There is a scene toward the end of the epic film, “Lawrence of Arabia” that hits me hard. It’s the one where they are trying to work out a deal. Lawrence’s fighting and the combat is done and it’s time for the peace to be made. The men in the scene, T. E. Lawrence, General Allenby, Prince Faisal, and diplomat Mr. Dryden, are played by Peter O’Toole, Jack Hawkins, Sir Alec Guinness, and by Claude Rains respectively. They are working out the deal that will end the stand-off among the Arabs and the British. You got that right, the Arabs and the Allies.
But you say, “Didn’t the British fight with the Arabs against the Ottomans and set up the modern Middle East?” Well, yes they did, in a way. But after they kicked the Ottomans out, they then had to sort themselves out as their Arab and British soldiers were about to come to blow over who would control Damascus. They haggle, like traders in a bazaar, about which of them will control the water works, who gets the telephone exchange, and so on. In the end, they agree on who gets what, but not without the shrewd, old Arab King Faisal teaching General Allenby a thing or two about what life is like in the bazaar where, as the Arab saying goes, “there is no truth.”
But that uncomfortable haggling occurs after Lawrence leaves the room. Before he leaves, Allenby, rather curtly, promotes him to Colonel. When Lawrence asks why, Allenby simply explains it is so he’ll have a private cabin for the voyage home. Faisal is much more honest, frankly, and tells Lawrence to be gracious and accept the promotion. He also chides him, in a grandfatherly way, that war is waged with the virtues of young men. “With courage and hope for the future,” he states with some hope in his own voice, but “peace” he says, with his voice turning acidly as only Guinness can do, is made by the “vices of old men – with mistrust and caution.” Years later, while playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, it’s hard not to imagine him fighting the urge to repeat that line and give the same advice to Luke Skywalker.
In September of 2012, I was coming home to Colorado from England after speaking on Eisenhower’s use of the French resistance. While on the flight, I took the opportunity to skip grading Air Force Academy cadet papers to watch “Lawrence of Arabia,” so kindly provided by the airline. Since the real-life Colonel T. E. Lawrence provided much of the historical and theoretical foundations to those who did the detailed Second World War guerrilla warfare planning I write about in my book- I could, without too much of a stretch, chalk watching the movie up to, well, you know, work. And so, I watched it for the first time in several years.
In the scene I described above, after Lawrence leaves the room for his private voyage home- the King, the General, and the diplomat do their dirty work and hash out a deal. None of the three trust the other and all come at the real issue, short-term Arab sovereignty, from different points of view. King Faisal, during the exchange reminds them all that he will be as tough as he needs to be. After all, as he says to Allenby, “. . . you are only a General. I must be a King.” The look on Allenby’s face is one of a man being insulted. He thought he was to be the toughest guy in the room, but he realizes he was mistaken. Lashing out, he seeks the advice of the diplomat, whose eyes dart quickly back and forth between the two intransigent men, as only Claude Raines, formerly the Invisible Man, can do. Then he lands upon the words that get them to an agreement. They all realize reality and, for now, let the Arabs have pieces of Damascus’ civil administration.
There’s one other guy in the room, a British Colonel Brighton, played by Anthony Quayle, but I’ll get to him later.
The ending scene hit a tender spot with me, as I flew home from London. Just the September before, I was serving on General John Allen’s staff in Kabul, where mistrust and caution were as thick as the soot and pollution in the air. We were well into beginning what the coalition called “Transition” and plans were being executed that placed half of all Afghans under the security and responsibility of the Afghan army and police. Proud of our efforts, we viewed this as quite an accomplishment. While we all presented a confident view about the future, just a few months before, President Obama had decided that what we were doing meant something different than we and our Afghan army friends thought it meant.
As the “Transition Coordinator” on Allen’s staff, I was the guy setting up meetings between our generals and Afghan generals; between our generals and coalition diplomats; and between our generals and our own subordinate generals, who had other tasks, and saw all this “transition stuff” as a big distraction from their more important task of either fighting the war, or training the Afghans to fight the war. It was a very strange job to be in, but I often thought of who in the room might be our Lawrence of Arabia. Of all these endless meetings I arranged, I wondered if anyone, might have the imagination and stamina to be Lawrence of Arabia in the Afghan war. I never saw one.
