According to AP, US troops left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night.
After 20 years of conflict – along with the deaths of 10 Kiwi soldiers – the US has decided the game is over. The primary mission to disrupt Al Qaeda terrorists after 9/11 was completed a long time ago. But the secondary job of replacing the Taliban with a Western-style government was an utter failure.
Even today in the Graveyard of Empires, the influence of the US-backed government in Kabul extends only to the city limits. No Afghan takes it seriously and anyone allied with it had better hope the US troops left them a Green Card because the Taliban will undoubtedly win any civil war, which is surely coming.
I have a question: what would Lord Cromer say about this?
Who is that person? Well, about a hundred years ago, the British had governed Egypt for about 25 years. In 1908, the population of Egypt was about 10 million and Lord Cromer controlled the country with only 5,500 British soldiers. Not only were his costs paid for by Egyptian taxpayers, but Egypt also had zero militias, private armies, political parties, ethnic mafias or any type of “Taliban” at all. Lord Cromer achieved this without a single assault helicopter, main battle tank or F/A-18.
I’m not sure what an Egyptian pound was worth back then, but Lord Cromer’s annual budget was, including occupation fees, about 141,375 Egyptian pounds. Egypt also had a “reserve fund” roughly equivalent to its annual expenses, which is quite frankly unthinkable for any government today. To put this in perspective, Washington spent about US$45 billion each year it was in Afghanistan. And the country has been infested with militant groups for the entire occupation.
Despite what progressives say, the military occupation of a foreign country is not at all difficult. Here’s how Lord Cromer would deal with Afghanistan:
- Create an Afghan government with Afghan employees and US executives;
- Set up an Afghan army with US officers but Afghan soldiers;
- Suppress all political parties, mafias, militias, etc, by hanging or imprisoning as many people as necessary until all such groups disappear;
- Set up a transition plan to hand over a stabilised Afghanistan to a trained ruler or split the country into emirates and pick a prince to govern each one.
Does this make Lord Cromer sound like a colonial maniac? That’s what our foreign policy elites would have you think. Forget what you’ve heard about colonialism, Lord Cromer’s system worked well and was enormously profitable. It is one of the biggest modern taboos that governance in many parts of the third world was far better under European colonialism than it is today.
The Afghanistan mess can only be understood as a continuation of the postcolonial disaster, which can only be understood by understanding colonialism. The thing is, no one who understands colonialism would ever suggest that colonialism doesn’t work. As Lord Cromer’s legacy shows clearly, it worked quite well until the British Whigs turned it into postcolonialism.
However, Lord Cromer’s Egypt was more profitable in 1800 than in 1900, and more profitable in 1700 than in 1800. The reason for this decline wasn’t that Egyptians suddenly rose up. It was British politics that became a problem. Even back then, you can see the basic alliance forming between progressives at home and nationalists abroad. In John Alexander’s The Truth About Egypt, the “Panislamic” movement is even mentioned, which is basically the precursor of the Taliban, ISIS and al Qaeda.
Despite what CNN says, the Taliban are not fighting because they are “motivated by the US occupation”. That’s just Wilsonian nonsense. They are motivated by the desire for power, money and glory, like everyone who fights. Even the kamikazes were told their actions would cause Imperial Japan to win the war, or at least survive it. That did the trick.
But there’s a difference between the kamikazes and the Taliban. While both are equally fanatical, all resistance in Japan stopped once the US won the war. Why? Read JCS 1067 for a clue. Why was there no Confederate insurgency? Look at the Lieber code and the tactics the Union used when an insurgency was attempted.
Lord Cromer would say the reason the Taliban remains is that law and order has broken down in Afghanistan, and the way to prevent militancy is to impose law and order. The core problem, he would say, is the widespread progressive belief that vices can be suppressed by “turning the other cheek” and rewarding virtues.
The progressive foreign policy elites in charge of Afghanistan never received this advice because they had just finished spending the last century purging anyone who even came close to agreeing with Lord Cromer from any position of responsibility or influence.
Lord Cromer would recognise these elites as descendants of the Exeter Hall movement that ruined his Egyptian project – a movement whose Evangelical Christian roots were known to everyone at the time – and would be surprised to hear them describe their foreign policy as “secular”. He would also dispute the idea that Islamic militancy and genocide are “problems from hell” by pointing out that there was no militancy in Egypt when Lord Cromer ruled it, although there was plenty afterwards.
He would advise that virtues tend to emerge when you suppress the vices, and this can only be done by a culture that provides disincentives for vices. The sine qua non of civilisation, in other words, is punishment. Past societies that aggressively punished vice were also remarkably virtuous – the Victorian culture, for example, which was unusual both for its hard-line attitude toward sin and high levels of altruism.
Unfortunately, the Lord Cromers of the world no longer exist for a specific reason. They were defeated politically by the “missionaries” and “evangelicals.” But a defeat is a defeat. The leaders of the Whig movement were not “the peasants,” “the workers,” “the natives,” or any other victim class. As Carroll Quigley told us decades ago, “popular uprisings” were always controlled by the Whigs (the ancestors of today’s progressive movement).
The Whig lawyers, ministers and diplomats killed colonialism by interfering with the colonial governments and creating a series of unacknowledged alliances with militant forces against their own compatriots like Lord Cromer. The British progressives weren’t friends with these militants. But they both knew they were more likely to achieve their goals because of the other’s actions. As Al Qaeda’s #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri put it back in 2006: “The Democrats should not forget that they owe their victory to the mujahedin.”
Don’t let anyone tell you the invasion of Afghanistan failed. It was the occupation that failed. The problem with colonialism was that it got nationalised. Colonialism run by chartered companies was a wonder of economic engineering. On the other hand, colonialism as a government department is always a disaster, as Lord Cromer knew.
An Indian was once asked how the British had conquered and ruled India with so few men. He replied, “The British didn’t betray each other.” Lord Cromer lost Egypt because he was betrayed by the Whigs in London. The reason the US lost Afghanistan is because the same fanatical quasi-Christian group continues to betray its fellow Americans in the pursuit of a missionary empire.
A hundred years after Lord Cromer’s success, this movement goes by many names and is still breaking eggs but there are no omelettes in sight. Lord Cromer would not be surprised by the embarrassing departure of the US military from Afghanistan. Not one bit.
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