The Future of the Great Game: Sir Olaf Caroe, India's Independence, and the Defense of Asia (review)

Sir Olaf Caroe was an officer of the Indian Political Service, which managed relations with both Princely India and the Raj's penumbra of client states from the Persian Gulf to Nepal. Entering the Political Service from the British Army after World War I, he had risen, by 1939, to be the senior official in New Delhi's Department of External Affairs, the Raj's foreign office. He finished his Indian career as Governor of the North-West Frontier Province in 1946–47. Lord Wavell, then viceroy, had serious doubts about making Caroe a governor, feeling that, for all his bureaucratic gifts, he lacked the robust temperament needed for the job. Wavell would have preferred to name a soldier. The appointment, however, had traditionally gone to a member of the Political Service, so Wavell aquiesced. Caroe's career might have ended less controversially if Wavell had followed his instincts. When Mountbatten replaced Wavell, the new viceroy, attuned to the need to work with Nehru (who had fallen out with Caroe over policy toward the frontier tribes), pushed Caroe out—and replaced him with a soldier. Caroe spent the rest of his life writing about the geopolitics of southern and southwestern Asia, as well as about the "Pathan" tribesmen in whose defense he had sacrificed his career. Caroe has never found a biographer and Brobst does not really attempt to fill that void in this smoothly written and interesting monograph. His focus is rather on Caroe's work during the war heading up an informal think tank, mostly of officials (largely British but with a few Indian contributors), who discussed and debated the future security needs of the subcontinent and submitted papers to the viceroy.

Wavell, who inherited this operation from his predecessor when he became viceroy in 1943, referred to it (perhaps with some amusement?) as "Caroe's brains trust." Its activities may have been the reason he felt Caroe was too donnish to be a successful governor. What Caroe and his colleagues (only one of the core members, Lieutenant General Francis Tuker, was a soldier—and Tuker was a very unusual soldier) took as their basic assumption was an undivided, even if independent, India, with a continued major role for Britain in its defense. Caroe and Tuker even envisioned an "inner ring" of statelets from Baluchistan in the west to Assam in the east still in some degree under British control and providing bases for forward deployed forces to guard India's frontiers.

Like Churchill, who in the summer of 1945 told Wavell to "keep a bit of India," Caroe and his associates could not really imagine the total demise of the Raj and its looming partition. This ignored, of course, not merely what was happening under their noses in India, but Britain's impending bankruptcy and its electorate's weariness with empire. That remarkable man, Claude Auchinleck, the old Indian Army's last and greatest commander-in-chief, when briefed on the "inner ring" concept, merely remarked that Tuker was a very strange man. In the end the pragmatic soldiers, Wavell and Auchinleck, proved more perceptive than the geopoliticians, a not uncommon occurrence. This book can, in fact, be read as an illuminating case study of the pitfalls of geopolitical theorizing divorced from political and military reality, not to mention large-scale maps.