The object of reflecting on Winston Churchill's writings is of course to bring this war in Afghanistan to an end. But it goes some way to highlight the problems with Islamic populations both indigenous and immigrant. Russia has had Muslims living there for ages and yet they are still not settled ~ so to speak and they are after all this time still represent a lawless bunch. There is the Russian citizen and then there is the - and feel the bump in the road - 'Muslim' citizen. The religion in so many ways represents a protrusion to citizenship. And one could even say to humanity. And then we have Western leaders of today who have allowed Muslims like other citizens from around the world to immigrate to their countries ~ and are forever blaming themselves for the failures to do with the Muslim community. When the same problems that existed during colonial times with Islam still exist today ~ and they think that through self examination ~ and policies to get the whole nation on board ~ to view Islam favorably ~ not so much Muslims ~ but to view 'Islam' favorably ~ that somehow we are going to overcome this age old problem. But when a problem has been going on for this long ~ isn't time to say this is the way Islam is. And say under an Islamic mindset people are likely to act this or that way. Clearly defining patterns of behavior to do with the Islamic belief. We know that when people leave Islam and they reject these ideas then they become a citizen like everyone else. I think the Russia example is a good way to examine Western immigration policies going forward. Even after being in the region for hundreds of years the Russian people are still coming under attack ~ by those with a militant Jihadist mindset. The British government has spent some £140 million ($213 million) trying to bring the Muslims on board and trying to get the other 97% of the population to 'respect' Islam. And it has pretty much utterly failed ~ the Muslims are still complaining ~ my guess ~ Britain is not an Islamic state ~ and 75% of the population have an unfavorable view of Islam. But perhaps there needs to be a Churchill figure to say that there should be strict limits on the number of people allowed to enter Europe particularly from these violent and lawless areas of the Islamic world. If this immigration continues we are going to be looking at a splitting up of Britain and other EU countries into Muslim enclaves. One 'integrated' Dutch-Muslim parliamentarian has already proposed having a Muslim only area in a rezoned Amsterdam. As a group Muslim behaviour is [largely] and has been adverse to civil rule. What the Muslims see as an alternative is we live under Shari'a law ~ and some EU governments or elected officials have suggested this - 'aspects of'. But what could be more offensive. For any new law or change in the law ~ there is discussion and open and frank debate ~ but for Islamic laws to be introduced ~ Muslims would object to talk of the Prophet's behaviour which is the root of these laws ~ so this would have to be an erosion of democracy, an erosion of freedoms. Without the death sentence for criticizing Islam such as you see in the Islamic world ~ people are not going to be bound by fear ~ to slavishly pass any measure because someone says 'its Islamic.' People are going to tell Muslims where to put their book and they are not going to like it. Of course this doesn't stop Muslims from enforcing the Shari'a over their own communities and that is where you might likely get a break up ~ if immigration continues from the Muslim world unchecked. I think coexistence is possible if Muslims are made to understand that they cannot impose their religious will on the rest of society. However if you look at the Muslims in Russia and in any Muslim country ~ holding to this ideal is going to be a problem.
The commander of US and Nato forces has been seeking guidance from the British statesman, who visited the Afghan-Pakistan border in 1897
General Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, has found an unlikely adviser in the continuing struggle against the Taleban. This new counsellor is British, a former journalist, soldier, writer, painter and politician. He is also dead, and the last time he was anywhere near Afghanistan was in 1897.
Winston Churchill has come to the aid of the Allies.
McChrystal is said to listen to the writings of Churchill on his iPod during his daily eight-mile jog. A recent visitor to Nato headquarters in Kabul found the American general immersed in Churchill’s first book, his account of the struggle to pacify the tribes of the North West Frontier at the end of the 19th century.
Next on the general’s reading list, it was reported, is Churchill’s The River War, describing the reconquest of the Sudan that ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898.
Barack Obama, fresh from his first presidential visit to Afghanistan, is no admirer of Britain’s colonial past, and his own writings echo with anger at the iniquities of imperialism. Yet Britain’s last great imperial leader offered an extraordinary insight into the nature of warfare in the region, Islamic fundamentalism and the history and character of Afghan tribal society.
