What happens when the primary battlefield terrain is human terrain. The Small Wars Journal hosts an article by James Gavrilis entitled A Model for Population-Centered Warfare.
In counterinsurgency, people are not part of terrain; they are the terrain. The battle is over “human terrain.” Conventional warfare is about gaining ground, taking more territory, and destroying your opponent’s military power. Counterinsurgency is about gaining human terrain, winning popular support, and preventing your opponent from winning popular support. Counterinsurgency is a shift from the physical to the human terrain.
One of Gavrilis’ most interesting points is about persistence. It can be summarized in the phrase: “who stays wins”. The function of military power is to ensure that your people can stay. But it cannot provide the people who will persist themselves. Thus, the ability to create a cadre of stay behinds, or more accurately the ‘live behinds’ is critical to success. Gavrilis describes the power of persistence.
Presence matters, in this kind of war. As local and decentralized as insurgency and counterinsurgency are, whoever sleeps in the village at night with guns dictates the political order and allocation of resources. Unfortunately, the average citizen gets pressure from all sides. In some places in Iraq the citizens are pressured from Sadr’s militia, Al Qaeda in Iraq, foreign terrorists, tribal sheiks, political parties, the Iraqi security forces, local and national government officials, Coalition forces and even Iranian agents. And unfortunately a reality of this kind of war is that civilians have no choice but to support the group that exerts the most pressure on them. So in order to be effective, the counterinsurgent must exert more authority and control and protect the civilians over a long period of time. Temporary security is self-defeating because of erosion of trust and exposure of the population to retribution. Furthermore, to be successful the counterinsurgent must form a closeness to the population at the local levels to compete with and edge out the guerrilla and insurgent who by nature are closer and more connected to the population than the central government; centralized counterinsurgency is less effective, local effective governance and security are more effective.
What Kipling called the ‘arithmetic of the frontier’ means that a cheap and effective way must be found to create the equivalent of what the British once called the Indian Civil Service to hold sway over the failed-state areas of the world. Taken to its logical conclusion, fighting on the new human terrain may mean reinstituting colonialism in selected parts of the world. Right now the political elites of the West would die of horror at the thought. But perhaps our real fear is that once they get going, they will like it all too much. However that may be, Gavrilis essay discusses an important point in small wars of the 21st century.
Tip Jar or Subscribe
Wretchard, I believe the “political elites of the West” would rail at the concept of an entity like the US running a colonial program.
But put the UN in charge, and now that’s another thing entirely. I believe they would go for that option in a flash.
…unfortunately a reality of this kind of war is that civilians have no choice but to support the group that exerts the most pressure on them.
It may also be that the most influential group is the one able to intervene, safeguard, and so relieve undo pressure on civilians. In that case, pressure is applied to those groups (al Qaeda, Taliban, Iranian agents, et al) attempting to coerce obedience via force, resulting in not more but less pressure applied to the civilian population.
In any event, I totally agree with the value of persistance, though that may be a lesson too many in the political arena still have yet to appreciate, much less absorb.
Watching the destruction of African countries and especially Zimbabwe, I have come to the conclusion that colonies were a good idea. The problem was when the white power structure, which actually ruled for the benefit of the country, withdrew out of misplaced guilt.
The British civil service and that system was very good and certainly better than the destruction that later ensued under African rule.
South Africa is next and any person of wealth better sell out for what they can get and emigrate to Europe or the US since South Africa is on the path of Zimbabwe.
However in the idea of human terrain it follows the force of ethnic cleansing that eliminate in the area of a disparate ethnic group that will fight for dominance in the territory.
Really what this is more than colonizing which is what China is doing, is the Roman equivalent of awarding land and ruler ship of territory to retired veteran who will fight to maintain control of the land.
This is not an American trait so the only other method is to create a civil class like the Sons of Iraqi. But The American impatience does not allow us to retain control long enough to really see that through and our minions get slaughter or abandoned by the next regime.
Part of our impatience is the short term of our leaders 8 years at most. Reagan was the most successful since he got his VP to follow him. GWB knew he had a time limit and really waited too long to come to clear and hold tactics.
