India and geostrategy
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Robert D. Kaplan: "Revenge of Geography"
Robert Kaplan has an excellent (though disputed) article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy (May/June 2009): "The Revenge of Geography." Although his article is global in scope, emphasizing the role played by geography in conflicts along what he calls "shatter zones" (reminiscent of Huntington's "fault lines" between civilizations, except geographic rather than religious), it has some especially significant observations about the specific case of Pakistan:
Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups -- Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns -- for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan's raison d'être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.
To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.
The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces -- and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.
Geography, ethnicity, and religion -- a witches' brew that makes up the dysfunctional state that we know as Pakistan. We're rather far from Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man, which saw human history as a struggle between ideologies that had reached its Hegelian goal of liberal democracy. But we're also not precisely in those civilizations where Samuel P. Huntington placed us, either, for the Islamic civilization that ought to glue Pakistan together is a rather weak binding agent, given the corrosive acid of ethnicity. The good news in what Kaplan shows is that the Taliban, being an expression of Pashtun nationalism, will encounter resistance from the Punjabis who rule Pakistan and wouldn't want their nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of a different ethnic group. We can therefore expect the Pakistan army to show more resistance than it previously did, for the stakes have been raised by the Taliban's push beyond the Swat Valley.
Or can we? Another scholar, Thomas Barfield, raises some doubts, noting the rise of Islamic radicalism within Pakistan's heavily Pashtun Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its previously secular army:
A lot of people in the ISI are Pashtuns because they had the language skills. During the Soviet War period, [Mohammad] Zia ul-Haq began Islamizing the army. Before, the army was fairly resolutely secular, but since the '80s you saw a greater and greater influence of Islamists in the army as well as the ISI. By the time they were helping the Taliban, some [army officials] were highly sympathetic to this idea of a Wahhabi-style Islamic state. Pakistan was formed as a state for Muslims separated off from India -- its name means "land of the religiously pure" -- and it's always been like, "Well, are we Muslim enough?" (Michael Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve Altogether? (Interview with Thomas Barfield)" Mother Jones, May/June 2009)
Barfield worries not just about a Pashtun attempt to take over Pakistan but also about even a failed Pastun attempt to grab the entire country if Pakistan's army holds steady and manages to keep the Punjab region for itself in the ensuing chaos:
The army has always stood to prevent that [sort of takeover], so presumably if they would hold on to the army, the army would hold on to Punjab and prevent things from getting out of hand. But then the question would be, if it starts to fall apart like that, would India feel the need to make a preemptive strike to go after the nukes? (Mechanic, "Could Pakistan Dissolve")
This is where things get really scary . . . and even scarier is the recognition that the world is full of 'Pakistans'! Perhaps not nuclear-armed ones, but increasingly militarized "shatter zones" destabilized by the tyranny of geography.
actual article.....
By Robert D. Kaplan
May/June 2009
People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it's time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict.
When rapturous Germans tore down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago it symbolized far more than the overcoming of an arbitrary boundary. It began an intellectual cycle that saw all divisions, geographic and otherwise, as surmountable; that referred to "realism" and "pragmatism" only as pejoratives; and that invoked the humanism of Isaiah Berlin or the appeasement of Hitler at Munich to launch one international intervention after the next. In this way, the armed liberalism and the democracy-promoting neoconservatism of the 1990s shared the same universalist aspirations. But alas, when a fear of Munich leads to overreach the result is Vietnam—or in the current case, Iraq.
And thus began the rehabilitation of realism, and with it another intellectual cycle. "Realist" is now a mark of respect, "neocon" a term of derision. The Vietnam analogy has vanquished that of Munich. Thomas Hobbes, who extolled the moral benefits of fear and saw anarchy as the chief threat to society, has elbowed out Isaiah Berlin as the philosopher of the present cycle. The focus now is less on universal ideals than particular distinctions, from ethnicity to culture to religion. Those who pointed this out a decade ago were sneered at for being "fatalists" or "determinists." Now they are applauded as "pragmatists." And this is the key insight of the past two decades—that there are worse things in the world than extreme tyranny, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this having supported the war.
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So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.
Indeed, what is at work in the recent return of realism is the revenge of geography in the most old-fashioned sense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.
And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.
So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the "shatter zones" of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.
If you want to understand the insights of geography, you need to seek out those thinkers who make liberal humanists profoundly uneasy—those authors who thought the map determined nearly everything, leaving little room for human agency.
One such person is the French historian Fernand Braudel, who in 1949 published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. By bringing demography and nature itself into history, Braudel helped restore geography to its proper place. In his narrative, permanent environmental forces lead to enduring historical trends that preordain political events and regional wars. To Braudel, for example, the poor, precarious soils along the Mediterranean, combined with an uncertain, drought-afflicted climate, spurred ancient Greek and Roman conquest. In other words, we delude ourselves by thinking that we control our own destinies. To understand the present challenges of climate change, warming Arctic seas, and the scarcity of resources such as oil and water, we must reclaim Braudel's environmental interpretation of events.
So, too, must we reexamine the blue-water strategizing of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a U.S. naval captain and author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Viewing the sea as the great "commons" of civilization, Mahan thought that naval power had always been the decisive factor in global political struggles. It was Mahan who, in 1902, coined the term "Middle East" to denote the area between Arabia and India that held particular importance for naval strategy. Indeed, Mahan saw the Indian and Pacific oceans as the hinges of geopolitical destiny, for they would allow a maritime nation to project power all around the Eurasian rim and thereby affect political developments deep into Central Asia. Mahan's thinking helps to explain why the Indian Ocean will be the heart of geopolitical competition in the 21st century—and why his books are now all the rage among Chinese and Indian strategists.
Similarly, the Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman saw the seaboards of the Indian and Pacific oceans as the keys to dominance in Eurasia and the natural means to check the land power of Russia. Before he died in 1943, while the United States was fighting Japan, Spykman predicted the rise of China and the consequent need for the United States to defend Japan. And even as the United States was fighting to liberate Europe, Spykman warned that the postwar emergence of an integrated European power would eventually become inconvenient for the United States. Such is the foresight of geographical determinism.
But perhaps the most significant guide to the revenge of geography is the father of modern geopolitics himself—Sir Halford J. Mackinder—who is famous not for a book but a single article, "The Geographical Pivot of History," which began as a 1904 lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Mackinder's work is the archetype of the geographical discipline, and he summarizes its theme nicely: "Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls."
His thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the "pivot" around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the "heartland" in a later book. Surrounding it are four "marginal" regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two "monsoon lands": one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, "deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa" and for the most part "thinly peopled" (in 1904, that is).
This Eurasian relief map, and the events playing out on it at the dawn of the 20th century, are Mackinder's subject, and the opening sentence presages its grand sweep:
When historians in the remote future come to look back on the group of centuries through which we are now passing, and see them fore-shortened, as we to-day see the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that they will describe the last 400 years as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year 1900.
Mackinder explains that, while medieval Christendom was "pent into a narrow region and threatened by external barbarism," the Columbian age—the Age of Discovery—saw Europe expand across the oceans to new lands. Thus at the turn of the 20th century, "we shall again have to deal with a closed political system," and this time one of "world-wide scope."
Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will [henceforth] be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.
By perceiving that European empires had no more room to expand, thereby making their conflicts global, Mackinder foresaw, however vaguely, the scope of both world wars.
Mackinder looked at European history as "subordinate" to that of Asia, for he saw European civilization as merely the outcome of the struggle against Asiatic invasion. Europe, he writes, became the cultural phenomenon it is only because of its geography: an intricate array of mountains, valleys, and peninsulas; bounded by northern ice and a western ocean; blocked by seas and the Sahara to the south; and set against the immense, threatening flatland of Russia to the east. Into this confined landscape poured a succession of nomadic, Asian invaders from the naked steppe. The union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these invaders produced the basis for modern France. Likewise, other European powers originated, or at least matured, through their encounters with Asian nomads. Indeed, it was the Seljuk Turks' supposed ill treatment of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem that ostensibly led to the Crusades, which Mackinder considers the beginning of Europe's collective modern history.
Russia, meanwhile, though protected by forest glades against many a rampaging host, nevertheless fell prey in the 13th century to the Golden Horde of the Mongols. These invaders decimated and subsequently changed Russia. But because most of Europe knew no such level of destruction, it was able to emerge as the world's political cockpit, while Russia was largely denied access to the European Renaissance. The ultimate land-based empire, with few natural barriers against invasion, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally conquered. As a result, it would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory.
Key discoveries of the Columbian epoch, Mackinder writes, only reinforced the cruel facts of geography. In the Middle Ages, the peoples of Europe were largely confined to the land. But when the sea route to India was found around the Cape of Good Hope, Europeans suddenly had access to the entire rimland of southern Asia, to say nothing of strategic discoveries in the New World. While Western Europeans "covered the ocean with their fleets," Mackinder tells us, Russia was expanding equally impressively on land, "emerging from her northern forests" to police the steppe with her Cossacks, sweeping into Siberia, and sending peasants to sow the southwestern steppe with wheat. It was an old story: Europe versus Russia, a liberal sea power (like Athens and Venice) against a reactionary land power (like Sparta and Prussia). For the sea, beyond the cosmopolitan influences it bestows by virtue of access to distant harbors, provides the inviolate border security that democracy needs to take root.
In the 19th century, Mackinder notes, the advent of steam engines and the creation of the Suez Canal increased the mobility of European sea power around the southern rim of Eurasia, just as railways were beginning to do the same for land power in the Eurasian heartland. So the struggle was set for the mastery of Eurasia, bringing Mackinder to his thesis:
As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history, does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident? Is not the pivot region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways?
