Priya Satia: The shadow of history passes over Pakistan
[The writer is assistant professor of modern British history at Stanford University. Her book, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East, was published by Oxford University Press last year.]
As Pakistan spirals out of its grasp, the Obama administration is at last considering halt ting drone attacks there. Influential military officials such as Colonel David Kilcullen, a former adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq, have testified that, despite damaging the Taliban leadership and protecting US pilots, the strategy is backfiring. The Taliban's recent gains comeon the heels of President Barack Obama's intensification of remotely piloted air strikes - 16 strikes in the first four months of 2009 compared with 36 in all of 2008.
This scepticism about drones is well placed but a halt is not enough. Only a permanent end to the strategy will win Pakistani hearts and minds back to their government and its US ally. They, like Afghans and Iraqis, are struck less by the strategy's futuristic qualities than by its uncanny echo of the past: aerial counterinsurgency was invented in precisely these two regions - Iraq and the Pakistani-Afghan borderland - in the 1920s by the British.
The memory of that colonial past shapes the military and political dynamics of any aerial strategy in the region. Col Kilcullen shrewdly discerned that Pakistanis see the drones as "neocolonial". Oddly, the historical use of aerial policing in the region has been absent from public debate about the issue, despite the light it sheds on the likelihood of the tactic's success.
The British, too, turned to aerial surveillance as a way out of the double bind of persistent anti-colonial rebellion and popular demands that their troops be brought home. When the British public grew critical in turn of the violence of the new strategy, officials proclaimed that it worked more through the threat of bombardment than actual attack, gamely embracing "terror" as its main tactical principle. As I discovered while researching Air Ministry documents, officials privately confessed that the public was not ready for the truth that air warfare had made distinctions between civilians and combatants "obsolete". And the Middle East offered an ideal terrain for its education: this was the region in which civilian deaths would be easiest to stomach, air staff officials argued, since Arabs and Pathans "love fighting for fighting's sake . . . They have no objection to being killed." In 1924, Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command in the second world war, reported having shown Iraqis "what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village . . . can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed."
But British aerial control failed miserably, and regional memory of that past ensures that the strategy raises the spectre of ruthless western imperial ambition - no matter how much US officials protest their altruism...
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)
As Pakistan spirals out of its grasp, the Obama administration is at last considering halt ting drone attacks there. Influential military officials such as Colonel David Kilcullen, a former adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq, have testified that, despite damaging the Taliban leadership and protecting US pilots, the strategy is backfiring. The Taliban's recent gains comeon the heels of President Barack Obama's intensification of remotely piloted air strikes - 16 strikes in the first four months of 2009 compared with 36 in all of 2008.
This scepticism about drones is well placed but a halt is not enough. Only a permanent end to the strategy will win Pakistani hearts and minds back to their government and its US ally. They, like Afghans and Iraqis, are struck less by the strategy's futuristic qualities than by its uncanny echo of the past: aerial counterinsurgency was invented in precisely these two regions - Iraq and the Pakistani-Afghan borderland - in the 1920s by the British.
The memory of that colonial past shapes the military and political dynamics of any aerial strategy in the region. Col Kilcullen shrewdly discerned that Pakistanis see the drones as "neocolonial". Oddly, the historical use of aerial policing in the region has been absent from public debate about the issue, despite the light it sheds on the likelihood of the tactic's success.
The British, too, turned to aerial surveillance as a way out of the double bind of persistent anti-colonial rebellion and popular demands that their troops be brought home. When the British public grew critical in turn of the violence of the new strategy, officials proclaimed that it worked more through the threat of bombardment than actual attack, gamely embracing "terror" as its main tactical principle. As I discovered while researching Air Ministry documents, officials privately confessed that the public was not ready for the truth that air warfare had made distinctions between civilians and combatants "obsolete". And the Middle East offered an ideal terrain for its education: this was the region in which civilian deaths would be easiest to stomach, air staff officials argued, since Arabs and Pathans "love fighting for fighting's sake . . . They have no objection to being killed." In 1924, Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command in the second world war, reported having shown Iraqis "what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village . . . can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed."
But British aerial control failed miserably, and regional memory of that past ensures that the strategy raises the spectre of ruthless western imperial ambition - no matter how much US officials protest their altruism...