That was part of our white guilt not wanting to look as occupiers when that was obvious that we were occupying the country. The military wanting a light touch was just stupid and that was the policy from every general to Rumsfeld.
Americans just hate to occupy land. Break and kill we are good at but occupation that can become brutal just destroys morale at home and by the troops.
If we accepted being an empire I bet that these countries we help and conquer would love to become an American territory. We would build and protect and set up an autonomous government in place.
But America has rejected that role, probably for the better, so the messy trying to convert and subvert the locals is the next best solution and that is messy indeed.
RAH reminds me that there are all kinds of pressures that a benevolent power may intervene to alleviate, hunger not least among them.
Of course under Socialist guidance, there’s no end to the pressures to be tackled.
Some people forget so easily. Imperialism was of little net benefit to the Brits and would not be to us. The Africans had their shot at modernity. If they choose to regress to tribalism, why should we prevent them? They deserve a choice and they’ve made it. Same for Dar es Salaam. As long as they don’t try to destroy our buildings and people, I really don’t care how barbarically they treat each other. It’s not our job to be their parents, it’s their job to grow up. And their choice. I say let them be free to choose.
I was living in Germany when Reagan was first elected. He had the reputation as a real fire breather and anti-Communist who wanted to confront (“engage” just doesn’t mean the same any more), the Soviet Union. I remember my landlord asking about how serious Americans were…that is, would we stick around or back off when the going got tough. There was no mention of “what if you piss off the Russians”, just would we back up our words. I heard similar questions from other Germans. I am afraid whether Americans will stick around or not is a question that shouldn’t be asked, but is, and, unfortunately, rightly so.
Even the Left admits that there are large swaths of humanity that are unable, for whatever reason, to effectively govern themselves. Unfortunately, the admission is the limit of their attention. They’re perfectly willing to see the natives slaughter each other whilst living in a more “natural” setting.
I’d submit that there is nothing inherently wrong with some form of colonial benevolence for a few hundred years while the “nation-building” takes place. The former British colonies are a good example. Iraq is an example of trying to hurry the process.
One suspects that the real reason the British created the Indian Civil Service was not so much find a cheaper way to take on “the White Man’s Burden” than it was to prevent the ungovernable parts of the world from spilling over into the governable parts.
As one European famously put it, by the end of the 19th Century they found that had conquered most of the world in a fit of absence of mind. Then, like a dog who has finally caught a school bus, what would they do with it?
Perhaps it was less an enthusiasm for imperialism than a way to draw borders around the parts of imperialism they did like. Our problem today would not merely be conquering the conquerable rest of the world but stopping at a good point – while they are showing starving children on Biafra or genocide in Darfur 24/7 in glorious living technicolor.
I think the key problem is whether local “persistence” can be achieved without putting some kind of long-term proxy cadre on the ground. Back in the early 1900s the US sent a boatload of teachers in the USS Thomas to the Philippines, an act which has been described as a counterinsurgency masterpiece. Today’s Western academia has extensive hooks into the Third World, but it might now be characterized as having the opposite effect.
To some degree the Left already has a Third World colonial corps, consisting of NGOs, academic ‘oriental departments’, ‘developing country studies’ and even the UN. The problem with this existing liberal colonial corps is that it is totally useless at actually solving problems and is all too easily co-opted by thugs on the ground. The common story is how “aid programs” eventually wind up paying protection money or employing local radicals, sometimes promoting them into responsible positions in international agencies.
But that’s neither here nor there. I think that “who stays wins” is largely true. But how does one stay? Americans are too expensive to deploy for long in large numbers. So it has to to be locals. But not just any locals. They have to be locals trained to solve problems. And from there to non-leftist colonialism, or at least to colonialist-like activity seems to me a short step.
This analysis falls apart before Islam. In many ways, given the tyrannical nature of Islam, the West has persisted in the Muslim world by exerting pressure on the levers of power, that is, Islam’s corrupt potentates and tyrants.