Just as the Mongols banged at, and often broke down, the gates to the marginal regions surrounding Eurasia, Russia would now play the same conquering role, for as Mackinder writes, "the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human." Forget the czars and the commissars-yet-to-be in 1904; they are but trivia compared with the deeper tectonic forces of geography.
Mackinder's determinism prepared us for the rise of the Soviet Union and its vast zone of influence in the second half of the 20th century, as well as for the two world wars preceding it. After all, as historian Paul Kennedy notes, these conflicts were struggles over Mackinder's "marginal" regions, running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and beyond. Cold War containment strategy, moreover, depended heavily on rimland bases across the greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the U.S. projection of power into Afghanistan and Iraq, and today's tensions with Russia over the political fate of Central Asia and the Caucasus have only bolstered Mackinder's thesis. In his article's last paragraph, Mackinder even raises the specter of Chinese conquests of the "pivot" area, which would make China the dominant geopolitical power. Look at how Chinese migrants are now demographically claiming parts of Siberia as Russia's political control of its eastern reaches is being strained. One can envision Mackinder's being right yet again.
The wisdom of geographical determinism endures across the chasm of a century because it recognizes that the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold. Communist Eastern Europe, Mongolia, China, and North Korea were all contiguous to the great land power of the Soviet Union. Classic fascism was a predominantly European affair. And liberalism nurtured its deepest roots in the United States and Great Britain, essentially island nations and sea powers both. Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss.
To discern where the battle of ideas will lead, we must revise Mackinder for our time. After all, Mackinder could not foresee how a century's worth of change would redefine—and enhance—the importance of geography in today's world. One author who did is Yale University professor Paul Bracken, who in 1999 published Fire in the East. Bracken draws a conceptual map of Eurasia defined by the collapse of time and distance and the filling of empty spaces. This idea leads him to declare a "crisis of room." In the past, sparsely populated geography acted as a safety mechanism. Yet this is no longer the case, Bracken argues, for as empty space increasingly disappears, the very "finite size of the earth" becomes a force for instability. And as I learned at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, "attrition of the same adds up to big change."
One force that is shrinking the map of Eurasia is technology, particularly the military applications of it and the rising power it confers on states. In the early Cold War, Asian militaries were mostly lumbering, heavy forces whose primary purpose was national consolidation. They focused inward. But as national wealth accumulated and the computer revolution took hold, Asian militaries from the oil-rich Middle East to the tiger economies of the Pacific developed full-fledged, military-civilian postindustrial complexes, with missiles and fiber optics and satellite phones. These states also became bureaucratically more cohesive, allowing their militaries to focus outward, toward other states. Geography in Eurasia, rather than a cushion, was becoming a prison from which there was no escape.
Now there is an "unbroken belt of countries," in Bracken's words, from Israel to North Korea, which are developing ballistic missiles and destructive arsenals. A map of these countries' missile ranges shows a series of overlapping circles: Not only is no one safe, but a 1914-style chain reaction leading to wider war is easily conceivable. "The spread of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in Asia is like the spread of the six-shooter in the American Old West," Bracken writes—a cheap, deadly equalizer of states.
The other force driving the revenge of geography is population growth, which makes the map of Eurasia more claustrophobic still. In the 1990s, many intellectuals viewed the 18th-century English philosopher Thomas Malthus as an overly deterministic thinker because he treated humankind as a species reacting to its physical environment, not a body of autonomous individuals. But as the years pass, and world food and energy prices fluctuate, Malthus is getting more respect. If you wander through the slums of Karachi or Gaza, which wall off multitudes of angry lumpen faithful—young men mostly—one can easily see the conflicts over scarce resources that Malthus predicted coming to pass. In three decades covering the Middle East, I have watched it evolve from a largely rural society to a realm of teeming megacities. In the next 20 years, the Arab world's population will nearly double while supplies of groundwater will diminish.
A Eurasia of vast urban areas, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors transported at the speed of light from one Third World megalopolis to another. So in addition to Malthus, we will also hear much about Elias Canetti, the 20th-century philosopher of crowd psychology: the phenomenon of a mass of people abandoning their individuality for an intoxicating collective symbol. It is in the cities of Eurasia principally where crowd psychology will have its greatest geopolitical impact. Alas, ideas do matter. And it is the very compression of geography that will provide optimum breeding grounds for dangerous ideologies and channels for them to spread.
All of this requires major revisions to Mackinder's theories of geopolitics. For as the map of Eurasia shrinks and fills up with people, it not only obliterates the artificial regions of area studies; it also erases Mackinder's division of Eurasia into a specific "pivot" and adjacent "marginal" zones. Military assistance from China and North Korea to Iran can cause Israel to take military actions. The U.S. Air Force can attack landlocked Afghanistan from Diego Garcia, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Chinese and Indian navies can project power from the Gulf of Aden to the South China Sea—out of their own regions and along the whole rimland. In short, contra Mackinder, Eurasia has been reconfigured into an organic whole.
The map's new seamlessness can be seen in the Pakistani outpost of Gwadar. There, on the Indian Ocean, near the Iranian border, the Chinese have constructed a spanking new deep-water port. Land prices are booming, and people talk of this still sleepy fishing village as the next Dubai, which may one day link towns in Central Asia to the burgeoning middle-class fleshpots of India and China through pipelines, supertankers, and the Strait of Malacca. The Chinese also have plans for developing other Indian Ocean ports in order to transport oil by pipelines directly into western and central China, even as a canal and land bridge are possibly built across Thailand's Isthmus of Kra. Afraid of being outflanked by the Chinese, the Indians are expanding their own naval ports and strengthening ties with both Iran and Burma, where the Indian-Chinese rivalry will be fiercest.
These deepening connections are transforming the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian and Pacific oceans into a vast continuum, in which the narrow and vulnerable Strait of Malacca will be the Fulda Gap of the 21st century. The fates of the Islamic Middle East and Islamic Indonesia are therefore becoming inextricable. But it is the geographic connections, not religious ones, that matter most.
This new map of Eurasia—tighter, more integrated, and more crowded—will be even less stable than Mackinder thought. Rather than heartlands and marginal zones that imply separateness, we will have a series of inner and outer cores that are fused together through mass politics and shared paranoia. In fact, much of Eurasia will eventually be as claustrophobic as Israel and the Palestinian territories, with geography controlling everything and no room to maneuver. Although Zionism shows the power of ideas, the battle over land between Israelis and Palestinians is a case of utter geographical determinism. This is Eurasia's future as well.
The ability of states to control events will be diluted, in some cases destroyed. Artificial borders will crumble and become more fissiparous, leaving only rivers, deserts, mountains, and other enduring facts of geography. Indeed, the physical features of the landscape may be the only reliable guides left to understanding the shape of future conflict. Like rifts in the Earth's crust that produce physical instability, there are areas in Eurasia that are more prone to conflict than others. These "shatter zones" threaten to implode, explode, or maintain a fragile equilibrium. And not surprisingly, they fall within that unstable inner core of Eurasia: the greater Middle East, the vast way station between the Mediterranean world and the Indian subcontinent that registers all the primary shifts in global power politics.
This inner core, for Mackinder, was the ultimate unstable region. And yet, writing in an age before oil pipelines and ballistic missiles, he saw this region as inherently volatile, geographically speaking, but also somewhat of a secondary concern. A century's worth of technological advancement and population explosion has rendered the greater Middle East no less volatile but dramatically more relevant, and where Eurasia is most prone to fall apart now is in the greater Middle East's several shatter zones.
The Indian subcontinent is one such shatter zone. It is defined on its landward sides by the hard geographic borders of the Himalayas to the north, the Burmese jungle to the east, and the somewhat softer border of the Indus River to the west. Indeed, the border going westward comes in three stages: the Indus; the unruly crags and canyons that push upward to the shaved wastes of Central Asia, home to the Pashtun tribes; and, finally, the granite, snow-mantled massifs of the Hindu Kush, transecting Afghanistan itself. Because these geographic impediments are not contiguous with legal borders, and because barely any of India's neighbors are functional states, the current political organization of the subcontinent should not be taken for granted. You see this acutely as you walk up to and around any of these land borders, the weakest of which, in my experience, are the official ones—a mere collection of tables where cranky bureaucrats inspect your luggage. Especially in the west, the only border that lives up to the name is the Hindu Kush, making me think that in our own lifetimes the whole semblance of order in Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan could unravel, and return, in effect, to vague elements of greater India.
In Nepal, the government barely controls the countryside where 85 percent of its people live. Despite the aura bequeathed by the Himalayas, nearly half of Nepal's population lives in the dank and humid lowlands along the barely policed border with India. Driving throughout this region, it appears in many ways indistinguishable from the Ganges plain. If the Maoists now ruling Nepal cannot increase state capacity, the state itself could dissolve.
The same holds true for Bangladesh. Even more so than Nepal, it has no geographic defense to marshal as a state. The view from my window during a recent bus journey was of the same ruler-flat, aquatic landscape of paddy fields and scrub on both sides of the line with India. The border posts are disorganized, ramshackle affairs. This artificial blotch of territory on the Indian subcontinent could metamorphose yet again, amid the gale forces of regional politics, Muslim extremism, and nature itself.
Like Pakistan, no Bangladeshi government, military or civilian, has ever functioned even remotely well. Millions of Bangladeshi refugees have already crossed the border into India illegally. With 150 million people—a population larger than Russia—crammed together at sea level, Bangladesh is vulnerable to the slightest climatic variation, never mind the changes caused by global warming. Simply because of its geography, tens of millions of people in Bangladesh could be inundated with salt water, necessitating the mother of all humanitarian relief efforts. In the process, the state itself could collapse.
Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan's raison d'être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.
To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.
The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces—and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.
Another shatter zone is the Arabian Peninsula. The vast tract of land controlled by the Saudi royal family is synonymous with Arabia in the way that India is synonymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by massive waterless tracts. Highways and domestic air links are crucial to Saudi Arabia's cohesion. Though India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on loyalty to an extended family. But while India is virtually surrounded by troubling geography and dysfunctional states, Saudi Arabia's borders disappear into harmless desert to the north and are shielded by sturdy, well-governed, self-contained sheikhdoms to the east and southeast.
Where Saudi Arabia is truly vulnerable, and where the shatter zone of Arabia is most acute, is in highly populous Yemen to the south. Although it has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia's land area, Yemen's population is almost as large, so the all-important demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula is crammed into its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sand-castle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since antiquity. Because the Turks and the British never really controlled Yemen, they did not leave behind the strong bureaucratic institutions that other former colonies inherited.
When I traveled the Saudi-Yemen border some years back, it was crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible. Mud-brick battlements hid the encampments of these rebellious sheikhs, some with their own artillery. Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two.
I'll never forget what a U.S. military expert told me in the capital, Sanaa: "Terrorism is an entrepreneurial activity, and in Yemen you've got over 20 million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hard-working compared with the Saudis next door. It's the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh." The future of teeming, tribal Yemen will go a long way to determining the future of Saudi Arabia. And geography, not ideas, has everything to do with it.
The Fertile Crescent, wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau, constitutes another shatter zone. The countries of this region—Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—are vague geographic expressions that had little meaning before the 20th century. When the official lines on the map are removed, we find a crude finger-painting of Sunni and Shiite clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the governing authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely exist. The one in Syria is tyrannical and fundamentally unstable; the one in Jordan is rational but under quiet siege. (Jordan's main reason for being at all is to act as a buffer for other Arab regimes that fear having a land border with Israel.) Indeed, the Levant is characterized by tired authoritarian regimes and ineffective democracies.
Of all the geographically illogical states in the Fertile Crescent, none is more so than Iraq. Saddam Hussein's tyranny, by far the worst in the Arab world, was itself geographically determined: Every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in 1958 had to be more repressive than the previous one just to hold together a country with no natural borders that seethes with ethnic and sectarian consciousness. The mountains that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the Mesopotamian plain between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may prove more pivotal to Iraq's stability than the yearning after the ideal of democracy. If democracy doesn't in fairly short order establish sturdy institutional roots, Iraq's geography will likely lead it back to tyranny or anarchy again.
But for all the recent focus on Iraq, geography and history tell us that Syria might be at the real heart of future turbulence in the Arab world. Aleppo in northern Syria is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul, Baghdad, and Anatolia than to Damascus. Whenever Damascus's fortunes declined with the rise of Baghdad to the east, Aleppo recovered its greatness. Wandering through the souks of Aleppo, it is striking how distant and irrelevant Damascus seems: The bazaars are dominated by Kurds, Turks, Circassians, Arab Christians, Armenians, and others, unlike the Damascus souk, which is more a world of Sunni Arabs. As in Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, each sect and religion in Syria has a specific location. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druse, and in the mountain stronghold contiguous with Lebanon are the Alawites—both remnants of a wave of Shiism from Persia and Mesopotamia that swept over Syria a thousand years ago.
Elections in Syria in 1947, 1949, and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by polarizing the vote along sectarian lines. The late Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after 21 changes of government in 24 years. For three decades, he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future by failing to build a civil society at home. His son Bashar will have to open the political system eventually, if only to keep pace with a dynamically changing society armed with satellite dishes and the Internet. But no one knows how stable a post-authoritarian Syria would be. Policymakers must fear the worst. Yet a post-Assad Syria may well do better than post-Saddam Iraq, precisely because its tyranny has been much less severe. Indeed, traveling from Saddam's Iraq to Assad's Syria was like coming up for air.
In addition to its inability to solve the problem of political legitimacy, the Arab world is unable to secure its own environment. The plateau peoples of Turkey will dominate the Arabs in the 21st century because the Turks have water and the Arabs don't. Indeed, to develop its own desperately poor southeast and thereby suppress Kurdish separatism, Turkey will need to divert increasingly large amounts of the Euphrates River from Syria and Iraq. As the Middle East becomes a realm of parched urban areas, water will grow in value relative to oil. The countries with it will retain the ability—and thus the power—to blackmail those without it. Water will be like nuclear energy, thereby making desalinization and dual-use power facilities primary targets of missile strikes in future wars. Not just in the West Bank, but everywhere there is less room to maneuver.
A final shatter zone is the Persian core, stretching from the Caspian Sea to Iran's north to the Persian Gulf to its south. Virtually all of the greater Middle East's oil and natural gas lies in this region. Just as shipping lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines are increasingly radiating from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China, and the Indian Ocean. The only country that straddles both energy-producing areas is Iran, as Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy note in Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East. The Persian Gulf possesses 55 percent of the world's crude-oil reserves, and Iran dominates the whole gulf, from the Shatt al-Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz in the southeast—a coastline of 1,317 nautical miles, thanks to its many bays, inlets, coves, and islands that offer plenty of excellent places for hiding tanker-ramming speedboats.
It is not an accident that Iran was the ancient world's first superpower. There was a certain geographic logic to it. Iran is the greater Middle East's universal joint, tightly fused to all of the outer cores. Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.
Of all the shatter zones in the greater Middle East, the Iranian core is unique: The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent Iranian nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it. The security provided to Iran by its own natural boundaries has historically been a potent force for power projection. The present is no different. Through its uncompromising ideology and nimble intelligence services, Iran runs an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities in the greater Middle East: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrist movement in southern Iraq. If the geographic logic of Iranian expansion sounds eerily similar to that of Russian expansion in Mackinder's original telling, it is.
The geography of Iran today, like that of Russia before, determines the most realistic strategy to securing this shatter zone: containment. As with Russia, the goal of containing Iran must be to impose pressure on the contradictions of the unpopular, theocratic regime in Tehran, such that it eventually changes from within. The battle for Eurasia has many, increasingly interlocking fronts. But the primary one is for Iranian hearts and minds, just as it was for those of Eastern Europeans during the Cold War. Iran is home to one of the Muslim world's most sophisticated populations, and traveling there, one encounters less anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism than in Egypt. This is where the battle of ideas meets the dictates of geography.
***
In this century's fight for Eurasia, like that of the last century, Mackinder's axiom holds true: Man will initiate, but nature will control. Liberal universalism and the individualism of Isaiah Berlin aren't going away, but it is becoming clear that the success of these ideas is in large measure bound and determined by geography. This was always the case, and it is harder to deny now, as the ongoing recession will likely cause the global economy to contract for the first time in six decades. Not only wealth, but political and social order, will erode in many places, leaving only nature's frontiers and men's passions as the main arbiters of that age-old question: Who can coerce whom? We thought globalization had gotten rid of this antiquarian world of musty maps, but now it is returning with a vengeance.
We all must learn to think like Victorians. That is what must guide and inform our newly rediscovered realism. Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists, thereby merging the analogies of Vietnam and Munich. Embracing the dictates and limitations of geography will be especially hard for Americans, who like to think that no constraint, natural or otherwise, applies to them. But denying the facts of geography only invites disasters that, in turn, make us victims of geography.
Better, instead, to look hard at the map for ingenious ways to stretch the limits it imposes, which will make any support for liberal principles in the world far more effective. Amid the revenge of geography, that is the essence of realism and the crux of wise policymaking—working near the edge of what is possible, without slipping into the precipice.
Robert D. Kaplan is national correspondent for The Atlantic and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
"The Revenge of Geography"
By Robert D. Kaplan
May/June 2009
People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it's time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best. A journalist who has covered the ends of the Earth offers a guide to the relief map—and a primer on the next phase of conflict.
When rapturous Germans tore down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago it symbolized far more than the overcoming of an arbitrary boundary. It began an intellectual cycle that saw all divisions, geographic and otherwise, as surmountable; that referred to "realism" and "pragmatism" only as pejoratives; and that invoked the humanism of Isaiah Berlin or the appeasement of Hitler at Munich to launch one international intervention after the next. In this way, the armed liberalism and the democracy-promoting neoconservatism of the 1990s shared the same universalist aspirations. But alas, when a fear of Munich leads to overreach the result is Vietnam—or in the current case, Iraq.
And thus began the rehabilitation of realism, and with it another intellectual cycle. "Realist" is now a mark of respect, "neocon" a term of derision. The Vietnam analogy has vanquished that of Munich. Thomas Hobbes, who extolled the moral benefits of fear and saw anarchy as the chief threat to society, has elbowed out Isaiah Berlin as the philosopher of the present cycle. The focus now is less on universal ideals than particular distinctions, from ethnicity to culture to religion. Those who pointed this out a decade ago were sneered at for being "fatalists" or "determinists." Now they are applauded as "pragmatists." And this is the key insight of the past two decades—that there are worse things in the world than extreme tyranny, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this having supported the war.
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So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.
Indeed, what is at work in the recent return of realism is the revenge of geography in the most old-fashioned sense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.
And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.
So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the "shatter zones" of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.
If you want to understand the insights of geography, you need to seek out those thinkers who make liberal humanists profoundly uneasy—those authors who thought the map determined nearly everything, leaving little room for human agency.
