establish the location of the recipient. The split second it is established a Tomahawk cruise missile will be fired from a US warship stationed in the Gulf. Three minutes later the location which took the phone call and everything and everyone around it will be obliterated.

This elaborate (and pretty flaky) plan has been two years in the making, and now we see the whole thing from Devereaux’s point of view. All the chatter, all the word on the street, is that Al Qaeda are about to launch some major attack, a big one, against the US. Devereaux sees his mission as absolutely vital, to cut off the head of the organisation before some dreadful atrocity is carried out. So: Avenger or Devereaux: who are we rooting for?

Throughout the book Forsyth makes us constantly aware of the timeline of events: as the murder of young Ricky in 1995 led onto the Tracker’s return visit to Serbia in 1999, and then the commissioning of The Avenger. Now it is August 2001, just turning into September. Devereaux is frantic that Project Peregrine is not disrupted. For if Zilic feels he is being threatened in any way, he will abort his role for the CIA and the entire anti-AQ plot will collapse.

It is this which informs his panic-stricken orders to stop at nothing to prevent The Avenger finding or even spooking Zilic. But someone in his own organisation is leaking: hence the anonymous tip-off to Cal before he leaves the States.

Final act

Like a Jacobean tragedy, a set of players or tokens or ‘characters’, enmeshed in a whole matrix of plans and intentions, are now launched on collision course, and it makes for a gripping and thrilling read. The Tracker makes his way to San Martin – itself portrayed as a typical banana republic with a very evil head of secret police, well used to torture and, of course, friendly with the CIA. Devereaux sends his number two to work with this loathesome man to try and catch The Tracker, a decorated war hero.

Thus the final chapters pit Devereaux, his man on the spot and the San Martin police, against the solo mission of Cal Dexter: who will get to Zilic first? Will The Tracker even be able to smuggle himself into the country now all its border guards are alerted? Will he make it to Zilic’s coastal fortress and stand a chance of penetrating the awesome defences built for Zilic by his South African architect, with all its razor wire, Afrikaans security guards, Doberman guard dogs and so on? Will Devereaux be able to warn Zilic and so carry through his long-planned operation Peregrine, or will the Tracker bring the whole thing down in flames?

9/11

And all this is set against something the reader knows but the characters do not: for The Tracker’s entry into San Martin and final attempt on the fortress happens in the first days of September 2001. Ie Devereaux is correct, Al Qaeda are planning a terrorist ‘spectacular’ against the US, and it will occur on 9/11.

At moments I wondered whether it was kind of ‘blasphemous’ for Forsyth to use the grotesque tragedy of 9/11 as backdrop to a novel. But plenty of novels (and movies) use the Holocaust the same way, and all aspects of the Second World War, and 9/11 has itself been the setting for novels and movies so, logically, no…

Maybe it’s the bloodless, nerveless way Forsyth uses it as just another backdrop which rankled slightly, illogically. It isn’t given any special resonance or depth of horror. It is another in Forsyth’s gallery of atrocities.

Which prompts the thought that Forsyth’s fictions exist in a world of permanent war. In this world there is only conflict between cunning enemies and bonds forged between tough professional men. There are hardly any women in Forsyth’s novels and no romance (Cal’s teenage daughter is abducted and murdered by Hispanic sex slavers, who he pursues and executes, in a vivid sub-plot. When he returns some weeks later it is to find his wife has committed suicide. The net result, though is to make him, once again, a Man Alone.)

With no women or love interest, with no civilising or restraining forces, in Forsyth’s world there is just endless conflict, driven by evil men, causing appalling civilian casualties, which the intrinsically moral & decent Western nations struggle to combat and contain. The lack of psychology, the lack of women, the lack of realistic characters, the often preposterous plots, have led Forsyth to be widely ridiculed in literary circles. But three points:

1. Forsyth would always have said that we do live in a world of constant conflict and threat; it’s just that most people in the comfy West refuse to acknowledge or admit it. And – from my days in international affairs – I couldn’t agree more with him. Our way of life is faced with serious existential threats. Events of the past year or two have finally brought this to a lot more people’s attention, whether it’s the machine gun attacks in Paris or the escalating refugee crisis.