In 1897, at the age of 23, Churchill was attached as a soldier-journalist to the Malakand Field Force, the British expedition under the splendidly named Sir Bindon Blood, dispatched to put down the rebellious Pathan tribesmen of the North West Frontier, on what is now the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Churchill described his impressions of this land “where every man is a soldier” in a series of vivid newspaper reports, which were incorporated into The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published a year later. Churchill’s time among the border tribes was also recalled in his autobiography, My Early Life.
The Young Winston was only on the North West Frontier for a few weeks, but like most journalists he swiftly considered himself an expert on the Afghans in general, and the Pathans in particular. His prose is typically rich and colourful, his generalisations lofty and patronising. He shared the peculiar British reverence for the Pathans as a noble warrior race: “the ferocity of the Zulu are added to the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer”. He never set foot in Afghanistan itself.
Yet Churchill was a natural historian, and for all their imperial arrogance, his words carry unmistakable relevance to Afghanistan today. “Tribe wars with tribe. Every man’s hand is against the other and all are against the stranger ... the state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity.”
Churchill was fascinated by the fabulously complex web of feud and counter-feud among the Taleban’s ancestors, the conglomeration of tribes and sub-tribes and the total absence of central authority. “Such a disposition, combined with an absolute lack of reverence for all forms of law and authority, is the cause of their frequent quarrels with the British power.”
Churchill reserved a special disdain for Talibs, the religious students who would later form the core of the original Taleban. He called them “a host of wandering Talib-ul-ulms [who] live free at the expense of the people”.
Yet his attitude towards Islamic fundamentalism was far more nuanced than that of his contemporaries. Later in the Sudan he did not merely dismiss the Dervishes following the Mahdi as lunatics, but sought to understand the “mighty stimulus of fanaticism” that thrived, as it does today, in the “fearful fatalistic apathy” in much of the Muslim world.
Despite deploying the latest military technology, British imperial Forces were at a severe disadvantage when faced by rebels armed with long-handled jezail muskets, able to shoot and kill at a distance, and then disappear. “The weapons of the 19th century,” wrote Churchill, “in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.”
The IED, the remote-controlled improvised explosive device planted at roadsides in Afghanistan to such devastating effect, is the modern equivalent of the jezail; the Taleban’s “asymmetric tactics” are directly descended from the long-distance sniping of a century ago.
Above all, Churchill realised that pacifying the rebel Pathans was a matter of culture, politics and persuasion, not compulsion. The more an outside army sought to impose order, the more ferocious the Afghan response. For this society to develop and progress, he predicted, any government would have to first tackle “the warlike nature of the people and their hatred of control”.
Brute force of arms, he knew, was not only insufficient and probably ineffective, but also likely to foment greater antagonism. After experiencing the wild borderlands firsthand, Churchill laid out the options for dealing with a country like Afghanistan: imposing the rule of law at the barrel of a gun, pulling out and leaving the tribes to their stone age bloodletting or working through and with the tribal system. As General McChrystal recently told Robert Kaplan of The Atlantic magazine, “the third choice — Churchill’s choice — is really the only one we have”.
One can see Churchill’s choice reflected in the allies’ changing policy in Afghanistan: in the determination to recruit and train Afghans for the army and police, in the greater willingness to talk to elements within the Taleban and the distribution of hard cash. On his brief visit to Bagram this week, Obama spoke of the progress made in “good governance, rule of law, anti-corruption efforts”.
David Miliband, too, has suggested that Britain’s past in Afghanistan might usefully be recruited to the present. “Imperial strategists sought and secured a saner and more sustainable objective: a self-governing, self-policing, but heavily subsidised Afghanistan where the tribes balanced each other and the Afghan state posed no threat to the safety of British India.”
That sounds like the sort of solution Churchill would have applauded, yet he also knew that any policy reliant on raw force would have its limitations in a land saturated by centuries of violence.
As a 23-year-old journalist, Churchill looked on, as Blood’s British Forces laid waste to the rebel villages “in punitive devastation”, and wondered whether peace would ever be possible here.
“At the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert,” he wrote. “Whether it was worth it ... I cannot tell.”
Winston Churchill: an unlikely adviser in the Afghan conflict | Ben Macintyre - Times Online
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