One such person is the French historian Fernand Braudel, who in 1949 published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. By bringing demography and nature itself into history, Braudel helped restore geography to its proper place. In his narrative, permanent environmental forces lead to enduring historical trends that preordain political events and regional wars. To Braudel, for example, the poor, precarious soils along the Mediterranean, combined with an uncertain, drought-afflicted climate, spurred ancient Greek and Roman conquest. In other words, we delude ourselves by thinking that we control our own destinies. To understand the present challenges of climate change, warming Arctic seas, and the scarcity of resources such as oil and water, we must reclaim Braudel's environmental interpretation of events.
So, too, must we reexamine the blue-water strategizing of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a U.S. naval captain and author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Viewing the sea as the great "commons" of civilization, Mahan thought that naval power had always been the decisive factor in global political struggles. It was Mahan who, in 1902, coined the term "Middle East" to denote the area between Arabia and India that held particular importance for naval strategy. Indeed, Mahan saw the Indian and Pacific oceans as the hinges of geopolitical destiny, for they would allow a maritime nation to project power all around the Eurasian rim and thereby affect political developments deep into Central Asia. Mahan's thinking helps to explain why the Indian Ocean will be the heart of geopolitical competition in the 21st century—and why his books are now all the rage among Chinese and Indian strategists.
Similarly, the Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman saw the seaboards of the Indian and Pacific oceans as the keys to dominance in Eurasia and the natural means to check the land power of Russia. Before he died in 1943, while the United States was fighting Japan, Spykman predicted the rise of China and the consequent need for the United States to defend Japan. And even as the United States was fighting to liberate Europe, Spykman warned that the postwar emergence of an integrated European power would eventually become inconvenient for the United States. Such is the foresight of geographical determinism.
But perhaps the most significant guide to the revenge of geography is the father of modern geopolitics himself—Sir Halford J. Mackinder—who is famous not for a book but a single article, "The Geographical Pivot of History," which began as a 1904 lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Mackinder's work is the archetype of the geographical discipline, and he summarizes its theme nicely: "Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls."
His thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the "pivot" around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the "heartland" in a later book. Surrounding it are four "marginal" regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two "monsoon lands": one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, "deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa" and for the most part "thinly peopled" (in 1904, that is).
This Eurasian relief map, and the events playing out on it at the dawn of the 20th century, are Mackinder's subject, and the opening sentence presages its grand sweep:
When historians in the remote future come to look back on the group of centuries through which we are now passing, and see them fore-shortened, as we to-day see the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that they will describe the last 400 years as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year 1900.
Mackinder explains that, while medieval Christendom was "pent into a narrow region and threatened by external barbarism," the Columbian age—the Age of Discovery—saw Europe expand across the oceans to new lands. Thus at the turn of the 20th century, "we shall again have to deal with a closed political system," and this time one of "world-wide scope."
Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will [henceforth] be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.
By perceiving that European empires had no more room to expand, thereby making their conflicts global, Mackinder foresaw, however vaguely, the scope of both world wars.
Mackinder looked at European history as "subordinate" to that of Asia, for he saw European civilization as merely the outcome of the struggle against Asiatic invasion. Europe, he writes, became the cultural phenomenon it is only because of its geography: an intricate array of mountains, valleys, and peninsulas; bounded by northern ice and a western ocean; blocked by seas and the Sahara to the south; and set against the immense, threatening flatland of Russia to the east. Into this confined landscape poured a succession of nomadic, Asian invaders from the naked steppe. The union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these invaders produced the basis for modern France. Likewise, other European powers originated, or at least matured, through their encounters with Asian nomads. Indeed, it was the Seljuk Turks' supposed ill treatment of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem that ostensibly led to the Crusades, which Mackinder considers the beginning of Europe's collective modern history.
Russia, meanwhile, though protected by forest glades against many a rampaging host, nevertheless fell prey in the 13th century to the Golden Horde of the Mongols. These invaders decimated and subsequently changed Russia. But because most of Europe knew no such level of destruction, it was able to emerge as the world's political cockpit, while Russia was largely denied access to the European Renaissance. The ultimate land-based empire, with few natural barriers against invasion, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally conquered. As a result, it would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory.
Key discoveries of the Columbian epoch, Mackinder writes, only reinforced the cruel facts of geography. In the Middle Ages, the peoples of Europe were largely confined to the land. But when the sea route to India was found around the Cape of Good Hope, Europeans suddenly had access to the entire rimland of southern Asia, to say nothing of strategic discoveries in the New World. While Western Europeans "covered the ocean with their fleets," Mackinder tells us, Russia was expanding equally impressively on land, "emerging from her northern forests" to police the steppe with her Cossacks, sweeping into Siberia, and sending peasants to sow the southwestern steppe with wheat. It was an old story: Europe versus Russia, a liberal sea power (like Athens and Venice) against a reactionary land power (like Sparta and Prussia). For the sea, beyond the cosmopolitan influences it bestows by virtue of access to distant harbors, provides the inviolate border security that democracy needs to take root.
In the 19th century, Mackinder notes, the advent of steam engines and the creation of the Suez Canal increased the mobility of European sea power around the southern rim of Eurasia, just as railways were beginning to do the same for land power in the Eurasian heartland. So the struggle was set for the mastery of Eurasia, bringing Mackinder to his thesis:
As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history, does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident? Is not the pivot region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways?
Just as the Mongols banged at, and often broke down, the gates to the marginal regions surrounding Eurasia, Russia would now play the same conquering role, for as Mackinder writes, "the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human." Forget the czars and the commissars-yet-to-be in 1904; they are but trivia compared with the deeper tectonic forces of geography.
Mackinder's determinism prepared us for the rise of the Soviet Union and its vast zone of influence in the second half of the 20th century, as well as for the two world wars preceding it. After all, as historian Paul Kennedy notes, these conflicts were struggles over Mackinder's "marginal" regions, running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and beyond. Cold War containment strategy, moreover, depended heavily on rimland bases across the greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the U.S. projection of power into Afghanistan and Iraq, and today's tensions with Russia over the political fate of Central Asia and the Caucasus have only bolstered Mackinder's thesis. In his article's last paragraph, Mackinder even raises the specter of Chinese conquests of the "pivot" area, which would make China the dominant geopolitical power. Look at how Chinese migrants are now demographically claiming parts of Siberia as Russia's political control of its eastern reaches is being strained. One can envision Mackinder's being right yet again.
The wisdom of geographical determinism endures across the chasm of a century because it recognizes that the most profound struggles of humanity are not about ideas but about control over territory, specifically the heartland and rimlands of Eurasia. Of course, ideas matter, and they span geography. And yet there is a certain geographic logic to where certain ideas take hold. Communist Eastern Europe, Mongolia, China, and North Korea were all contiguous to the great land power of the Soviet Union. Classic fascism was a predominantly European affair. And liberalism nurtured its deepest roots in the United States and Great Britain, essentially island nations and sea powers both. Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss.
To discern where the battle of ideas will lead, we must revise Mackinder for our time. After all, Mackinder could not foresee how a century's worth of change would redefine—and enhance—the importance of geography in today's world. One author who did is Yale University professor Paul Bracken, who in 1999 published Fire in the East. Bracken draws a conceptual map of Eurasia defined by the collapse of time and distance and the filling of empty spaces. This idea leads him to declare a "crisis of room." In the past, sparsely populated geography acted as a safety mechanism. Yet this is no longer the case, Bracken argues, for as empty space increasingly disappears, the very "finite size of the earth" becomes a force for instability. And as I learned at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, "attrition of the same adds up to big change."
One force that is shrinking the map of Eurasia is technology, particularly the military applications of it and the rising power it confers on states. In the early Cold War, Asian militaries were mostly lumbering, heavy forces whose primary purpose was national consolidation. They focused inward. But as national wealth accumulated and the computer revolution took hold, Asian militaries from the oil-rich Middle East to the tiger economies of the Pacific developed full-fledged, military-civilian postindustrial complexes, with missiles and fiber optics and satellite phones. These states also became bureaucratically more cohesive, allowing their militaries to focus outward, toward other states. Geography in Eurasia, rather than a cushion, was becoming a prison from which there was no escape.
Now there is an "unbroken belt of countries," in Bracken's words, from Israel to North Korea, which are developing ballistic missiles and destructive arsenals. A map of these countries' missile ranges shows a series of overlapping circles: Not only is no one safe, but a 1914-style chain reaction leading to wider war is easily conceivable. "The spread of missiles and weapons of mass destruction in Asia is like the spread of the six-shooter in the American Old West," Bracken writes—a cheap, deadly equalizer of states.
The other force driving the revenge of geography is population growth, which makes the map of Eurasia more claustrophobic still. In the 1990s, many intellectuals viewed the 18th-century English philosopher Thomas Malthus as an overly deterministic thinker because he treated humankind as a species reacting to its physical environment, not a body of autonomous individuals. But as the years pass, and world food and energy prices fluctuate, Malthus is getting more respect. If you wander through the slums of Karachi or Gaza, which wall off multitudes of angry lumpen faithful—young men mostly—one can easily see the conflicts over scarce resources that Malthus predicted coming to pass. In three decades covering the Middle East, I have watched it evolve from a largely rural society to a realm of teeming megacities. In the next 20 years, the Arab world's population will nearly double while supplies of groundwater will diminish.
A Eurasia of vast urban areas, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors transported at the speed of light from one Third World megalopolis to another. So in addition to Malthus, we will also hear much about Elias Canetti, the 20th-century philosopher of crowd psychology: the phenomenon of a mass of people abandoning their individuality for an intoxicating collective symbol. It is in the cities of Eurasia principally where crowd psychology will have its greatest geopolitical impact. Alas, ideas do matter. And it is the very compression of geography that will provide optimum breeding grounds for dangerous ideologies and channels for them to spread.
