A visitor strolling through halls of the British Imperial War Museum, in London, might not notice that most of the paintings in the museum depict scenes of British military defeats and not the victory of British arms in battle. This is not an oversight on the part of the museum’s curator, but a poignant commentary on the fallacy of conventional wisdom that exists as a contradiction in the realms of political and military logic. Every military academy in the world prepares its students to fight the wars of the future by refighting and winning the lost battles of the last war and teaches them how the defeats in the previous battles could have been turned into victories. It was due to this view that the French Army in the summer of 1940 found itself standing confidently behind the Maginot Line fully expecting the German Army to follow a similar plan of attack as it did in 1914 and that was because the French Army and its officer corps, between the years 1918-1940, were trained to fight the war of 1914.
The German philosopher Friedrich von Schiller once remarked that man learns nothing from history except that man learns nothing from history and this comment stands at variance from George Santayana’s observation that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. There is a delicious irony that exists, as a contradiction in these two statements, in how the political and the military mind approaches a problem and tries to resolve it, because they imply two very opposing ideas. It has been generally understood within the context of Santayana’s statement that those who do not heed history’s mistakes are forced to repeat it and that the mistakes of history need to be understood so they might be avoided, but herein exists the contradiction that confounds the problems in both a political and a military sense.
In this sense, Schiller is more on the mark when he suggests that man learns nothing from history, because the implication of Santayana’s statement also suggests though it is a worthwhile act to learn the lessons of the past, understanding the lessons of the past do not mean a solution to the problems of the future. In reality, in terms of pragmatism of policy options and decisions, learning the lessons of the past could have disastrous results for a future policy, as the experience of the French Army proved in 1940, if the wrong lessons are learned, and that those who learn the lessons of the past are, in fact, condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past in the future.
Therefore, the pregnant question that exists in the minds of the political and military architects of a policy, when they create a policy, is how to balance the experience of the historic past; of similar historic situations in the past, with the unknown quantum of a new problem and in the process, how to design a policy that avoids the flaws of a previous policy which was considered as a failure in the past.
Karl von Clausewtiz, the Prussian philosopher of war, said in book On War, that no two wars will be ever similar as the political reasons behind those wars will always be different and therefore, the political reasons behind a war must be understood if the correct military strategy is to be devised to win it and this also means that since no two wars (or for that matter two political events, because wars like revolutions are a political event) will have similar political imperatives behind them, and therefore, no two wars can be fought with a politically formulaic approach or two political events (wars or revolutions) be even considered within a formulaic explanation as having similarities.
To extrapolate this argument further, what Clausewitz is suggesting is the intellectual synthesis of what Schiller and Santayana said that, in the words of an ancient Greek saying, the past is the prologue to the future. The implication behind the Clausewitzian statement is that the past is not a very practical guide or even a good idea on how to deal with future problems, because though the nature of a future problem might appear to be the same as with one in the past or for that matter two political events might have a similar connotation to each other, the contextual reasons within the two problems will always be different and therefore no two historic or even two contemporary political events or problems can be alike or have a common solution.
Therefore, Schiller was correct when he said that man learns nothing from history, because history does not repeat itself as the context of a past problem, will always be different from a problem in the future.
This is where the problem resides when policy makers undertake the task of creating a policy based on the experience of the past and what is known as the “historic memory”, which is usually quantified as the personal life experience of the policy makers and their own perceptions of a policy decision and the reasons why it was a failure. Political policy, even the foreign policy of a nation, as in the case of its military strategy is based on the experience of the past and therefore, all policy decisions and the thought process that went into it are basically of a retrogressive nature and why there is no pro-active thought ever involved in the idea of a policy creation.
There are two explanations behind the retrogressive nature of policy formulations and first one is very obvious and that is, the policy makers do have a crystal ball to gaze into the future and when a policy is made, for a futuristic intention, it is mostly based on the speculative idea of a presumed assumption of what the future will be based on an understanding of the past. The second explanation is that when politicians/policy makers make policy, all such policies are actually not created for the purpose of being effective in a future sense, but to remove the mistakes of the past policies, which is why there is a very common perception that politicians have no answers for the future problems and are “stuck in the past” and keep trying to implement, or cannot change, discredited policies.
