Time to bury Lawrence of Arabia
Saturday, 24 November 2007
Anthony Bubalo
AT the British military headquarters at Kandahar, there is a pretty mural of the Afghan countryside with the following quote beneath it: "It is better to let them do it themselves imperfectly, than do it yourself perfectly. It is their country, their way and our time is short."
Were alive, the quotation's claimed author, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), might cringe, disturbed at such a cult of Lawrence among some fighting men and their leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. To paraphrase another of quoted author, it is time to bury Lawrence, not to praise him.
Ominously for the US, the quotation was also found at the site of America's last big defeat by insurgents. James Fenton and John Pilger, in separate accounts of the fall of Saigon in 1975, both mention seeing it framed on the wall of the abandoned US embassy. One wonders how long it was there. It does not seem to have helped.
Today, Lawrence-isms are recycled by everyone from the commander of US forces in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, to field officers and "grunts" writing on counter-insurgency weblogs.
According to Lawrence's biographer, Jeremy Wilson, the line is probably a corruption of Article 15 of his "27 Articles", published in the Arab Bulletin of August 20 1917 and meant as a guide for British officers fighting alongside Arab tribesmen. The original reads: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them."
Today's liberal usage of Lawrence's aphorisms - including one he may not have exactly uttered - makes you wonder how many people quoting him have read his work or understand the historical context of his ideas. In the first world war, Lawrence played the part of today's insurgents. In Iraq and Afghanistan it is the US and its allies that are the latter-day Ottoman Empire.
Gen Petraeus has pointed to the importance of Lawrence's "do not try to do too much with your own hands" advice for those fighting in Iraq. But Lawrence was talking about Arab ownership of a guerrilla war that they themselves chose to fight against the Turks. In Iraq, however much it has become "their war", it is a war the coalition initiated. Fighting it "their way" has in many cases meant militias and in some instances death squads.
Nor is it a matter, as many American politicians lament, of Iraqis failing to assume responsibility for solving their own problems. The chief problem -- the destruction of the Iraqi central state -- was primarily the result of coalition actions, and unleashed a multitude of civil and political conflicts. Until these are resolved, the chief responsibility for providing some form of security -- for moral, legal and practical reasons -- rests with the US and its allies.
Similarly, one of Gen Petraeus's former advisers, David Kilcullen, in expressing his zeal for the revolt of Sunni tribesmen against al-Qaeda, recently wrote: "Building local allies and forging partnerships and trusted networks with at-risk communities seems to be one of the keys to success perhaps this is what T.E. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote that the art of guerrilla warfare with Arab tribes rested on 'building a ladder of tribes to the objective"'.
Mr Kilcullen concedes that switching to a strategy focused on Iraq's tribes runs counter to the earlier aim of building national institutions. Yet he grasps at the Lawrencian straw anyway. It is hard to complain about Sunni tribes expending deadly energy on al-Qaeda rather than the coalition. Yet there is also danger in such romantic enthusiasms.
Tribes or militias are never likely to transcend narrow interests. Forging alliances with them is a ladder not "to the objective" but to state failure. At best, the result will be semi-stable oases in a desert of national insecurity; at worst it will perpetuate a fractured and fractious Iraq.
That coalition leaders and thinkers see the tribal revolt as propitious underlines how far US ambitions have slipped from rebuilding Iraq to escaping it. But both Iraqis and the region will have to live with the divisive and destabilising consequences of such expediency long after US troops leave.
This is not to say that Lawrence's words of some 85 years ago are entirely unhelpful today. His 27 Articles offered some good advice. He argued, for example, that "a bad start is hard to atone for" and provided perhaps the soundest recommendation of all for the modern counter-insurgent: "Cling tight to your sense of humour".
But the 27 Articles also contain an injunction seemingly ignored by some contemporary Lawrence-o-philes. Lawrence wrote in his introduction to the Articles that they were never meant to be "applicable unchanged in any particular situation". We do him and ourselves a disservice by wrenching his words unthinkingly from his own time just because they seem, superficially, to fit the needs of our own.