All of this requires major revisions to Mackinder's theories of geopolitics. For as the map of Eurasia shrinks and fills up with people, it not only obliterates the artificial regions of area studies; it also erases Mackinder's division of Eurasia into a specific "pivot" and adjacent "marginal" zones. Military assistance from China and North Korea to Iran can cause Israel to take military actions. The U.S. Air Force can attack landlocked Afghanistan from Diego Garcia, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Chinese and Indian navies can project power from the Gulf of Aden to the South China Sea—out of their own regions and along the whole rimland. In short, contra Mackinder, Eurasia has been reconfigured into an organic whole.
The map's new seamlessness can be seen in the Pakistani outpost of Gwadar. There, on the Indian Ocean, near the Iranian border, the Chinese have constructed a spanking new deep-water port. Land prices are booming, and people talk of this still sleepy fishing village as the next Dubai, which may one day link towns in Central Asia to the burgeoning middle-class fleshpots of India and China through pipelines, supertankers, and the Strait of Malacca. The Chinese also have plans for developing other Indian Ocean ports in order to transport oil by pipelines directly into western and central China, even as a canal and land bridge are possibly built across Thailand's Isthmus of Kra. Afraid of being outflanked by the Chinese, the Indians are expanding their own naval ports and strengthening ties with both Iran and Burma, where the Indian-Chinese rivalry will be fiercest.
These deepening connections are transforming the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian and Pacific oceans into a vast continuum, in which the narrow and vulnerable Strait of Malacca will be the Fulda Gap of the 21st century. The fates of the Islamic Middle East and Islamic Indonesia are therefore becoming inextricable. But it is the geographic connections, not religious ones, that matter most.
This new map of Eurasia—tighter, more integrated, and more crowded—will be even less stable than Mackinder thought. Rather than heartlands and marginal zones that imply separateness, we will have a series of inner and outer cores that are fused together through mass politics and shared paranoia. In fact, much of Eurasia will eventually be as claustrophobic as Israel and the Palestinian territories, with geography controlling everything and no room to maneuver. Although Zionism shows the power of ideas, the battle over land between Israelis and Palestinians is a case of utter geographical determinism. This is Eurasia's future as well.
The ability of states to control events will be diluted, in some cases destroyed. Artificial borders will crumble and become more fissiparous, leaving only rivers, deserts, mountains, and other enduring facts of geography. Indeed, the physical features of the landscape may be the only reliable guides left to understanding the shape of future conflict. Like rifts in the Earth's crust that produce physical instability, there are areas in Eurasia that are more prone to conflict than others. These "shatter zones" threaten to implode, explode, or maintain a fragile equilibrium. And not surprisingly, they fall within that unstable inner core of Eurasia: the greater Middle East, the vast way station between the Mediterranean world and the Indian subcontinent that registers all the primary shifts in global power politics.
This inner core, for Mackinder, was the ultimate unstable region. And yet, writing in an age before oil pipelines and ballistic missiles, he saw this region as inherently volatile, geographically speaking, but also somewhat of a secondary concern. A century's worth of technological advancement and population explosion has rendered the greater Middle East no less volatile but dramatically more relevant, and where Eurasia is most prone to fall apart now is in the greater Middle East's several shatter zones.
The Indian subcontinent is one such shatter zone. It is defined on its landward sides by the hard geographic borders of the Himalayas to the north, the Burmese jungle to the east, and the somewhat softer border of the Indus River to the west. Indeed, the border going westward comes in three stages: the Indus; the unruly crags and canyons that push upward to the shaved wastes of Central Asia, home to the Pashtun tribes; and, finally, the granite, snow-mantled massifs of the Hindu Kush, transecting Afghanistan itself. Because these geographic impediments are not contiguous with legal borders, and because barely any of India's neighbors are functional states, the current political organization of the subcontinent should not be taken for granted. You see this acutely as you walk up to and around any of these land borders, the weakest of which, in my experience, are the official ones—a mere collection of tables where cranky bureaucrats inspect your luggage. Especially in the west, the only border that lives up to the name is the Hindu Kush, making me think that in our own lifetimes the whole semblance of order in Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan could unravel, and return, in effect, to vague elements of greater India.
In Nepal, the government barely controls the countryside where 85 percent of its people live. Despite the aura bequeathed by the Himalayas, nearly half of Nepal's population lives in the dank and humid lowlands along the barely policed border with India. Driving throughout this region, it appears in many ways indistinguishable from the Ganges plain. If the Maoists now ruling Nepal cannot increase state capacity, the state itself could dissolve.
The same holds true for Bangladesh. Even more so than Nepal, it has no geographic defense to marshal as a state. The view from my window during a recent bus journey was of the same ruler-flat, aquatic landscape of paddy fields and scrub on both sides of the line with India. The border posts are disorganized, ramshackle affairs. This artificial blotch of territory on the Indian subcontinent could metamorphose yet again, amid the gale forces of regional politics, Muslim extremism, and nature itself.
Like Pakistan, no Bangladeshi government, military or civilian, has ever functioned even remotely well. Millions of Bangladeshi refugees have already crossed the border into India illegally. With 150 million people—a population larger than Russia—crammed together at sea level, Bangladesh is vulnerable to the slightest climatic variation, never mind the changes caused by global warming. Simply because of its geography, tens of millions of people in Bangladesh could be inundated with salt water, necessitating the mother of all humanitarian relief efforts. In the process, the state itself could collapse.
Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan's raison d'être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.
To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.
The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces—and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.
Another shatter zone is the Arabian Peninsula. The vast tract of land controlled by the Saudi royal family is synonymous with Arabia in the way that India is synonymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by massive waterless tracts. Highways and domestic air links are crucial to Saudi Arabia's cohesion. Though India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on loyalty to an extended family. But while India is virtually surrounded by troubling geography and dysfunctional states, Saudi Arabia's borders disappear into harmless desert to the north and are shielded by sturdy, well-governed, self-contained sheikhdoms to the east and southeast.
Where Saudi Arabia is truly vulnerable, and where the shatter zone of Arabia is most acute, is in highly populous Yemen to the south. Although it has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia's land area, Yemen's population is almost as large, so the all-important demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula is crammed into its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sand-castle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since antiquity. Because the Turks and the British never really controlled Yemen, they did not leave behind the strong bureaucratic institutions that other former colonies inherited.
When I traveled the Saudi-Yemen border some years back, it was crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible. Mud-brick battlements hid the encampments of these rebellious sheikhs, some with their own artillery. Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two.
I'll never forget what a U.S. military expert told me in the capital, Sanaa: "Terrorism is an entrepreneurial activity, and in Yemen you've got over 20 million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hard-working compared with the Saudis next door. It's the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh." The future of teeming, tribal Yemen will go a long way to determining the future of Saudi Arabia. And geography, not ideas, has everything to do with it.
The Fertile Crescent, wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau, constitutes another shatter zone. The countries of this region—Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—are vague geographic expressions that had little meaning before the 20th century. When the official lines on the map are removed, we find a crude finger-painting of Sunni and Shiite clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the governing authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely exist. The one in Syria is tyrannical and fundamentally unstable; the one in Jordan is rational but under quiet siege. (Jordan's main reason for being at all is to act as a buffer for other Arab regimes that fear having a land border with Israel.) Indeed, the Levant is characterized by tired authoritarian regimes and ineffective democracies.
Of all the geographically illogical states in the Fertile Crescent, none is more so than Iraq. Saddam Hussein's tyranny, by far the worst in the Arab world, was itself geographically determined: Every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in 1958 had to be more repressive than the previous one just to hold together a country with no natural borders that seethes with ethnic and sectarian consciousness. The mountains that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the Mesopotamian plain between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may prove more pivotal to Iraq's stability than the yearning after the ideal of democracy. If democracy doesn't in fairly short order establish sturdy institutional roots, Iraq's geography will likely lead it back to tyranny or anarchy again.
But for all the recent focus on Iraq, geography and history tell us that Syria might be at the real heart of future turbulence in the Arab world. Aleppo in northern Syria is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul, Baghdad, and Anatolia than to Damascus. Whenever Damascus's fortunes declined with the rise of Baghdad to the east, Aleppo recovered its greatness. Wandering through the souks of Aleppo, it is striking how distant and irrelevant Damascus seems: The bazaars are dominated by Kurds, Turks, Circassians, Arab Christians, Armenians, and others, unlike the Damascus souk, which is more a world of Sunni Arabs. As in Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, each sect and religion in Syria has a specific location. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druse, and in the mountain stronghold contiguous with Lebanon are the Alawites—both remnants of a wave of Shiism from Persia and Mesopotamia that swept over Syria a thousand years ago.
Elections in Syria in 1947, 1949, and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by polarizing the vote along sectarian lines. The late Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after 21 changes of government in 24 years. For three decades, he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future by failing to build a civil society at home. His son Bashar will have to open the political system eventually, if only to keep pace with a dynamically changing society armed with satellite dishes and the Internet. But no one knows how stable a post-authoritarian Syria would be. Policymakers must fear the worst. Yet a post-Assad Syria may well do better than post-Saddam Iraq, precisely because its tyranny has been much less severe. Indeed, traveling from Saddam's Iraq to Assad's Syria was like coming up for air.
