Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied by Toby Dodge. Columbia University Press (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup), 61 West 62nd Street, New York, New York 10023, 2003, 288 pages, $24.95 (hardcover).
The Origins of Conflict in Afghanistan by Jeffery J. Roberts. Praeger Publishers (http://auburn house.com/praeger.htm), 88 Post Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2003, 288 pages, $69.95 (hardcover).
Today American armed forces are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but few of us know much about the troubled histories of these two countries. The two books reviewed here offer fascinating insights into the origins of the current situations in these two countries. Both countries were defined by contact with British imperialism. Both countries presented the British Empire with problems that the British were never successful at resolving. According to both authors, previous failures to resolve these problems help to explain the problems currently being faced by the United States.
In Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied, Toby Dodge examines the British attempt to create Iraq as a modern state in the eighteen years from 1914 to 1932. Prior to World War I, the territory that became Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire. Britain invaded the area south of Basra in October 1914 and by 1918 had conquered most of the area that is today Iraq. In the tangled wartime diplomacy that divided the Ottoman Empire among the European allies, Britain claimed Iraq. After the war, the situation that had supported European imperialism before the war no longer existed. Much of Britain’s economic strength had been expended. Britain could no longer afford the expense of administering large new areas that at least in the short term would be an economic drain. The political environment had also changed. President Woodrow Wilson’s idealism captured people’s imagination around the world. Markets should be open to all. Self-determination should be afforded to those who were capable and offered as a prospect under international supervision for those peoples not yet ready to be fully self-governing. The result of these ideas was the mandate system under the League of Nations. The country assigned as the mandatory power would be responsible to the League of Nations for bringing the people under its tutelage to full sovereignty as a member of the League of Nations. Britain accepted the role of mandatory power for Iraq on May 5, 1920.
Iraq was created from three distinct Ottoman administrative districts: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The British saw Ottoman rule as corrupt. They sought to displace it, but had a hard time finding alternate administrators. Nationalism was a new force in the region. It greatly complicated British attempts to find rulers who could put an “Iraqi face” on the administration, while remaining sympathetic to British interests. Nation building proved to be a complex, unappreciated and expensive task. To end their conflict with the Iraqi political elite, the British recommended Iraq be accepted as a full member of the League of Nations in 1932. According to Dodge, Britain colored its reporting to the League of Nations to achieve this end. Iraq became a sovereign nation, not because it had achieved any “standard of civilization,” but because of Iraqi nationalism and British domestic politics.
Early in the mandatory period the Royal Air Force became the chief means of enforcing British authority in Iraq. An Arab revolt broke out against the British in 1920. At the height of the rebellion, the rebels had over 100,000 in the field. After it had been suppressed, the British decided to rapidly remove most of their imperial troops. Raising an Iraqi army proved extremely difficult. Conscripting and funding an army was likely to lead to further rebellions by tribal Iraqis who had little trust of the central government. The British solution was “air policing.” Airpower allowed Britain to maintain control without having to occupy the country. Tribes that refused to acknowledge central government authority were bombed. There was virtually nothing that the Iraqis could do to oppose the aircraft. Aircraft could reach recalcitrants in places that would have been extremely difficult for infantry to reach such as the marshes of southern Iraq. The British found that night bombing and the use of incendiaries greatly increased their coercive power. Unfortunately, the use of airpower to maintain control was essentially despotic and served to alienate the majority of rural Iraqis from the central government. Thus the Iraq that the British left in 1932 was a relatively weak state with fragile political institutions.
Like Iraq, Afghanistan proved to be a challenge to the British Empire that the British were never successful at solving. In The Origins of Conflict in Afghanistan, Jeffery Roberts traces British contact with Afghanistan from the early nineteenth century to the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Following the British withdrawal from South Asia, he focuses on relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the problems that this relationship created for U.S. grand strategy. Britain was unable to establish a regime in Kabul that aligned itself with British interests despite successfully fighting two wars with the Afghans in the nineteenth century. Britain eventually settled for an Afghanistan that served as a buffer between British India and Russian/Soviet expansion in Central Asia. The withdrawal of Britain from South Asia in 1947, left Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. Though both were Muslim countries, dispute over control of the ethnic Pushtuns in what had been the Northwest Frontier Province of British India led almost immediately to animosity between the two countries. Clever Pakistani diplomacy, coupled with the desire for access to Pakistani air bases and the Pakistani army as a bulwark against communism led the U.S. to tilt towards Pakistan under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. The end result was that Afghanistan ultimately turned to the Soviet Union for aid. Soviet aid to the Afghan military gave the Soviets great influence and eventually allowed for an almost bloodless invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Roberts also chronicles the difficulties experienced by Afghanistan’s own rulers in trying to modernize the country. In the 1920s, King Amanullah tried to modernize Afghanistan by promulgating a western style legal code. At the instigation of his queen, he established schools for girls and tried to give women the same freedoms they enjoyed in Western societies. His reforms led to widespread resistance. The mullahs saw his reforms as an attack on their authority in particular and on Islam in general. Anti-Amanullah propaganda included spliced pictures that purported to show the queen nude in the presence of European men. In 1929, Amanullah was overthrown. Resistance to change is deeply embedded in Afghan society.
Both of these books are scholarly monographs. They are not light reading. They are extensively documented and both authors have a good command of their sources. Dodge is a recognized expert on Middle East affairs. He devotes the greatest part of his book to an analysis of Iraqi society in the 1920s and British miscomprehension of that society. Interest in his insights can be seen from the fact that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called on him to testify on April 4, 2004. That testimony applying the insights gained from his study of Iraq to the current situation can be found at: http://foreign.senate.gov/testimony/2004/DodgeTestimony040420.pdf.
Similarly, Roberts also has a very good command of his subject. The bulk of his work is focused on the period from 1945 to 1960 at the start of the Cold War. His narrative ends with the Soviet invasion in 1979. He gives extensive coverage to Pakistan, and its role on U.S. foreign policy in the region. He sees this influence as not being altogether positive. He believes that Pakistan used strong anti-communist rhetoric to gain support from the U.S. in order to achieve its own objectives vis-à-vis India and Afghanistan. Roberts’s seventeen-page last chapter is particularly well done. It provides an excellent summary of the work and then in the last five pages analyzes the failure of the Soviet Union to subdue Afghanistan in the 1980’s and the fragmentation of Afghan society since.
Both of these books offer valuable insights into two troubled societies in which the U.S. military finds itself deeply engaged today. They were both written with the intent of shedding light on the current situation in these countries. Both of them draw heavily on the British experience to aid our understanding. They both come to similar conclusions: anyone wanting to try to change these societies does this at some peril without understanding the long-term nature of their indigenous problems.
Dr. John Albert
Montgomery, Alabama
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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