2. Forsyth used to be ridiculed for being an alarmist right-winger. Ironically, he has lived to see a lot of Western opinion move in his direction. When terrorists are massacring civilians in Paris or London, when a million refugees, terrorists and criminals among them, threaten to swamp European countries ie when push comes to shove, it turns out that many citizens of the comfy West are forced to make decisions about the actual world, the larger world beyond their comfortable lives, and those choices are the ones Forsyth was way ahead of us about. Yes, we do want strong security services; Yes, we do want increased funding for intelligence and surveillance work; Yes, we do want hard men from the Army and armed police to patrol the streets, if it is the only way to guarantee our security. It turns out that we do live in a world of permanent conflict which Forsyth has been portraying.

3. In a narrowly literary sense, Forsyth’s novels are so flat, so lacking in psychology or nuance, as almost to be avant-garde. In fact reading the next novel, The Afghan, I find many of the wars covered in this book also feature in that one. Of course this is because the same wars have occurred in the last 25 years, but within Forsyth’s fiction, they are used like familiar settings or landscapes, like the topographical features of, say, Hardy’s Wessex. A familiar and recurring and even repetitive backdrop against which the minutely detailed, carefully worked-out and somehow totally improbable narratives are set.

Credit

Avenger by Frederick Forsyth was published by Bantam Press in 2003. All quotes and references are from the 2003 Bantam paperback edition.