But we are confronted with a perfect storm in this arrangement if we never take the cancerous ideology of Islam on directly — and since our motives engaging the vile Muslim world exclusively center around access to oil, fundamentally challenging (or destroying) the ideology of Islam is not on anyone’s radar — but it should be!
We to fail connect the ubiquitousness of corruption, terror, tyranny, and obscenity within the Muslim world with Islam itself. But what is far worse, in our endeavors to “win their hearts and minds”, we have connived with the Muslims we wish to influence by reinforcing the power of Islam over them!
Examples:
Via idiotic and misguided “experts” like Noah Feldman, we have enshrined Islam in both the Iraqi and Afghani constitutions.(!???)
We have spent hundreds of millions rebuilding Mosques (which are little more than weapons caches, command and control centers, and indoctrination centers) across Iraq and Afghanistan after bombing them. I believe our budget in 2004 in Iraq alone was $80,000,000.
Our leaders have continued to characterize Islam as a “religion of peace”, thus serving as premiere mouthpieces and propagandists for Muslim fascists across the globe.
Rather than fighting to win we’re strengthening this vile enemy and only temporarily impeding the force and momentum of his direct Jihad against us. We will NEVER win their hearts and minds — those are owned by Islam entirely.
Sounds like we should take some locals and make them Marines for a few years, then send them back.
Islam is just the vehicle to promote tyranny, terror and obscenity. Those characteristics are normal to the human condition. Christianity just ameliorated them for a while.
The natural characteristics of humanity are to rule by force and appropriate what ever you want. The benefits of a kingdom were that is better to rule well to promote a prosperous kingdom that was left to your heirs. Single dictatorships do not look that far ahead. Similar to Obama ‘s rush to assume control over the sectors of America since he has only a limited time to do so.
The jewel of the Constitution was to recognize those human traits and set up competing power centers. Regrettably that requires the separate branches to actually compete for power rather than collude.
If an American empire is not a good idea then maybe it was better that the political left raised such pressure to prevent it. For a moment there in 2003 there was nothing to stop us from rolling into Syria and Iran other than the difficulties of what you do with countries once your conquer them. Bush was thankfully humble enough to withstand that temptation.
He really did not abuse the powers of his office and allowed himself to be limited, but he failed to realized or just figured his successor would be too honorable to abuse the powers of the Patriot Act.
Obama is regrettably following his programming as a communist to the detriment of this country and he may sincerely believe that is better. It is a shame he was socialized at such a young age by communist influences.
I think the Roman system had a more stable model and allowed the expansion to an empire and that lasted 2000 years. We will not last that long and there is no frontier to flee to any longer. We really need to colonize space.
@Mrs Davis #5: Au contraire. All successful republics have to become empires in self-defense. The reason is envy. You either change them or they drag you down to their levels.
Trying to isolate them (via a blockade for example) is but a temporary tactic. Isolating yourself is to destroy your own vitality sooner or later.
How to pay for doing what needs doing is, as Wretchard points out, the question.
Now who the hell says that government is the answer.
There needs to be some repeal/suspensions of neutrality acts/laws aginst weapons dealing, hiring of mercenaries etc. Let the concerned parties put together plans and programs they judge capable of turning a profit. Some will work, some will fail.
But in the long run, the threatening beast WILL be tamed and without all the entanglements we have come to fear.
My main point is that we do indeed have very valid concerns about those that live in squalor. The only thing they are capable of, in various degrees, is to do us harm. Go from there.
Brock,
You have the right idea. The only long-term sustainable counter-insurgency involves the locals being armed and committed to protecting their own homes and families from insurgents. When insurgents cannot enter a neighborhood without risk to their lives, the insurgency will start to collapse.
I would add that arming the locals is generally disliked by corrupt Third World governments, because while armed locals are harder for insurgents to push around, they are also harder for corrupt officials to push around as well.
Mrs. Davis –
Islam is based on polygamy. Therefore, all Muslim men will either wish to kill you and every other Kafir, or assist other Muslim men in doing the same. Polygamy means a few men have most of the women, and most men have none. Save in Paradise by way of Jihad, or becoming a Big Man running a bunch of killers.
