Olaf Caroe
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Through World War II, Afghanistan and Cold War
Early life
Born in London, Olaf Caroe was the son of architect William Douglas Caroe (1857–1938) and Grace Desborough Rendall (died 1947), daughter of John Rendall, barrister. He was educated at Winchester College, where his maternal uncle Montague Rendall was headmaster, and entered Magdalen College, Oxford in 1911 on a demyship, where he read classics.
On the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the Royal West Surrey Regiment, rising to the rank of captain. He spent the entire war in India, where he began learning Urdu and Pashto and acquired a desire to return to the country after the war.
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Career
In 1919, Caroe joined the Indian Civil Service, and soon moved to the Indian Political Service. He was influential in foreign policy and rose to be the Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, serving in that role through the World War II.
When he was deputy foreign secretary, Caroe is credited with getting the Government of India to reaffirm the McMahon Line, which had been negotiated by a former Foreign Secretary Henry McMahon with Tibet in the Simla Convention of 1914. The McMahon Line ran along the crest of the Himalayan ranges east of Bhutan, and incorporated the present day Arunachal Pradesh within the territory of India. For various reasons, the Simla Convention was not operationalised until 1935, and the official publication of the treaties of the Government of India, Aitchison's Treaties, did not include it. Caroe obtained the British government's permission to revise the official Indian maps to show the McMahon Line as the new boundary and to include the Simla Convention in a revised volume of Aitchison's Treaties but to do so "unobtrusively". Caroe reissued the new volume in 1938, but still carrying the original 1929 date, and had the original volumes withdrawn. When the matter was discovered in 1963, it gave rise to accusation of a "virtual falsification" of the official records. Scholar Karunakar Gupta states that Caroe's zeal in operationalising the McMahon Line warrants it being renamed the "McMahon–Caroe Line".
Caroe took a great interest in involving native Indian officials in foreign service and training them in diplomacy. Two of Caroe's officers rose to high ranks after independence: K. P. S. Menon, who became India's ambassador to China and Soviet Union as well as foreign secretary, and A. S. B. Shah, who headed Pakistan's Political Service and later went as ambassador to Egypt.
After the war, Caroe was appointed as the Governor of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), on the northwest border of the Indian subcontinent, adjoining Afghanistan and Russia. He served in this role from 1946 to just before the Partition of India in 1947. Subject to accusations that he was too close to the Muslim League, he encountered opposition from Congress Party politicians, and was replaced in mid-1947 by Rob Lockhart as governor.
Strategist
He wrote extensively after returning to Britain in 1947. His strategic ideas proved influential in the United States:
At about this time there were those in Washington, looking for ways to secure the oil resources and practice containment in the middle east. The formulations of Sir Olaf Caroe attracted attention and soon found favour in official circles. His article in the March 1949 number of Round Table and his 1951 book, Wells of Power, led to invitations from the state and defence departments to visit Washington.