The New York Times published an investigation today documenting that Abdul Raziq, an American-backed warlord in Afghanistan who was assassinated in 2018, was responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial murders and kidnappings, along with frequent torture, during the American occupation of Afghanistan, with the full knowledge of American military and civilian planners who interacted with him.
Raziq’s actions were supported by a common war-fighting, administrative and diplomatic ethos in modern imperial histories: that a local proxy for a global or imperial hegemony should use harsh violence against the enemies of empire, that in time this sort of decimation will teach people that resistance is too dangerous. The familiar logic, sometimes attributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that a hegemon needs its proxy bastards. The Times takes note of this view:
“You will learn to respect me and reject the Taliban,” Raziq said after the killings, which took place in the winter of 2010, according to the witnesses and relatives of both men. “Because I will come back and do this again and again, and no one is going to stop me.”
For years, American military leaders lionized Raziq as a model partner in Afghanistan, their “if only” ally in the battle against the Taliban: If only everyone fought like Raziq, we might actually win this war, American commanders often said.
In this way of thinking, the subject population can then be inducted into liberal democracy after being pacified, but not before.
What the NYT story sets out is a very elementary point that historians of modern empires and Cold War hegemonies know very well, which is that violent pacification at best produces the brief silence of graves before the next cycle of resistance. It recruits people to fight against the empire who would have otherwise been content to go about their business. Exemplary violence doesn’t create security; it spreads insecurity into every home, every life. A leader like Raziq inevitably comes to understand everyone as a potential enemy and in so doing, makes that fear into a reality.
It’s easy to just cut to the chase and condemn the suffering that such a person creates and say that it ought to be moral anathema to any country or institution that aims to make life better. But there’s always a realpolitik devotee in the room who wants to know, “Yeah, ok, but does it work?”
The answer in global history is no, it does not, if by working we mean, “Does it protect the interests of the empire or hegemon and provision greater security at its frontiers?”
The kind of proxy you can buy who has local standing but is willing to work with the empire is very often precisely the person the empire does not want to represent its interests in a contested frontier. That person is often someone who would lack power or legitimacy locally if the empire were not present. They are either opportunists who see the intruding hegemon as a tool to achieve dominion or they are people who actually identify with the values and culture of the hegemon via some prior exposure. The former are the worst case (like Raziq) because they require a superabundant supply of resources and military assets from the hegemon in order to maintain their position, and associate the hegemon with an arbitrary regime that wouldn’t exist but for the empire’s presence. The proxy who actually identifies with the empire, on the other hand, is often attracted to the “higher values” of the empire and wants to be recognized as belonging to the empire’s society. In becoming a proxy, they often discover that they are expected to violate those values and in most cases that they are only valued because they are in the empire’s periphery.
The opportunist from the first moment is not only trapped in a cycle of escalating brutality in order to stave off challenges to their legitimacy, but also is easily bought off by competing interests. Moreover, the opportunist can turn against their imperial sponsor the moment they’re not being supplied with sufficient resources, the moment the cash stops flowing. In fact, at that moment, the opportunist’s best hope for medium-term survival is to suddenly become the chief enemy of the empire, to seek spoils over the border of the frontier. (Imperial Roman history is especially replete with examples of this dynamic.) The true believing friend of empire, on the other hand, is lost the first moment they sense that they are not actually accepted by the empire, will not actually be allowed to claim membership—and of course, this sort of proxy also struggles to stay connected to the society of the periphery and be an effective intermediary even when they feel the empire continues to accept them.
There are a few empires in world history that have been properly wary of the opportunists and properly accepting of people who step forward to actually embrace the empire’s culture, allowing them access to the imperial core. Without fail, those have been premodern empires because the sort of judgment necessary requires long-developed situated knowledge of those peripheries, often through trade, and a willingness to allow the societies in the imperial periphery genuine autonomy in most matters.
