'Americans as Occupiers'

While our military generals prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are clear in providing us with a rationale behind these wars, namely, to destroy al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist Islamist groups that pose a threat to both national and global security interests, many in the Muslim world, including home-grown terrorists, do not see things that way. They view the Americans as “occupiers.” According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist and defense analyst in Islamabad, “’The U.S. is seen as an occupier in Afghanistan, and there's no way that can be turned around.’ He said that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would be ‘terrible for Pakistan,’ but that the United States had created the problem and must ‘clean up the mess before it leaves’” (Washington Post, “Pakistanis voice concerns about Obama's new Afghanistan plan”).

Let’s dignify this charge for a moment and take it seriously. What does it mean to be an occupier? What does empire-building entail for both the colonizer and the colonized?

The history of the world is a history of the rise and fall of empires. That’s just how it is. Most recent to date were the British imperial rule in South Asia, America’s colonial rule in the Philippines , the spread of Nazi totalitarian rule across Europe, and the expansion of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe, among others. There were good and bad empires. But what makes an empire civilizing, according to Churchill, is when it promotes the interests and welfare of the colonized, hence, “a cure to the disease of tyrannical rule” (Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem, 156).

What makes it unjust? An empire is unjust, Churchill says, if it does not help in elevating the uncivilized world from barbarism and savagery towards a life of dignity and well-being. In defending the British Empire, he says that empire-building should not rest only on altruism, nor does it have to be motivated only by self-seeking, narrow interests: "To be just, empire must be grounded on a higher sentiment and principle, but that higher motivation must reside midway between extreme formulas.” This higher motivation lies in an imperial people's desire to improve themselves, for sharing the benefits of civilization with those who do not possess them can make an imperial people more human. In Churchill's view, "Ruling its empire justly further civilizes an imperial nation. At its best, empire is not a burden to be endured but an opportunity for individual and national self-improvement" (Kirk Emmert, Winston S. Churchill on Empire, 53).

Can a democratic nation engage in empire-building? According to Emmert,

Democratic empire would seem to rest on an alliance between two quite different views of justice and the political good. The democratic view looks to equality grounded in a commonly shared humanity, the imperial view to inequality as it is manifested in the superiority of the fully civilized few; the democrat insists upon the primacy of rights, the imperialist upon the primacy of obligations; the democratic elevation of freedom and individualism contrasts with the imperial stress on virtue and man’s political nature; the highest purpose of modern democratic government is to encourage the private pursuit of happiness and the source of its legitimacy is popular consent; the purpose of an imperial government is to promote civilization, and “intrinsic merit” is its title to rule. If democratic empire is to be a viable form of government these fundamentally different principles and the practices which spring from them, must be able to coexist within an imperial democracy (Ibid., 66-67).

That is, until subjugated peoples are able to create the conditions for democracy and justice themselves, a good regime, even from afar, can adopt and employ an aristocratic view of what is morally good and politically just for them.

Between the extremist ideology and cruel rule of the Taliban and al-Qaeda on one side and the US policy of defending, securing, and supporting the local population on the other, can’t reasonable people in the Muslim world conclude that sometimes in the grand scheme of things occupiers are really liberators?