But I knew that I was more like Colonel Brighton, the other Colonel in the room when the King, the General, and the diplomat ask Lawrence to leave so they can finish what Lawrence started while getting what they each need. In the movie, Brighton is played by Anthony Quayle, a round-faced, classically-trained British actor who plays an officer in the film often a step behind Lawrence in imagination, in boldness, and in understanding of what was really going on. He’d been working with various Arab factions to try to get them to organize their rebellion against the Ottomans so that its impact could magnify the British and French war effort before Lawrence ever showed up. But despite beginning his work with the Arabs after Brighton, Lawrence pulled off what Brighton had been trying to achieve for months. Brighton admires Lawrence tremendously as Brighton’s a good man with no sense of guile nor desire for fame - just a solid, British soldier doing his bit to win the war.
But, if you know the entire history of the affair, or you’ve read T. E. Lawrence’s book, or you’ve watched David Lean’s film closely, you know that something else is going on off screen and that there is another elephant in the room. You see, the French and the British agreed in the, then, secret and, now, infamous Sykes-Picot deal, to divvy up Arab territory between the French and British and leave the scraps to the Arabs. There will be no real Arab sovereignty after all. Even though Lawrence and Brighton believed all along that the British were going to let their Arab allies have their hard-fought-for territory and expand out of the sun-drenched sand dunes of deep Arabia for the sheltered areas of what is today Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel, that was now not to be. The British and French were going to take control of those areas. The Arabs and Lawrence expected what any honorable man in his right mind would have expected to receive for risking his life and losing friends along the way – namely, and at last, a country of his own.
So when, in the fall of 2011, with Transition proceeding along, I knew that the diplomats and Presidents, were letting us pursue our little games while all along they knew the score. After all, they’re harder men and women than any general, and certainly colonel and, I guess, they have to be.
For you see, United States and the coalition had agreements with the Afghans to not leave without the Afghans ready to take over the war against the Taliban. This intent was thrashed out at not one, but two major international meetings, including one NATO Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. The statement from Lisbon says that, “Transition will be conditions-based, not calendar-driven and will not equate to withdrawal . . .” Pretty clear to me, and everyone else, but it also didn’t matter.
Evidently, the American president, despite agreeing to Lisbon, understood things differently. When General David Petraeus briefed coalition Ambassadors in early March of 2011 that conditions were such that he did not plan for the Afghans to be completely solo in the war until sometime after 2014, the American in the room, Ivo Daalder, cabled President Obama. The President then, according to Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, threw a fit at an security council meeting and stated transition would start in July 2011 and end in 2014 - end of story. Conditions on the ground and reality be damned. You see, what Pres Obama really wanted Transition to mean was that the US was leaving. Full stop.
So now, in my imagination, I think of this scene at the end of “Lawrence of Arabia” and I guess, unhappily, I don’t know who the modern day King Feisal is, although ISIS propaganda videos still make hay out of Sykes-Picot. General Allenby could be McChrystal, Petraeus, or Allen, as they’re only Generals after all. And the Claude Rains diplomat, I suppose, is Ivo Daalder, as he, like the invisible man, has little time to care about the humanity of the Afghans or the honor of his nation’s agreements. The kicker is, there seems to be no Lawrence of Arabia for all our trouble in Afghanistan. No one who people will make movies of, or who will write a grippingly thrilling work on the romance of guerrilla war, that then influences leaders a generation later like Lawrence did for Churchill and the British, American, and French of Eisenhower’s Guerrillas in the Second World War and beyond.
The only thing I’m certain of is that watching it all, I’m Colonel Brighton, who toward the end of the haggling in that dusty and dank fought over Damascus parlor, asks Allenby to be excused. He looks as if he’s about to throw up on the whole proceeding and would really rather not mess up his uniform, or the nice rug, there in Damascus that he had just moments before thought worth dying for.