Now, thanks to technology as a commodity, it matters VERY MUCH who rules not only Dar Es Salaam, but every other backwater. The path to nuclear weapons for the Taliban and Kabul started in the high valleys of Afghanistan, itself unremarkable and unimportant.
Soon, and very soon, a unknown tribal leader with 6th Century attitudes can decide if you or someone else along with millions of others in a major American city lives or dies.
Don’t make the mistake in thinking aircraft carriers or ICBMs matter any more. They don’t. What matters is who will kill, the most ruthlessly and without qualms, measure, or quarter.
There is NO chance whatsoever at a colonial type “Administrator Corps.” First off, the human terrain in the West has been won by the usual assortment of SWPL Yuppies and women who have been favored by commercial power (women are viewed as the only important consumers) and cultural and economic power (more women are now employed than men).
The “stay behind force” WON — see Barack Obama and his backers.
No. THEY will kill us, and then it’s up to us to decide to live or die. If we wish to live, we will simply have to kill them. Pretty much all of them.
It was Always going to come to this. The power and influence of Yuppies and Women (but I repeat myself) was always going to guarantee that outcome. And if victory comes to us, it will be a close-run thing.
Ms Coulter, in her subtle nuanced style, wrote the Op-order on changing their culture on 9/13/2001.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
What we need now is Staff who can expand that into a Field Manual.
Aidid’s son had been a Marine.
For those who missed their Kipling, Bernard Fall, writing of French Indochina, said that it was infinitely more difficult to replace a master sergeant with twenty years’ colonial experience than the homegrown sniper who kills him.
The other end of frontier arithmetic is the grave that the Burmans shun.
The theory was that post-colonial era policy for Wackistan and Pestholia would have three foci.
1) Defense, we “sell” them shiny toys, paid for by the US taxpayer, they provide remote site sensor stations and port call facilities that keep our Medical and Legal Corps busy treating the resultant cases of venereal disease and drug usage.
2) Education, we skim off the top 1% of their youth to study law and drugs at Columbia, administration and wine at Harvard, money and pizza at Chicago, philosophy and coffee at Paris or tennis and girls at Stanford. This subsidizes Western institutions and again usually the money comes from Uncle Sugar.
3) Development, unemployed holders of advanced degrees are sent off encourage the building of wells without tax collectors at the bottom and inoculations for people who at best have the husband talk to the Doctor in one room while the female patient waits in another room.
To everyone’s surprise the mechanisms of Western Civilization are so good that even when entrusted to agents of the US DoS, or NGOs or the UN (WHO and FAO) they still work. We did not convince them to take the gift of Birth Control that has so dramatically changed the life of women in the West, and their portrayal in the Belmont Club. Instead of that we gave them Death Control. The populations of Wackis and Pestholes have exploded. If they had stayed where they were 60 years ago relative to the West the problem would be simple but now there are just to many of them and they are on the move. To be exact they are coming here by the hundreds of thousands. Once they arrive their population continues to expand and claim the benefits of citizenship.
wretchard:
Were it not for imperialism and colonialism, the United States of America would never have gotten to the size it has. Many states would simply not be part of the Union were it not for those who pushed for an “Empire of Liberty”.
Although it may be fashionable to call for an end to imperialism, such a call would effectively mean the dissolution of nearly every state on the planet. To call for an end to imperialism in all of its forms is to essentially call for a fashionable variety of treason. Empire in one form or another has been the rule throughout history. To replace an American empire with an Arab Islamist empire or even a Chinese Empire would not merely be no improvement for Americans, but would most fundamentally be a detriment to not merely most people throughout the world, but also the very liberal ideals that human rights activists claim to espouse.
“I think that “who stays wins” is largely true. But how does one stay? Americans are too expensive to deploy for long in large numbers. So it has to to be locals. But not just any locals. They have to be locals trained to solve problems.” –Wretchard
I agree to a point. But, it is more complexity than that. Radical Islamic operators can easily infiltrate, intimidate, set-up command posts, torture houses, and effective rule areas just as the Japanese Imperial Army did in the Philippines.
