Between October 12 and 19, 1895, British Major General Sir Bindon Blood, K.C.B., after a bloody four-month campaign, accepted the surrender of the Mamund tribe of India’s Northwest province, along with that of its Afghan allies. The British had prevailed. But their losses—251 men out of 1,200—were proportionately greater than the tribesmen’s, who had lost 350 men out of a much larger population of fighting men. But the tribes surrendered because, as Cavalry Lieutenant Winston Churchill, attached to Sir Bindon’s force observed, “when [the tribesmen] turned their eyes toward their valley…not a tower, not a fort was to be seen. Their villages were destroyed. The crops had been trampled down…and the winter was at hand.”1 Much as they hated the British, they were now forced to devote their full attention to fighting hunger and the elements. These, it seems, proved more compelling than casualties of combat.
In our time, as the U.S. government has tried to pacify some of these very tribes, it has coupled kinetic efficiency on the battlefield far superior to that of Sir Bindon with expensive efforts to improve the locals’ standard of living. Whatever else these efforts accomplished, they surely freed the locals from having to provide for immediate necessities, and hence enhanced their capacity to continue pursuing whatever ends they wish.
This latter-day American approach to imposing peace is historically anomalous. Food and shelter are everywhere conditions of life that impose themselves. Rome’s approach to pacifying frontier tribes was simply to control the towns and areas surrounding them while destroying crops and herds beyond them, and hence to force the tribesmen to come under Roman control. Circa 1980–85, the Soviet Union nearly won its Afghan war by using the same strategy. Only America’s provision of anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghans enabled the latter to defend their crops and hence to sustain life outside Soviet control.
But historical ignorance in America’s high places is no longer news. Along with losing wars, it has become politically correct.