In terms of foreign policy, what this means is that a nation’s foreign policy is also based on the idea of correcting the mistakes of the past, but it is never designed with the idea of protecting the interests of that nation in a future problem or crisis. Therefore, when a crisis erupts in the area of a foreign policy, for example in the case of the Tunisian or the Egyptian popular revolts, it finds the foreign policy of a nation, for example the United States, responding to such events as if it is existing in a “time wrap”. In the case of the above examples, the foreign policy of the United States towards the Middle East was designed during the days of the Cold War to protect United States’ interests and it was not designed to respond to a popular revolt against the governments in those nations and the reason why the initial reactions of the United States to the crisis appeared as cautious and indecisive and supporting a tyrannical regime against the popular notions of freedom, human rights and democracy.
In a similar sense, the reason the United States is perceived in Pakistan with such hostility as being anti-democratic and pro-military is because the United States foreign policy, towards Pakistan, was created with the idea of maintaining the status quo of American interests in the region and it was never intended to support democracy. Since the United States was judging and reacting to the political events in Pakistan on the basis of this calculation, of supporting a status quo, it always misjudged the popular mood and in persisting with its policy framework based on the idea of maintaining the status quo, it alienated the Pakistani population by supporting the very anti-thesis of Pakistani popular aspirations and in turn, radicalized the Pakistani population against the United States.
The more appropriate argument, in the case of Pakistan, is not that United States is anti-democracy in Pakistan and supports military over civilian rule or even civilian governments that are supportive and inclined towards its regional interests, but to argue that United States still has not realized that its policies towards Pakistan do not match the reality of the hour and it is still considering its future policy options in Pakistan on the basis of a past, which is becoming increasingly an anachronism and needs to change this policy, but it cannot change this policy as it has no understanding on how to formulate a new policy vis-à-vis Pakistan. In the absence of this policy guideline, the United States will attempt to compensate the mistakes of the past and seek to create a new policy, which removes the flaws of the past policy towards Pakistan and what this implies is that unlike in the past, when the United States withdrew its interests from the region, the United States will seek to be more actively involved in the region, but this will elicit a countervailing argument from Pakistan that the United States is too intrusive in Pakistani politics and this will, ironically, further alienate and radicalize the Pakistani opinions against the United States.
The United States is committing the biggest fallacy in its foreign policy as identified by Clausewitz, when it tries to deal and solve problems within a formulaic rubric of policy criteria without appreciating the fact whether those criteria and their intentions are applicable to the problem and the attempts to find a solution to them. Pakistan also suffers from this contradiction as shown in its refusal to acknowledge the failure of its policy of “strategic depth” towards Afghanistan or its reliance on the use of religious mercenaries to wage a proxy war in Kashmir. Similarly, the reasons for persisting with failed or flawed policies, in the case of the United States and Pakistan, is not they have not realized the futility of those policies, but more realistically speaking they have no viable alternative to those policies and instead of rejecting them; they seek to tailor them to specific situations because in the arena of foreign policy, the dictum that a bad foreign policy is better than no foreign policy is a powerful argument and no foreign policy maker wishes to believe, in the execution of a foreign policy, that the road to purgatory is paved with good intentions.
It is this argument, which favors the logic of the “devil you know” to the “devil you do not know” which creates the very reasons which Clausewitz warned against: not to judge all political situations formulaically. It is this reason, which prompts policy makers to struggle with flawed policy options and flawed policies. There is no reasonable way around this dilemma because the only alternative would be to ignore the lessons of the past experience and make policy on the basis of “inspired ad-hocism” and this idea goes against the very grain of a policy makers’ experience, temperament and “historic memory” which is based on the idea of seeking a sense of continuity (stability) in policy making options and avoid the pitfalls of “policy adventurism”.
It is this reason, which makes policy makers judge political events (wars or revolutions) and try to compare them and place them within a perceptional view of a past problem and why they always seek to react to new situations with the policies of the old and in doing so, make a worse situation into an even worse one and why they seem, always, eager to pull defeat from the jaws of a victory.
The reason behind this is that most policy makers, when crafting policy, ignore Clausewitz and do not understand Schiller and take the words of Santayana to heart but in doing so, they are not willing to admit that the lessons of history, unless they are understood in their proper historic contextual perspective which cannot be recreated, will only mean wrong policy options for wrong situations. When such options are reinforced with more misguided policies based on a flawed understanding of the historic reasons, it only means that those who learn the lessons of history, and what those paintings in the British Imperial War Museum tell us, should not turn the lessons of history into a dogma and those who do it, will be forever condemned to repeat its mistakes.
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