The only way to dislodge the Japanese was a combination of indigenous special forces, US special forces, and conventional forces to bring fire power to bear.
Just last night I was reviewing the ‘Battle of Manila’ and the ‘Raid at Los Banos.’ All available resources were need to dislodge the fanatical Japanese. And, it was hard, bloody work.
I think the same applies to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Lastly, we need a strong leader at the top (not a limp Limousine Liberal who cannot fight his way out of a wet paper bag).
[Raid at Los Banos]
“Some three minutes before 07:00, a lone Japanese sentry hunting possum among the bushes that shielded the waiting guerrillas shot at an animal, which was taken as a signal that the raiders were spotted. A Filipino guerrilla broke cover and hacked the sentry to death. Instantly, a wave of men charged the camp.”
“The Recon Platoon teams immediately swung into action. The assault team led by Sgt. Santos destroyed three pillboxes outside the main gate with automatic weapons fire. Sgt. Town’s squad raked several guardhouses along the perimeter and decimated a patrol charging their position. Lt. Col. Ingles’s guerrillas overran the camp perimeter and were battling Japanese guards at the rear of the camp. While Lt. Skau’s platoon was heavily engaged with the guards at the main gate, some men popped colored smoke to mark the drop zone for the paratroopers.”
[Picture of Paratroopers]
“Company B, 511th ARCT paratroopers land at Los Baños”
“At 07:00, coming in at the planned 500 feet (150 m) jump altitude and in three Vs-in-trail formation because of the small drop zone, Lt. Ringler’s paratroopers dropped from their aircraft. While the ground forces were overcoming the perimeter defenses, B Company regrouped, killed some stragglers fleeing from the camp and helped subdue the remaining guards before they had a chance to respond in force. The firefight was short and intense. The Japanese were defeated and the internees freed…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_at_Los_Banos
This article opened my eyes regarding the surprise-to-the-dominant-media 1994 US elections that yielded Republican party majorities in both houses of America’s national legislature and the 2006 and 2008 Democrat party political victories in US federal elections.
part of the reason for the end of colonialism was that the cost of maintaining the colonial infrastructure was greater than revenues derived from the colonies. They weren’t self supporting.
I’m still trying to decide whether I love or hate the expression human terrain.
Take and hold requires far more men at arms than we have available. Better to train, take and hold using culturally knowledgeable and locally savvy indigs than waste the time and talent of folks who would only “go native”. But then there is that lapse of time to train up the indigenous Staff Sargent, and the Officers.
He who only stays may win, but at what cost. He who stays and trains reaps the rewards.
We should consider the differences between the old-time Imperialism of fleets, armies, and viceroys and the current day Imperialism of the U.N, NGOs’s, First World political party operatives smoozing with Third World dictators, faculty clubs, celebrities looking for publicity and recreation, dictators, terrorists, and The Media.
For make no mistake, both of these forms of Imperialism have dominated the Third World quite completely.
The old fashioned kind, at best, dragged 14th Century tribes kicking and screaming into the modern world. The new version, at best, tiptoes through the tulips into the modern Welfare State. At worst, they both lead to wholescale destruction, but for the older version, at least it was creative destruction.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. The new version of Imperialism teaches the distant locals that the eggs will be shipped in, so don’t worry about it.
Petraeus: Al Qaeda No Longer Operating in Afghanistan
I spent some time in Eastern Africa. I saw the results of several imperial models. It was easy to distinquish who was who.
The British model was to make a buck. The idea was to teach as much as possible to the locals, leave a retainer in charge, and have them send money to run the estate in blighty.
The German model was so late on the scene as to be undeveloped.
The French model was to use the colony to unload excess population from metropolitan France, thus reducing the competition for wealth at home, leaving the already rich in place. Positions that Brits would have trained the locals to do were filled by expats.
The Italian model was, well, Italian. It used the french approch, with no concept as to what and why. Expats filled even the very least of positions.
