By John C. Hulsman and Alexis Y. Debat
The National Interest, Summer 2006.
Legitimacy comes in many faces. Westerners like to see it in the glow of freedom fighters ascending to high office in a sweeping democratic process, preferably after mass rallies in the squares of capital cities with the attendant flags and banners and rock concerts. But we are loath to grace with "legitimacy" the evil, greedy chieftain of Western imagination--the warlord--conjured in no small part by the portrayals in Indiana Jones movies. Of course, the West might work with such unsavory characters in alliances of convenience, but they are to be despised (not least in their immoral challenge to Western democratic superiority) and then quickly done away with at the first possible opportunity--to be replaced by "proper" political figures.
Our cinematic reaction to warlords has carried over into the policies of American state-builders to an uncomfortable degree. When looked at in the glare of reality, America's state-building record in the post-Cold War era is dreadful because of our reflexive antipathy for warlords and our unwillingness to co-opt them. America's failure to identify and engage warlords has contributed again and again to the most conspicuous of U.S. nation-building failures.
In Haiti we intervened to put a Robespierreist president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, back in power following a military coup. After he pathetically failed even to begin addressing Haiti's massive problems, cultivated authoritarian tendencies, and failed to draw in the country's factional power brokers, Aristide was again chased into exile, this time in Africa. Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
In Bosnia America's failure to grasp the durability of clan and ethnic allegiances undermined peacekeeping efforts. If free and fair elections were held tomorrow, two of the three primary ethnic groups (the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats) would vote to secede from the country, a decade after the Dayton Accords.
In Afghanistan things are a little better. President Hamid Karzai, following successes in both the presidential and parliamentary elections, is finally more than just the mayor of Kabul. But anyone assuming that in the foreseeable future he will be able to supervise, bypass or pacify the country's powerful warlords--especially now that they are represented in Parliament--needs an Internet connection. And, of course, there is Iraq.
This dismal record is matched by an unwillingness to seriously assess the flaws in the standard Western model of state-building from afar. Debates continue to focus on the potential roles of the United States, United Nations, World Bank, European Union or International Monetary Fund in state-building, with indigenous leadership--chiefs, elders and yes, even warlords--playing either a secondary or adversarial role in the process.
As long as international admiration trumps local legitimacy in selecting who we are willing to work with in state-building, our efforts will fail. This means, in many parts of the world, we have to come to terms with so-called warlords.
But just what do we mean by "warlord"? A "warlord" is a leader whose power has been attained by non-democratic means but who exercises authority usually on the basis of an appeal to ethnic or religious identity, and who usually controls a definable territory where he has a near monopoly on the use of force. A warlord, as opposed to a gang leader or petty crook, operates within a clear and defined political framework.
To bolster our state-building efforts in the future, we should instead look towards a British subaltern who in the early 20th century hastily scribbled some notes about the importance of warlords in the wastes of the Arabian Desert.
Lessons from Lawrence
Thomas Edward Lawrence, in the flower of his youth, was one of the most famous men in the world. The conqueror of Aqaba at 29 and Damascus at thirty, he was a major leader of the wildly romantic and improbably successful Arab Revolt of Emir Feisal--a warlord--against his Turkish overlords during World War I. There is no doubting Lawrence's military achievement. During the Great War, 50,000 Turks were pinned down east of the Jordan by an Arab force of around 3,000 irregulars operating under his immediate direction. A further 150,000 Turks were spread over the rest of the region in a vain effort to crush the Arab Revolt, so little more than 50,000 were left to meet the assault by Sir Edmund Allenby--the senior British officer in theater and Lawrence's commanding general. The British historian and a friend of Lawrence's, Basil Liddell-Hart, noted that while it was unlikely that the Arab forces alone could have overcome the Turks without British assistance, it was equally true that Allenby could not have defeated the Turks without the Arabs and Lawrence.
Lawrence's approach was based on a few simple principles, encapsulated in an August 1917 memo he wrote for British officers serving with Feisal's legions, and in a September 1920 article he wrote anonymously for the British journal Round Table. What Lawrence advocated in these primary sources represents a dramatic break not only with state-building as it was then practiced, but also as it continues to be implemented today.
Local elites, Lawrence held, must be stakeholders in any successful state-building process. At root, almost all state-building problems are political and not military in nature; with political legitimacy, military problems can be solved. To work against the grain of local history is to fail. It is critical to accurately assess the unit of politics in a developing state--and in the case of the Arab Revolt, it was the tribe, and hence tribal leaders, or warlords.
To Lawrence, the seminal operational fact in dealing with the Arab Revolt was that the framework was tribal. By working within Bedouin cultural norms, rather than imposing Western institutions, the Arabs accepted the legitimacy of British objectives. As he wrote in his 1917 memo, "Wave a Sharif [local warlord] in front of you like a banner, and hide your own mind and person." Lawrence understood that the sharif, not he, had local legitimacy. The common British custom was to issue orders to the Arabs only through their chiefs, and only when agreed upon. Lawrence did not take this approach out of some romantic belief in the unspoiled ways of the Arabs. Rather, he saw it as the only practical way to achieve results. Lawrence worked with local culture, history, political practice, sociology, ethnology, economic statutes and psychology to get the job done.
Early on, Lawrence realized that in Emir Feisal he had happened upon the ideal warlord of the Arab Revolt. As son of the sharif of Mecca, Feisal was imbued with religious and political legitimacy. He led in the name of his father, who as keeper of the Holy Places had an unrivalled political position in the Hejaz (western Saudi Arabia). Lawrence worked within the tribal structure and collaborated with warlords, an approach he employed later on his way to Damascus, when he successfully constructed another alliance of Syrian tribes, including the Howeitat, Beni Sakhr, Sherrat, Rualla and Serahin.
The contrast with modern Western efforts at state-building could hardly be greater. Too often, modern-day Wilsonians assume that because a nation-state exists on paper, they can dispense with the need to forge alliances and compacts among sectarian, tribal, ethnic and religious factions and simply deal with "Iraqis" or "Somalis" or "Afghans"--disregarding or ignoring the traditional sub-national centers of authority in favor of anointing "modern" leaders.
Mistakes in Iraq
Many of the administration's problems in Iraq can be traced to two fatal mistakes. First, while obsessing about Iraq's problematic long-term democratic future, the Bush White House ignored the "spiritual warlord" Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Kurdish leader Nechirvan Barzani, both of whom possessed the (admittedly non-democratic) legitimacy to bring the majority of the Shi'a and the Kurds toward some sort of fairly rapid Iraqi national compromise. The failure to recognize their importance, particularly that of Sistani, one of the most respected men in Iraq, led to a situation whereby the administration was playing a game of perpetual political catch-up.
Secondly, the administration simply backed the wrong horse in supporting Ahmed Chalabi, rather than Sistani. In its appreciation of the impeccably tailored and mannered Chalabi, the administration failed to question how his exile status and Western orientation, indeed the very qualities that made him a neoconservative fantasy ruler for Iraq, would impair his leadership capability. Chalabi had not set foot in Baghdad since he fled Iraq in 1958 at the age of 14. The wonder was that American policymakers presumed he could speak with confidence for any indigenous Iraqis at all. In many ways Chalabi functioned as the anti-warlord, grounding his power in the patronage he received from Washington, rather than possessing any significant local sway in Iraq.
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Citation: John C. Hulsman and Alexis Y. Debat. "In Praise of Warlords," The National Interest, Summer 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nationalinterest.org/ME2/Segments/Publications/Print.asp?Module=Publications::Article&id=C71D44FAE2CA4BF486C81789761BDA9E
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