Related links

Forsyth’s books

1971 The Day of the Jackal – It is 1963. An international assassin is hired by right-wing paramilitary organisation, the OAS, to assassinate French President, Charles de Gaulle. The novel follows the meticulous preparations of the assassin, code-name Chacal, and the equally thorough attempts of the ‘best detective in France’, Commissaire Lebel, to track him down. Surely one of the most thoroughly researched and gripping thrillers ever written.
1972 The Odessa File – It is 1963. German journalist Peter Miller goes on a quest to track down an evil former SS commandant and gets caught up in a high-level Nazi plot to help Egypt manufacture long-range missiles to attack and destroy Israel.
1974 The Dogs of War – City magnate Sir James Manson hires seasoned mercenary Cat Shannon to overthrow the dictator of the (fictional) West African country of Zangaro, so that Manson’s mining company can get its hands on a mountain virtually made of platinum. This very long novel almost entirely amounts to a mind-bogglingly detailed manual on how to organise and fund a military coup.
1975 The Shepherd – A neat slick Christmas ghost story about a post-war RAF pilot whose instruments black out over the North Sea but who is guided to safety by an apparently phantom Mosquito, flown by a pilot who disappeared without trace during the war.
1979 The Devil’s Alternative – A Cold War, geopolitical thriller confidently describing machinations at the highest levels of the White House, Downing Street and a Soviet Politburo riven by murderous factions and which is plunged into emergency by a looming grain shortage in Russia. A plot to overthrow the reforming leader of the Soviet Union evolves into a nailbiting crisis when the unexpected hijacking of an oil supertanker by fanatical Ukrainian terrorists looks like it might lead to the victory of the hawks in the Politburo, who are seeking a Russian invasion of Western Europe.
1982 No Comebacks Ten short stories combining Forsyth’s strengths of gripping technical description and clear fluent prose, with his weaknesses of cardboard characters and improbable plots, but the big surprise is how many of them are clearly comic in intention.
1984 The Fourth Protocol – Handsome, former public schoolboy, Paratroop Regiment soldier and MI5 agent John Preston, first of all uncovers the ‘mole’ working in MI5, and then tracks down the fiendish Soviet swine who is assembling a tactical nuclear device in Suffolk with a view to vaporising a nearby US Air Force base. the baddies’ plan is to rally anti-nuclear opinion against the Conservatives in the forthcoming General Election, ensuring a Labour Party victory and then (part two of the plan) replace the moderate Labour leader with an (unspecified) hard-Left figure who would leave NATO and effectively hand the UK over to the Russians. A lunatic, right-wing fantasy turned into a ‘novel’.
1989 The Negotiator – Taciturn Clint Eastwood-lookalike Quinn (no first name, just ‘Quinn’) is the best negotiator in the business, so when the President’s son is kidnapped Quinn is pulled out of quiet retirement in a Spanish village and sent to negotiate his release. What he doesn’t realise is the kidnap is just the start of a bigger conspiracy to overthrow the President himself!
1991 The Deceiver – A set of four self-contained, long short stories relating exciting incidents in the career of Sam McCready, senior officer in the British Intelligence Service, as he approaches retirement. More gripping than the previous two novels, with the fourth and final story being genuinely funny, in the style of an Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness.
1994 The Fist of God – A journalistic account of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing US-led ‘Desert Storm’ operation to throw him out, complete with insider accounts of the Western military and intelligence services and lavish descriptions of scores of hi-tech weaponry. Against this backdrop is set the story of one man – dark-skinned, Arabic-speaking Mike Martin who goes undercover posing as an Arab, first in occupied Kuwait, then – even more perilously – in Baghdad itself, before undertaking a final mission to locate and assist the destruction of Saddam’s atom bomb (!) and the Supergun designed to fire it at the Allies. Simultaneously gripping in detail and preposterous in outline.
1996 Icon – Hot shot CIA agent Jason Monk is brought out of retirement to foil a fascist coup in post-communist Russia in a novel which starts out embedded in fascinating contemporary history of Russia but quickly escalates to heights of absurdity, capped by an ending in which the Russian people are persuaded to install a distant cousin of our very own Queen as the new Tsar of All The Russias! Sure.
2001 The Veteran – Five very readable short stories: The Veteran, The Art of the Matter, The Miracle, The Citizen, and Whispering Wind – well engineered, sleek and almost devoid of real human psychology. Nonetheless, the vigilante twist of The Veteran is imaginatively powerful, and the long final story about a cowboy who wakes from a century-long magic sleep to be reunited with a reincarnation of his lost love has the eerie, primal power of a yarn by Rider Haggard.
2003 Avenger – A multi-stranded narrative which weaves together the Battle of Britain, the murder of a young American aid worker in Bosnia, the death of a young woman in America, before setting the tracking down of a Serbian war criminal to South America against a desperate plot to assassinate Osama bin Laden. The least far-fetched and most gripping Forsyth thriller for years.
2006 The Afghan – Ex-SAS man Colonel Mike Martin, hero of The Fist of God, is called out of retirement to impersonate an Afghan inmate of Guantanamo Bay in order to infiltrate Al Qaeda and prevent their next terrorist attack. Quite a gripping thriller with an amazing amount of detailed background information about Afghanistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Islamic terrorism and so on.
2010 The Cobra – Two lead characters from Avenger, Paul Devereaux and Cal Dexter, are handed the task of wiping out the illegal cocaine trade on the authority of Barack Obama himself. Which leads to an awesome display of Forsyth’s trademark factual research, scores of pages building up a comprehensive picture of the drugs industry, and to the detailed description of the multi-stranded operation which almost succeeds, until lily-livered politicians step in to halt it.
2013 The Kill List – Another one about Islamic terrorism. The Preacher, who has been posting jihadi sermons online and inspiring a wave of terrorist assassinations, is tracked down and terminated by US marine Christopher Carson, aka The Tracker, with a fascinating side plot about Somali piracy thrown in. Like all Forsyth’s novels it’s packed with interesting background information but unlike many of his later novels it this one actually becomes genuinely gripping at the end.
2015 The Outsider – At age 76 Forsyth writes his autobiography in the form of a series of vignettes, anecdotes and tall tales displaying his characteristic briskness and dry humour. What an extraordinary life he’s led, and what simple, boyish fun this book is.

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by Simon on June 5, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 5, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/avenger-frederick-forsyth/

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