In those places where colonialist failed to impart any sort of skill for day to day participation in the modern world, there is none.
Originally ex British colonies had a chance. Unfortunately, they were pushed out too soon, the progressives re-educated the locals, telling them all the things they had been taught were wrong and neighbors with French or Italian colonial roots created regional turmoil.
Habu, you were in the west. What say you?
Excelsior
I might add, at its peak the Indian Civil Service numbered about 3000, total. In the early 20th century, over 90% of Indias population did not know who the Brits were, or who was the monarch.
It took over 400 years for the effort to bear fruit, especially since turning the Indian Subcontinent into an modern nation was not the agenda. Even then, India has had some growing pains as it flirted (flirts?) with socialism etc, learned in elite european schools.
The discussion of imperialist tendencies is interesting in a strange way. I think that RWE has it right for the modern day. This is one of the reasons that though we are accused of being imperialists in the US we are not. We just do not have the stomach nor the resources to do so. That was amply illustrated in Iraq recently. The best we could do was fall back on some sort of variation on the British model – train the locals and hope they sent us some business later. It failed.
From the movie “Braveheart” (fiction, I know, but it will illustrate my point) Longshanks understood the problem with imperialist ambitions. ‘The problem with Scotland is that it is filled with Scots.’ ‘If we cannot run them out then let’s breed them out.’ To be real imperialists of the Roman stature we must be ready to do something akin to this, but as whiskey always points out, we have become too soft to do what needs to be done for our own survival. At what point will things degenerate to the point that we will decide to fight again for survival or have we gone so far into the twilight that we will not? Those are the real questions, not who stays. It is who stays and controls the conquered populations. If you think that anything else will work in tribal societies, you are sorely mistaken.
This is an existential fight and the forces of light are losing, badly. The forces of darkness are gathering and looking to loot what they can.
I’m a bit of a student of the African colonial experience, having studied it in grad school and served a total of 13 years in former French colonial countries. I also served 9 years in former British colonies, but don’t have the same reading behind me to back up my experience there.
Much of what is written above is accurate, but I’d like to suggest that the French colonial experience (at least at the outset) was NOT to be a benefactor: they were there for money. In fact if you look at the experience in French Central Africa (what is now Chad, CAR, Congo and Cameroun) it was not the French government, but commercial enterprises that first administered the colony, and they were there for gold, diamonds, ivory, rubber, and other commodities that could be exported to the metropole.
The experience was brutal at the outset. It is said the number of dead laborers resulting from building the railroad from Brazzaville to the Atlantic equaled the number of sleepers (ties to Americans) used in the 150 mile track. Similarly, the corvee (labor in lieu of cash taxation) was a brutal custom that left families torn asunder and worse. The one good bit of news is that slavery in this region was not a large part of the French experience — it was Arabs from north Africa who ran that trade.
But the French and British DID stay long enough to influence the governing experience in the countries they ultimately left to self government in the sixties and seventies. Regrettably, much of the civil service they left behind was schooled at the Sorbonne or ENAM in France during the sixties and learned many of the theories popular in Europe at that time — most of which has proven to be socialist orthodoxy that is at best impractical in the real world, and at worst a cynical cover for brutal totalitarianism.
Our own colonial experience, if you can call it that, was much less mercenary and more friendly. Think Germany and Japan in the fifties and sixties, and you have examples of occupied countries that came out of the experience better than they entered it.
All of which is to say that I agree with Wretchard and Gavrilis — you need to have people on the ground to successfully hold on after the battle has been won. But you need to have people on the ground who are imbued with a sense of where it is all going and what they are there to impart to the people they are living with. You do NOT need to duplicate the French (or Portuguese or Italian, for that matter) colonial experience in Africa. Those were never meant to lead to enlightened self-rule. F
F #31
I have no experience in foreign countries and find your comments as well as those of Michael Hoskins very informative. Relative to French colonialism I have always found it amusing that, for example, the fire department at the French space launch base in French Guinea is operated by the Paris fire department. I have heard it said that Paris really is France and all of the countryside merely supporting appendages. This attitude appears to have been transferred part and parcel to the colonies.
