What the Gurkhas of Brunei tell us about British military overstretch

It is more than 60 years since UK Gurkha soldiers helped suppress an uprising against Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III of Brunei during the dying years of empire. But a battalion of British troops remains in the tiny petrostate — a symbol of colonial hangover and potential overstretch in London’s attempts to assert itself as a global security power since Brexit.  

The Gurkha garrison is commanded like any other British military unit but is funded by Hassanal Bolkiah, Omar’s son and successor. This extraordinary — and opaque — arrangement has endured during a wider post-imperial retreat from international military commitments. It has renewed relevance as the UK raises its visible military profile in Asia.

The Gurkhas, who are recruited from Nepal, are in Brunei because their predecessors flew in from Singapore in 1962 in response to a rebellion against the absolute monarchy. The uprising was linked to tensions with Indonesia and was followed by years of conflict involving British forces on the island of Borneo, where Brunei is located. At the time Brunei was a British protectorate and would remain so until full independence in 1984. 

Sultan Omar’s gratitude led to Brunei’s ruling family paying for a permanent Gurkha presence. The soldiers stationed there are themselves a legacy of the British empire, which fought and then enlisted their 19th-century ancestors after observing their skill and bravery. The Brunei Gurkhas are now the UK’s “largest and most persistent military presence in the region and have been for over 25 years”, Colonel Hugo Stanford-Tuck, the British Forces Brunei commander, said in February.

Details of the deal that keeps the Gurkhas in Brunei are not published. Some historical British official documents that discuss it are still censored while others are withheld altogether from the country’s National Archives. Among the scant information the government has previously given is that the sultan pays for “all salary and almost all basing costs” while the battalion is physically in Brunei. In addition, Brunei hosts a British jungle warfare school and a supporting Royal Air Force Squadron equipped with Puma helicopters.

It is unclear what would happen were the current sultan to ask for help from the Gurkhas he pays for to crush domestic opposition — or indeed fight off a foreign threat. The South China Sea is already a spider’s web of territorial jostling, with Beijing claiming almost the entirety despite a UN tribunal ruling against its assertion. Brunei’s monarch is now the world’s longest-ruling leader, having come to the throne in 1967 at the age of just 21. Emergency powers imposed in response to the 1962 rebellion, which are still in place, allow him to “govern with few limitations on his authority”, the US state department’s 2022 human rights report noted.

The Brunei Gurkha battalion’s status had become ever more anomalous over the decades as Britain pulled back militarily from Asia. In the late 1960s, Harold Wilson’s Labour government announced the “east of Suez” policy to cut Britain’s security presence outside Europe. Wilson prioritised the country’s “ability to get to places where we were needed” rather than sustain “vast, costly and sometimes indefensible bases”.

Britain has reversed this rhetoric lately, particularly since the June 2016 vote for Brexit and the government’s subsequent declaration that it wanted to create a “global Britain”. In December that year, then foreign secretary Boris Johnson gave a speech in Bahrain entitled “Britain is back east of Suez”. In 2021, a foreign policy review by prime minister Johnson’s government made an “Indo-Pacific tilt” a central plank of diplomatic and security policy.

The commitment has endured despite Russia’s Ukraine invasion and increasing pressures on both UK military spending and public services. Britain plans a “flagship” Indo-Pacific deployment next year of a group of warships, led by the HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carrier. There has been little public debate about the risks of British ships and troops in Asia being caught up in conflict far from home.

The unusual pact with the sultan of Brunei is a microcosm of the modern history of British international security ambition. For decades, the agreement was an uncomfortable way of slowing a post-imperial shrinkage that seemed remorseless. Today, the Borneo Gurkhas’ story revives the question of whether the UK is living beyond its means globally, even as troubles mount on the home front and in its European neighbourhood. 

michael.peel@ft.com

Michael Peel’s book ‘What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British)’ is published by Monoray