Modern empires, on the other hand, have been almost entirely Western and involve the extension of imperial power from a distant core to peripheries that the agents of empire know very little about. Those empires have gone through repeated cycles of recognizing that they need real local knowledge in order to make judgments about their alliances and proxies to scorning local knowledge on the grounds that it compromises their ability to rule through the maintenance of racial and cultural hierarchy.
The United States since the end of the 19th Century has been especially prone to military and administrative interventions in peripheries that it knows next to nothing about, making hasty decisions about its local proxies that fatally compromise any hope of being a constructive part of nation-building exercises, and then deploying disproportionate and indiscriminate punitive military power in ways that guarantee local populations will quickly come to hate the U.S. and its proxies even if they are not particularly fond of the local alternatives to American hegemony.
There is literally no intervention of this kind since 1945 that can be deemed remotely successful in building alliances or protecting clients except perhaps South Korea, and that is really about the period after the establishment of the Sixth Republic and a lengthy period of recurrent popular struggle against successive military and authoritarian regimes backed by the United States government. Once a failed occupation or intervention ends, the clock starts ticking until the next one, even in the post-Cold War world, and in the interim, the United States doesn’t even try to build capacity for a different form of nation-building intervention.
If you want evidence of how to detect when political and social practice are structural, pushed into a particular shape regardless of the different contingent circumstances attending on a specific event, this kind of pattern is a social scientist’s version of a neutrino detector—an indicator of something pervasive but invisible that is primarily made visible by recurrent collisions it has with seemingly new events. Something structural makes it impossible for modern empires or global-scale hegemonies to avoid turning to precisely the people they shouldn’t, makes it impossible to understand that indiscriminate military force makes it impossible to build stability and affinity in insecure places. How exactly we should read the nature of that structure is the only thing left to debate. Is it an indication of some deeper kind of self-interest that masks itself in language of building nations, bringing democracy, pursuing security? As crude as war profiteering and military careerism? Or is it a weakness of Western nation-states, an inability to conceive of supra-national associations, alliances or even client-patron networks in terms that don’t encode people in some places, some societies, some nations, some frontiers, as anything but subordinates who are entitled to no real consideration when push comes to shove. As it inevitably does.
It is a matter of great frustration for me and many other historians that the evident explanatory value of this last point is so fiercely contested and deflected. If you’re occupying defeated Germany, you reach for Konrad Adenauer. If you’re occupying post-Taliban Afghanistan, you reach for Abdul Raziq (the opportunist) and Ashraf Ghani (the friend of the empire). That is only partly because you don’t know any better. (If you did, you wouldn’t have tried to occupy with a bunch of American or coalition troops and then engage in state-building with Americans in charge.) It is also because you can’t imagine any other kind of relationship in that place, in this situation, than working with a brute and a cosmopolitan, as opposed to the people who are both local and hoping for a liberating change. It’s those people who generally end up dead in the end. The occupier can’t recognize them or see them as having a personhood that needs protection, the occupier’s brute murders them, the cosmopolitan is infected with the occupier’s blindness. The bombs fall on everyone, the bullets fly through every wall. The ruins grow, and in time, the person who hoped the occupier might bring change becomes the bitter insurgent who vows an unending war against the broken promises and the stink of indifference that wafts above them.
So it goes with structure: it makes fools of all who demand, in forced innocence, that this time we must act without hesitation, without reflection on history. And thus all that will happen is that once again Punch will strike Judy and Judy will strike back.
Image credit: "Sunnyside - home of Washington Irving - Punch n Judy Show" by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Early Americanist cultural historian myself, so ignorance pleaded, but even I keep muttering about 17th century Jesuits' relative respect for Native cultures in New France, and, as one who grew up in postwar Britain, the Marshall Plan. Could part of the problem be that powers-that-be prefer to get their history from anointed court historians, Tim, rather than from a range of academics? I remember a historian at the Air-War College warning, as war on Iraq was under consideration, that there was no precedent for successfully imposing democracy from the outside. Nobody seems to have listened.