Also, I have found Theodore Dalrimple’s writing to be very informative relative to Africa. It is apparent from his observations that Africa and individual Africans are held back very strongly by the tribal past, which leads naturally to socialism and an ever expanding government. Even the U.S. holiday of Kwanza, false holiday that it is, was meant as a celebration of African communism.
In contrast, in Asia feudalism was the norm and it proved to be a useful attitude in transferring allegiance from a local lord to a national one and eventually to a private company.
Whatever their objectives and philosophies, the Imperialist power is constrained by the attitudes of the people it occupies more so than many think. Perhaps the Romans really are the best model.
This all reminds me of Orwell’s essay, “Shooting the Elephant.”
Gavrilis’ argument ultimately devolves to Neo-Con-ism. To be successful, the individual Third Worlder needs to hold a gun in his own hand to protect his own family and property. The role of American troops is to provide the heavy fire power to overmatch his tormentors. The people who sleep in the villages are the potential citizens and they need to defend themselves.
It has been argued and continues to be argued that, at least in some cases (notably the British, whom I like to think did the best job among Western nations in civilising their overseas possessions) the real problem was that we left too soon.
The imperial West had a habit of drawing boundaries without very much regard for natural boundaries between ethnic groups – and we didn’t hang around long enough to make them stick.
It may be that Gandhi was a force for evil in the world, taking everything into account. This sounds extreme, but consider: India was probably the most ready of Britain’s overseas possessions to become independent, and in due course it did. However, that left many other “colonies” with an example to follow and no infrastructure to make it work; such trifles as the rule of law, an education system with reasonable coverage, half-decent living standards… were missing.
We should have stayed, and ignored the people with an ersatz guilty conscience. We should have stayed long enough to make the colonies, primarily in Africa, into real countries. That’s the real colonial guilt. We broke the established order and weren’t prepared to hang around to clean up the mess.
Social relativists have questions to answer there.
Fletcher Christian @ #34:
Yes, colonial boundaries were arbitrary and capricious. Most were established by the Conference of Berlin in 1894 based on very imperfect maps, often with lines drawn by people who had never been to Africa. The Belgian Congo, for example, was defined as all the land draining from the left bank into the Congo River. Since the Congo does not make a closed loop, that leaves space for dispute in the south. Much more importantly, it aggregates several hundred tribal and linguistic groups with no unifying feature at independence other than the desire to be as rich as the colonizers who lowered the flag and departed at midnight.
Things might have been made right upon independence from European powers, but the first point of the charter of the Organization of African Unity was to retain the colonial boundaries. Several wars were fought to make changes (Biafra and Cameroun were examples) but generally the colonial boundaries remained.
As for leaving too soon, I was in Kenya in the early nineties when they were holding their first truly contested election. When it resulted in absolutely no change (and we declared that the elections were essentially fair although seriously skewed in terms of infrastructure at the disposal of respective political parties) the losers began to speak openly about wishing they were still a colony. It was easy at that remove in time to talk that way; thirty years earlier many of the same people (Oginga Odinga the most outspoken) were talking out of the other side of their mouth. Now Oginga’s son Raila is “sharing” power with erstwhile opponents.
In truth, the French had figured out about a decade earlier that their ex colonies were costing more than they were worth unless one factored in the “prestige” of maintaining the French Union and the French Franc Zone. They were working to reduce all manner of financial and administrative ties.
And yes, social relativists have questions to answer. F
I have heard it said before that the colonial powers should have drawn boundaries based on tribal and ethnic divisions rather than purely on agreements between European powers.
However, the huge flaw in that argument is it would have resulted in a huge increase in the number of African countries. A place with too many countries now would have had a lot more. Aside from the disadvantages from the administrative standpoint, the economic effects would have been serious.
Before the creation of the U.S. the largest trading zone in the world was England. Not Great Britain, including Ireland and Scotland and Wales and England, but just merry old England. Giving each tribe its own hunk of land would have really been setting up Africa to fail.