In addition to its inability to solve the problem of political legitimacy, the Arab world is unable to secure its own environment. The plateau peoples of Turkey will dominate the Arabs in the 21st century because the Turks have water and the Arabs don't. Indeed, to develop its own desperately poor southeast and thereby suppress Kurdish separatism, Turkey will need to divert increasingly large amounts of the Euphrates River from Syria and Iraq. As the Middle East becomes a realm of parched urban areas, water will grow in value relative to oil. The countries with it will retain the ability—and thus the power—to blackmail those without it. Water will be like nuclear energy, thereby making desalinization and dual-use power facilities primary targets of missile strikes in future wars. Not just in the West Bank, but everywhere there is less room to maneuver.
A final shatter zone is the Persian core, stretching from the Caspian Sea to Iran's north to the Persian Gulf to its south. Virtually all of the greater Middle East's oil and natural gas lies in this region. Just as shipping lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines are increasingly radiating from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China, and the Indian Ocean. The only country that straddles both energy-producing areas is Iran, as Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy note in Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East. The Persian Gulf possesses 55 percent of the world's crude-oil reserves, and Iran dominates the whole gulf, from the Shatt al-Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz in the southeast—a coastline of 1,317 nautical miles, thanks to its many bays, inlets, coves, and islands that offer plenty of excellent places for hiding tanker-ramming speedboats.
It is not an accident that Iran was the ancient world's first superpower. There was a certain geographic logic to it. Iran is the greater Middle East's universal joint, tightly fused to all of the outer cores. Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.
Of all the shatter zones in the greater Middle East, the Iranian core is unique: The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent Iranian nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it. The security provided to Iran by its own natural boundaries has historically been a potent force for power projection. The present is no different. Through its uncompromising ideology and nimble intelligence services, Iran runs an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities in the greater Middle East: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrist movement in southern Iraq. If the geographic logic of Iranian expansion sounds eerily similar to that of Russian expansion in Mackinder's original telling, it is.
The geography of Iran today, like that of Russia before, determines the most realistic strategy to securing this shatter zone: containment. As with Russia, the goal of containing Iran must be to impose pressure on the contradictions of the unpopular, theocratic regime in Tehran, such that it eventually changes from within. The battle for Eurasia has many, increasingly interlocking fronts. But the primary one is for Iranian hearts and minds, just as it was for those of Eastern Europeans during the Cold War. Iran is home to one of the Muslim world's most sophisticated populations, and traveling there, one encounters less anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism than in Egypt. This is where the battle of ideas meets the dictates of geography.
***
In this century's fight for Eurasia, like that of the last century, Mackinder's axiom holds true: Man will initiate, but nature will control. Liberal universalism and the individualism of Isaiah Berlin aren't going away, but it is becoming clear that the success of these ideas is in large measure bound and determined by geography. This was always the case, and it is harder to deny now, as the ongoing recession will likely cause the global economy to contract for the first time in six decades. Not only wealth, but political and social order, will erode in many places, leaving only nature's frontiers and men's passions as the main arbiters of that age-old question: Who can coerce whom? We thought globalization had gotten rid of this antiquarian world of musty maps, but now it is returning with a vengeance.
We all must learn to think like Victorians. That is what must guide and inform our newly rediscovered realism. Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists, thereby merging the analogies of Vietnam and Munich. Embracing the dictates and limitations of geography will be especially hard for Americans, who like to think that no constraint, natural or otherwise, applies to them. But denying the facts of geography only invites disasters that, in turn, make us victims of geography.
Better, instead, to look hard at the map for ingenious ways to stretch the limits it imposes, which will make any support for liberal principles in the world far more effective. Amid the revenge of geography, that is the essence of realism and the crux of wise policymaking—working near the edge of what is possible, without slipping into the precipice.
Robert D. Kaplan is national correspondent for The Atlantic and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Tucker and Caroe were part of the Viceroy Study Group (VSG) and were the mentors of the new Great Game............
Mihir Bose
Published 23 April 2009
Born in Mumbai, Mihir Bose has won numerous awards for his wide-ranging journalism over four decades. Now the BBC's sports editor, he reflects here on democracy in India – and asks if the British really wanted their former colony to survive
As last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten (in white dress uniform, centre right) handed over to Jawaharlal Nehru (far right). It was Nehru's work that made secular democracy thrive in India
At one point during the recent general election campaign in India, the leader of the BJP opposition, L K Advani, accused the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, of being "weak". Singh and his colleagues reacted with fury. This was an abusive term, they said, that insulted both the office of the prime minister and the country itself. Not to be outdone, Advani reacted by claiming he was "hurt" by the attacks on his record, and for good measure then failed to attend an all-party dinner in honour of the departing speaker of the Indian parliament.
Such exchanges suggest that levels of debate in the Indian political class are not particularly elevated. But to be fair to the participants, they have not been helped by the historical inheritance the new state received at its birth. It may be hard to credit now, as 700 million voters go to the polls in the world's biggest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet communism. India's predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.
Nobody expressed this view more forcefully than Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tucker who, as General Officer Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, had been in charge of large parts of the country. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, published in 1950, the year India became a republic, reflected the view of many of the departing British.
Hindu India was entering its most difficult phase of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything . . . then we may well expect, in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.
Tucker was hardly alone among Raj officials. By then, it was almost an orthodoxy to believe that Hinduism was, if not an evil force, at least spent and worthless. Islam, on the other hand, was a religion the West could understand and with whose political leaders it could do business.
Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler of the Raj, had long made clear his fondness for Muslims and his distrust of Hindus. He was appalled by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Hindu classics, and repulsed by the jumble of the faith's beliefs. In contrast, Kipling claimed that he had never met an Englishman who hated Islam and its people, for "where there are Muslims there is a comprehensive civilisation".
The British had seized power in the subcontinent mainly from Muslim rulers, and the crushing of the 1857 revolt, after which the last Mughal emperor was removed, put paid to any chance of Muslim revival. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the Muslims had become the allies of the Raj as it struggled to quell the agitation for freedom led by the Indian National Congress. [b]The Raj encouraged the formation of the Muslim League and determinedly portrayed the INC as a Hindu party, despite its constant promotion of its secular credentials and advertisement of its Muslim leaders. (True, the party was mostly made up of Hindus; but as India was overwhelmingly Hindu, this was hardly surprising. The Raj just could not believe that a party made up largely of Hindus could be truly secular.)[/b]
Such was the hatred for the Hindus, particularly Brahmins, that the Raj could not be shaken from this fixation – even when the Congress Party had political victories in diehard Muslim provinces, the most remarkable of which was in the North-West Frontier Province. Today, parts of the province (which voted to join Pakistan in 1947) are adopting sharia law, but in the 1930s a secular Muslim movement had grown up there, led by Ghaffar Khan and his brother Khan Sahib. They joined the Congress Party and won successive election victories from 1937 onwards, defeating established Muslim parties.
But the Raj pictured these secular Muslims as dupes of the wily Hindus. The only consolation for Sir Olaf Caroe, considered to be the supreme Raj expert on the local Pashtuns, was that they would soon come to their senses, "It is hard to see how the Pathan [Pashtun] tradition could reconcile itself for long to Hindu leadership, by so many regarded as smooth-faced, pharisaical and double-dealing . . . How then could he [the Pathan] have associated himself with a party under Indian, even Brahmin, inspiration . . ."
What would the West not give now for such secular Muslims to return to power in this playground of the Taliban and al-Qaeda – even if under the spell of "pharisaical Brahmins"?
Such caricatures of Hindus were not uncommon (featuring, for instance, in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop), but it was when this view was espoused by major politicians such as Winston Churchill that it became truly dangerous. When Churchill argued vehemently against Indian independence in the 1930s, his fire was directed mainly at the Hindus (in contrast, he praised Muslims, whose valour and virility he admired). As the Second World War neared its close, the British prime minister was so consumed by hatred of the Hindus that he told his private secretary John Colville that he wanted extraordinary destruction visited upon them. Colville's The Fringes of Power records the extreme nature of his master's feelings in February 1945, just *after his return from Yalta:
"The PM said the Hindus were a foul race "protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is due" and he wished Bert [Bomber] Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them." :x
Clement Attlee, who came to power within months, did not share Churchill's Hindu-phobia. There were also historic ties between Labour and Congress. Yet his government nevertheless agreed that a separate Pakistan was vital to Britain's global interests. By early 1947, British policymakers realised they had to withdraw from the subcontinent, but still wanted a military presence there: to protect Britain's position in the century-long Great Game with Russia, and to protect the sea routes to Arabian oil wells. Partition, the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin told the Labour party conference that year, "would help to consolidate Britain in the Middle East".
British strategy was also shaped by Pakistan's wish to remain in the Commonwealth, while India wanted out. By the end of the war, what little love there had been between the Raj and Congress had long evaporated, as most of the party's leaders spent much of the war inside British jails. They had refused to co-operate with the war effort unless their masters promised freedom when peace came. Regarding this as blackmail during the empire's "darkest hour", the British made mass arrests and banned the party. In such circumstances, it was understandable that the pleas of both Churchill and Attlee that the king-emperor should remain as head of state were ignored.
British hopes for the country that emerged were not high. Just before he left India in 1943, the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, forecast that it would take Indians at least 50 years to learn how to practise parliamentary democracy. Even then, he felt it would require much tutoring from the British and other Europeans, whom he thought could be tempted to the subcontinent by the arrival of air-conditioning. (Once they didn't have to worry about the heat, he reasoned, some six million Britons could be persuaded to settle in India to take on the task.)
That democracy took root so quickly and successfully owes much to Jawaharlal Nehru, the first and longest-serving prime minister of India, who was in office from 1947-64. So well did the system embed itself that when his daughter Indira imposed emergency rule in the 1970s – the closest India has come to a dictatorship – it was ended not by tanks rolling down the streets of Delhi, but through the ballot box. That election showed, as have many since then, that ordinary Indians, many of them poor and illiterate, value their vote (perhaps even more than the rich, who feel money can buy them influence). They queue for hours in the baking heat to cast their ballots.