(The writer is programme director for West Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney)
AT the British military headquarters at Kandahar, there is a pretty mural of the Afghan countryside with the following quote beneath it: "It is better to let them do it themselves imperfectly, than do it yourself perfectly. It is their country, their way and our time is short."
Were alive, the quotation's claimed author, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), might cringe, disturbed at such a cult of Lawrence among some fighting men and their leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. To paraphrase another of quoted author, it is time to bury Lawrence, not to praise him.
Ominously for the US, the quotation was also found at the site of America's last big defeat by insurgents. James Fenton and John Pilger, in separate accounts of the fall of Saigon in 1975, both mention seeing it framed on the wall of the abandoned US embassy. One wonders how long it was there. It does not seem to have helped.
Today, Lawrence-isms are recycled by everyone from the commander of US forces in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, to field officers and "grunts" writing on counter-insurgency weblogs.
According to Lawrence's biographer, Jeremy Wilson, the line is probably a corruption of Article 15 of his "27 Articles", published in the Arab Bulletin of August 20 1917 and meant as a guide for British officers fighting alongside Arab tribesmen. The original reads: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them."
Today's liberal usage of Lawrence's aphorisms - including one he may not have exactly uttered - makes you wonder how many people quoting him have read his work or understand the historical context of his ideas. In the first world war, Lawrence played the part of today's insurgents. In Iraq and Afghanistan it is the US and its allies that are the latter-day Ottoman Empire.
Gen Petraeus has pointed to the importance of Lawrence's "do not try to do too much with your own hands" advice for those fighting in Iraq. But Lawrence was talking about Arab ownership of a guerrilla war that they themselves chose to fight against the Turks. In Iraq, however much it has become "their war", it is a war the coalition initiated. Fighting it "their way" has in many cases meant militias and in some instances death squads.
Nor is it a matter, as many American politicians lament, of Iraqis failing to assume responsibility for solving their own problems. The chief problem -- the destruction of the Iraqi central state -- was primarily the result of coalition actions, and unleashed a multitude of civil and political conflicts. Until these are resolved, the chief responsibility for providing some form of security -- for moral, legal and practical reasons -- rests with the US and its allies.
Similarly, one of Gen Petraeus's former advisers, David Kilcullen, in expressing his zeal for the revolt of Sunni tribesmen against al-Qaeda, recently wrote: "Building local allies and forging partnerships and trusted networks with at-risk communities seems to be one of the keys to success perhaps this is what T.E. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote that the art of guerrilla warfare with Arab tribes rested on 'building a ladder of tribes to the objective"'.
Mr Kilcullen concedes that switching to a strategy focused on Iraq's tribes runs counter to the earlier aim of building national institutions. Yet he grasps at the Lawrencian straw anyway. It is hard to complain about Sunni tribes expending deadly energy on al-Qaeda rather than the coalition. Yet there is also danger in such romantic enthusiasms.
Tribes or militias are never likely to transcend narrow interests. Forging alliances with them is a ladder not "to the objective" but to state failure. At best, the result will be semi-stable oases in a desert of national insecurity; at worst it will perpetuate a fractured and fractious Iraq.
That coalition leaders and thinkers see the tribal revolt as propitious underlines how far US ambitions have slipped from rebuilding Iraq to escaping it. But both Iraqis and the region will have to live with the divisive and destabilising consequences of such expediency long after US troops leave.
This is not to say that Lawrence's words of some 85 years ago are entirely unhelpful today. His 27 Articles offered some good advice. He argued, for example, that "a bad start is hard to atone for" and provided perhaps the soundest recommendation of all for the modern counter-insurgent: "Cling tight to your sense of humour".
But the 27 Articles also contain an injunction seemingly ignored by some contemporary Lawrence-o-philes. Lawrence wrote in his introduction to the Articles that they were never meant to be "applicable unchanged in any particular situation". We do him and ourselves a disservice by wrenching his words unthinkingly from his own time just because they seem, superficially, to fit the needs of our own.
(The writer is programme director for West Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney)