Afghanistan: Dalrymple’s lessons from history

The elephant in Afghan room today is that its post-colonial colonial occupation enjoys no credibility with the locals.

William Dalrymple is such an affable fellow, such an engaging narrator, and so generous in sharing the fruits of his erudition, that he gets away with speaking some hard truths. Last week, he ended a little Guardian item on “William Dalrymple’s top 10 books on Afghanistan” by bluntly recommending Cables from Kabul by the diplomat Sherard Cowper-Coles as “the best account I have read of how post-colonial colonialism works, exposing the mixture of arrogance, overconfidence and rudderless dithering that has defined the current occupation.”

The description is striking, given that Dalrymple’s recent career has been all about documenting and popularising awareness of significant episodes in the history of colonialism version 1.0 (British edition). Dalrymple recently told an interviewer that he sees his three history books, of which the just-published Return of a King: Shah Shuja and the First Battle for Afghanistan is perhaps, the most compelling, “very much as the East India Company trilogy”. So, when he refers to “post-colonial colonialism” in today’s Afghanistan, using words like “arrogance, overconfidence and rudderless dithering”, we do well to take note.

But the problem is that the people with the greatest understanding are not the people who wield power. All that is within Dalrymple’s power is to invest years of his own life, researching the first Afghan war of 1839-42, then to leverage everything he has learned by writing that — all over again — “despite all the billions of dollars handed out [since 2001], the training of an entire army of Afghan troops and the infinitely superior weaponry of the occupiers, the Afghan resistance succeeded again in first surrounding then propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exit”. It’s hard to drive home the point any more explicitly than that. But no writer can force the makers of imperial policy to change their views or their ways.

And the problem is not only power but money. Those billions of dollars — where did they go? As anyone who follows international humanitarianism knows, many of the dollars went straight back to the countries they came from. This is the nature of postcolonial colonialism. Kabul today is, Dalrymple told Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian, “almost like a French finishing school — lovely-looking French girls working for NGOs and handsome-looking French archaeologists, digging away”. Much of the damage the vaunted “international community” does in vulnerable countries like Afghanistan is in the sheer scale of the economic impact of their big institutions: exorbitant rents, financial and moral corruption, and so forth.

I haven’t seen this in action in Afghanistan as Dalrymple has, but I saw it in Cambodia in the 1990s, and I’ve been seeing it in Haiti for more than 30 years, where it’s been turbocharged since the January 2010 earthquake. “Every one of those 10,000 NGOs are here to live their own dream,” the Dutch journalist Linda Polman told the makers of the remarkable documentary film Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? “People are very poor, but they’re not stupid. They know that the money was raised from their suffering and their poverty, and it’s not being spent on them.”

As a Haitian proverb puts it, perhaps, explaining the motivation behind much, if not most, terrorism: the big guy does what he wants; the little guy does what he can. The elephant in the Afghan room today is that its post-colonial colonial occupation enjoys no credibility with the local population. Insisting otherwise or whistling in the dark changes nothing. The US has long leaned on the plausible deniability of not being overtly an imperial power; but that excuse wore thin decades ago in Vietnam.

A British writer like Dalrymple can approach the issues from a helpfully indirect angle because his country is further in time from the apogee of its imperial arrogance. For an American writer like me, the challenge is different. But for anyone writing in English, the question is: how do we get the American establishment and public to listen?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2013.