Before the Second World War, the Raj's relationship with India was like a father promising to allow his stepson to come into his inheritance at some unspecified date in the distant future. It never quite believed that there could ever be a time that this brown person would be capable of managing the estate.
This general election campaign may have exposed just how fractured the political classes are today, with numerous caste, religious and communal groups competing and doing deals with each other. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance may have completed its five-year term of office, but many of its allies, including cabinet ministers, are opposing Congress at local level. Some of them make no secret that they aspire to the prime ministership, and all of them are aware that, as the Times of India put it: "Opportunistic post-poll equations will be more important than the pre-poll pitch of the parties."
Yet the patchwork quilt that is made up of British India and the hundreds of princely states united and survived, and still manages to do so despite all the challenges that could have led to that Balkanisation predicted by old Raj hands. The likes of Tucker, Churchill and Kipling were proved wrong: constructing the new nation of India was not, after all, beyond the Indians.
Mihir Bose will be reporting on India for "Newsnight" on 23 April (BBC2) and for BBC World and BBC News in early May
Legacy of the Raj
Mihir Bose
Published 23 April 2009
Born in Mumbai, Mihir Bose has won numerous awards for his wide-ranging journalism over four decades. Now the BBC's sports editor, he reflects here on democracy in India – and asks if the British really wanted their former colony to survive
As last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten (in white dress uniform, centre right) handed over to Jawaharlal Nehru (far right). It was Nehru's work that made secular democracy thrive in India
At one point during the recent general election campaign in India, the leader of the BJP opposition, L K Advani, accused the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, of being "weak". Singh and his colleagues reacted with fury. This was an abusive term, they said, that insulted both the office of the prime minister and the country itself. Not to be outdone, Advani reacted by claiming he was "hurt" by the attacks on his record, and for good measure then failed to attend an all-party dinner in honour of the departing speaker of the Indian parliament.
Such exchanges suggest that levels of debate in the Indian political class are not particularly elevated. But to be fair to the participants, they have not been helped by the historical inheritance the new state received at its birth. It may be hard to credit now, as 700 million voters go to the polls in the world's biggest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet communism. India's predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.
Nobody expressed this view more forcefully than Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tucker who, as General Officer Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, had been in charge of large parts of the country. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, published in 1950, the year India became a republic, reflected the view of many of the departing British.
Hindu India was entering its most difficult phase of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything . . . then we may well expect, in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.
Tucker was hardly alone among Raj officials. By then, it was almost an orthodoxy to believe that Hinduism was, if not an evil force, at least spent and worthless. Islam, on the other hand, was a religion the West could understand and with whose political leaders it could do business.
Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler of the Raj, had long made clear his fondness for Muslims and his distrust of Hindus. He was appalled by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Hindu classics, and repulsed by the jumble of the faith's beliefs. In contrast, Kipling claimed that he had never met an Englishman who hated Islam and its people, for "where there are Muslims there is a comprehensive civilisation".
The British had seized power in the subcontinent mainly from Muslim rulers, and the crushing of the 1857 revolt, after which the last Mughal emperor was removed, put paid to any chance of Muslim revival. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the Muslims had become the allies of the Raj as it struggled to quell the agitation for freedom led by the Indian National Congress. [b]The Raj encouraged the formation of the Muslim League and determinedly portrayed the INC as a Hindu party, despite its constant promotion of its secular credentials and advertisement of its Muslim leaders. (True, the party was mostly made up of Hindus; but as India was overwhelmingly Hindu, this was hardly surprising. The Raj just could not believe that a party made up largely of Hindus could be truly secular.)[/b]
Such was the hatred for the Hindus, particularly Brahmins, that the Raj could not be shaken from this fixation – even when the Congress Party had political victories in diehard Muslim provinces, the most remarkable of which was in the North-West Frontier Province. Today, parts of the province (which voted to join Pakistan in 1947) are adopting sharia law, but in the 1930s a secular Muslim movement had grown up there, led by Ghaffar Khan and his brother Khan Sahib. They joined the Congress Party and won successive election victories from 1937 onwards, defeating established Muslim parties.
But the Raj pictured these secular Muslims as dupes of the wily Hindus. The only consolation for Sir Olaf Caroe, considered to be the supreme Raj expert on the local Pashtuns, was that they would soon come to their senses, "It is hard to see how the Pathan [Pashtun] tradition could reconcile itself for long to Hindu leadership, by so many regarded as smooth-faced, pharisaical and double-dealing . . . How then could he [the Pathan] have associated himself with a party under Indian, even Brahmin, inspiration . . ."
What would the West not give now for such secular Muslims to return to power in this playground of the Taliban and al-Qaeda – even if under the spell of "pharisaical Brahmins"?
Such caricatures of Hindus were not uncommon (featuring, for instance, in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop), but it was when this view was espoused by major politicians such as Winston Churchill that it became truly dangerous. When Churchill argued vehemently against Indian independence in the 1930s, his fire was directed mainly at the Hindus (in contrast, he praised Muslims, whose valour and virility he admired). As the Second World War neared its close, the British prime minister was so consumed by hatred of the Hindus that he told his private secretary John Colville that he wanted extraordinary destruction visited upon them. Colville's The Fringes of Power records the extreme nature of his master's feelings in February 1945, just *after his return from Yalta:
"The PM said the Hindus were a foul race "protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is due" and he wished Bert [Bomber] Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them." :x
Clement Attlee, who came to power within months, did not share Churchill's Hindu-phobia. There were also historic ties between Labour and Congress. Yet his government nevertheless agreed that a separate Pakistan was vital to Britain's global interests. By early 1947, British policymakers realised they had to withdraw from the subcontinent, but still wanted a military presence there: to protect Britain's position in the century-long Great Game with Russia, and to protect the sea routes to Arabian oil wells. Partition, the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin told the Labour party conference that year, "would help to consolidate Britain in the Middle East".
British strategy was also shaped by Pakistan's wish to remain in the Commonwealth, while India wanted out. By the end of the war, what little love there had been between the Raj and Congress had long evaporated, as most of the party's leaders spent much of the war inside British jails. They had refused to co-operate with the war effort unless their masters promised freedom when peace came. Regarding this as blackmail during the empire's "darkest hour", the British made mass arrests and banned the party. In such circumstances, it was understandable that the pleas of both Churchill and Attlee that the king-emperor should remain as head of state were ignored.
British hopes for the country that emerged were not high. Just before he left India in 1943, the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, forecast that it would take Indians at least 50 years to learn how to practise parliamentary democracy. Even then, he felt it would require much tutoring from the British and other Europeans, whom he thought could be tempted to the subcontinent by the arrival of air-conditioning. (Once they didn't have to worry about the heat, he reasoned, some six million Britons could be persuaded to settle in India to take on the task.)
That democracy took root so quickly and successfully owes much to Jawaharlal Nehru, the first and longest-serving prime minister of India, who was in office from 1947-64. So well did the system embed itself that when his daughter Indira imposed emergency rule in the 1970s – the closest India has come to a dictatorship – it was ended not by tanks rolling down the streets of Delhi, but through the ballot box. That election showed, as have many since then, that ordinary Indians, many of them poor and illiterate, value their vote (perhaps even more than the rich, who feel money can buy them influence). They queue for hours in the baking heat to cast their ballots.
Before the Second World War, the Raj's relationship with India was like a father promising to allow his stepson to come into his inheritance at some unspecified date in the distant future. It never quite believed that there could ever be a time that this brown person would be capable of managing the estate.
This general election campaign may have exposed just how fractured the political classes are today, with numerous caste, religious and communal groups competing and doing deals with each other. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance may have completed its five-year term of office, but many of its allies, including cabinet ministers, are opposing Congress at local level. Some of them make no secret that they aspire to the prime ministership, and all of them are aware that, as the Times of India put it: "Opportunistic post-poll equations will be more important than the pre-poll pitch of the parties."
Yet the patchwork quilt that is made up of British India and the hundreds of princely states united and survived, and still manages to do so despite all the challenges that could have led to that Balkanisation predicted by old Raj hands. The likes of Tucker, Churchill and Kipling were proved wrong: constructing the new nation of India was not, after all, beyond the Indians.
Mihir Bose will be reporting on India for "Newsnight" on 23 April (BBC2) and for BBC World and BBC News in early May
Winning the Great Game
G Parthasarathy
Located at the crossroads of Central, West and South Asia, the people of Afghanistan have been victims of great power rivalry and foreign occupation ever since the Afghan state was founded by Ahmed Shah Durrani in 1747. The Persians, Imperial Britain, Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the US and the Soviet Union have played out their great power rivalries on the hapless Afghans.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Pakistan sought to assume the role of a neighbouring hegemon by waging a proxy war for control of Kabul. Pakistan's ambitions now face a barrier, with an American and NATO presence in Afghanistan fighting Pakistan's proxy, the Taliban. But, the 'unilateralism' of the Bush Administration evoked suspicions in important regional players like Russia, China and Iran that the American presence was also motivated by a larger geopolitical desire to control access to Central Asian oil and gas.
With its own territory now the epicentre of terrorism, Pakistan itself is seen as a fragile state, unwilling to forego its ties with the Taliban and its Punjabi allies like the Jaish-e-Mohammed. American policies are changing, as the Obama Administration seeks to deal with an escalating insurgency in Afghanistan. The most notable change that has emerged is American recognition that it shares a common interest in working with Iran, Russia, China, India and Afghanistan's Central Asian neighbours in meeting the Taliban challenge in Afghanistan. I was surprised to be told by an Iranian diplomat last week that the Americans should retain a presence in Afghanistan for 10 to 15 years and not talk of an 'exit strategy' now.
Russia has agreed to arm the Afghan National Army and is promoting the involvement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in emerging developments. More importantly, Taliban attacks on supply routes through Pakistan and the latter's propensity to use its role to bargain for ever-increasing assistance and accommodation of the Taliban, are forcing the US and its NATO allies to look for new supply routes to Afghanistan, with Russian collaboration. Arrangements been finalised to source petroleum and oil supplies from Kazakhstan, bypassing Pakistan.
Moreover, new supply routes for non-military supplies through Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have been negotiated. Uzbekistan has agreed to provide land, air and rail facilities for the US and NATO. The Russians have now agreed to permit use of their territory even for military supplies to Afghanistan. Some NATO countries may even approach Iran to use the road built by India linking Afghanistan with the Iranian port of Chah Bahar bypassing Pakistan. With alternate supply routes in place, Pakistan's present strategic salience will be eroded. Its capacity to blackmail the international community will no longer be credible.
Changes are also envisaged on how the international community deals with Afghanistan. There is realisation that operations in populated areas by foreign forces promote public resentment in Afghanistan, thereby strengthening the Taliban. There are now moves to increase the strength of the Afghan National Army from 80,000 to 134, 000 and thereafter to over 200,000 men. With Russia expressing readiness to equip the Afghan National Army, the aim appears to be to allow internal security against Taliban depredations to be transferred increasingly to Afghan hands.
Also, there is recognition that American and other Western aid programmes have been woefully inadequate, inefficient and wasteful. Shortly after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, the donor countries pledged $ 40 billion for assistance to Afghanistan. This amount came down soon to $ 25 billion and ultimately barely $ 15 billion was disbursed for reconstruction and development. Worse still, over 40 per cent of this assistance went back to the donor countries as payments for their contractors and consultants. US President Barack Obama has indicated that measures will be taken to make assistance programmes more people-oriented and cost-efficient.
India has a vital stake in peace and stability in Afghanistan, especially given the pernicious role of the Taliban in hosting terrorist groups like the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, colluding with the hijackers of IC 814, killing Indian workers in aid projects and conducting a terrorist attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul. Both the NDA and UPA Governments deserve high credit for having fashioned a most imaginative aid programme in Afghanistan, which has resulted in India being seen as benevolent all across Afghanistan.
Amid personal threats to their safety and security around 4,000 Indian nationals are running hospitals, building roads, hydro-electric projects and transmission and telephone lines in Afghanistan. India's involvement extends from solar energy projects and bus services to food preservation facilities and high protein biscuits for Afghan school children. Hundreds of Afghans are receiving training in diverse fields in India. It is no exaggeration to say that India today runs the most cost-efficient aid programme in Afghanistan — an effort that has won our country widespread international acclaim.
While a firm posture by India has persuaded the US that its 'AfPak' strategy should not seek to venture into bilateral relations between India and Pakistan, New Delhi cannot remain unconcerned about Beijing's efforts to persuade the international community to dabble in India-Pakistan relations. While the Americans have made no secret of their determination to limit arms supplies to Pakistan to items for counter-insurgency, China has proceeded with its policy of unrestricted transfer of fighter aircraft, naval frigates and un-safeguarded plutonium production for Pakistan's nuclear programme.
These unrestricted Chinese supplies, together with substantial balance of payments support, have undermined international efforts to persuade Pakistan to end its support for the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. It is in this background that Mr Richard Holbrooke visited Beijing for high level diplomatic contacts, perhaps with the hope that given the current Sino-American honeymoon, China would back, and not undermine, American diplomacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mr Obama's 'AfPak' diplomacy has also been undermined by heavy-handedness in dealing with political developments in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Public criticism of Mr Hamid Karzai has led to increasing his public popularity in Afghanistan, prompting Russian support for the beleaguered Afghan President. Similarly, public criticism of Mr Nawaz Sharif has now been replaced by assertions that he may be America's 'best bet'. There is little realisation of the reality that a public American embrace is the proverbial kiss of death for any embattled politician in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
Very heady mix of politics, energy and ethnic rivalry.However the writer mistakes- everything in Central Asia is not the Great Game.....
May 7th, 2009
By S. Nihal Singh A "Great Game" was once played between Great Britain and Czarist Russia, but the "Great Game" has now moved further north to the southern Caucasus, and it involves not merely Russia and the West but important regional actors — Turkey and, up to a point, Iran. Indeed, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's vigorous "neighbourhood policy", the pace of the battle has picked up considerably evoking the times of the Russian and Ottoman Empires jostling for greater influence.
The most significant recent development was the agreement between Turkey and Armenia on "a road map" towards normalisation of relations after a yearlong series of secret negotiations in Switzerland initiated by Ankara. The borders between the two countries were closed after the 1992 war over the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabak in Azerbaijan and Armenian troops remain there since the ceasefire declared in 1994. Azerbaijan is an ally of Turkey and is linguistically close to it.
Historical memories run deep in southern Caucasus, and Armenians have never forgiven the killing of an estimated million Armenians in 1915 in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, classed as a genocide by Armenia and much of the West. Turks consider it as a consequence of the turmoil in those unsettled times in which Turks were killed as well. But those killings have remained a symbol of the enmity between the two countries, with closed borders making Armenia dependent upon Russia for its trade and commerce.
As long as the Army controlled the Turkish state, Ankara used the genocide charge as a foil to its ultra-nationalism, and it is an indication of Mr Erdogan's resolve and confidence that he sought to change the equations in the Caucasus by standing traditional attitudes on their heads by initially encouraging the formation of a joint reconciliation commission with Armenians. Russia, of course, supported Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabak war. The Russian Federation has now entered the field, initiating moves to resolve the contentious enclave problem by becoming the peacemaker. If Armenian troops could be withdrawn from the enclave in exchange for Russian peacemakers, Moscow would emerge the winner.
The opening of the Turkish-Armenian border would change the contours of the region, with neighbouring Turkish provinces gaining in prosperity and giving Ankara speedier access to Central Asia. And Azeri nervousness would be assuaged by the return of Azeri refugees to the enclave and an end to Armenian occupation of one-eighth of its territory.
These are, of course, not the only games being played in the region. The European Union (EU) has called a meeting of Plus Six — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine — ostensibly to promote regional stability and prosperity without offering the promise of membership. Despite the thaw in Belarus' relations with the EU, it has made it clear that it would not choose between the EU and Russia while Ukraine is frustrated that EU membership is ruled out as an agenda of the grouping's forthcoming meeting. Russia, on its part, is looking askance at the EU's activism, believing it to be an attempt to extend Brussels' influence beyond its eastern membership.
A few days before the scheduled Nato's military exercises in Georgia — a provocation in Russian eyes — Moscow signed security treaties with the two breakaway Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia it had earlier recognised, provoking Nato's "deep concern". The United States had been doing its own geopolitical engineering by encouraging the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum oil and gas pipelines bypassing Russia. The prize catch, of course, is Azeri gas and Gazprom remains a suitor. If Azerbaijan remains less than satisfied with the terms of a future Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, it could divert gas supplies to Russia.
Two new agreements have been signed: the opening of a 515-mile pipeline to carry Caspian oil from the Caucasian basin to west Ukraine, Georgia and Bulgaria and a treaty creating a new Black Sea train ferry route that would give Baku direct access to the West. And in a symbolic defiance of Russia, a midget military exercise of 100 soldiers from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine was held east of Tbilisi.
On its part, Iran has improved its relations with Azerbaijan.
It is becoming an increasingly crowded field, but Turkey is playing a key role. It has the option of the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline to transit Turkey. Mr Erdogan's Justice and Development Party suffered its first major reverse in seven years in recent local elections, but instead of nursing his wounds, he has responded by a sweeping revamping of his Cabinet, bringing in his foreign policy adviser, Ahmet Davutoglu, as foreign minister. In fact, the adviser's regional activism focusing on closer ties with West Asian neighbours earned him the sobriquet of "neo-Ottoman" from critics.
However, the moving spirit of Turkey's foreign policy initiatives remains Mr Erdogan, who has been undeterred by his troubled relations with the European Union on his country's membership prospects to pursue what he believes is Ankara's mission. This is defined as Turkey's uniqueness in straddling Europe and Asia, being a democratic Muslim-majority nation and being singularly qualified to be the peacemaker between a largely Christian West and a predominantly Muslim West Asia. Until the Gaza killings temporarily changed the equation between Ankara and Tel Aviv, Turkey was conducting indirect negotiations between Israel and Syria over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Until the advent of the AK (Justice and Development) Party, the dominant power in the land, the Army, had played on secularism and nationalism and close alignment with the United States as its main themes in exercising power. Although Mr Erdogan believes in the value of close relations with the US, he has altered the focus of foreign policy goals to a more pragmatic stance in accenting the country's own interests. These, in the AK Party's eyes, lie in its immediate neighbourhood and in amplifying the country's assets in the region at a time of mounting tensions fuelled in part by Islamic fundamentalism and the Western response to it.
Great Game gets new players: Turkey, Iran
May 7th, 2009
By S. Nihal Singh A "Great Game" was once played between Great Britain and Czarist Russia, but the "Great Game" has now moved further north to the southern Caucasus, and it involves not merely Russia and the West but important regional actors — Turkey and, up to a point, Iran. Indeed, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's vigorous "neighbourhood policy", the pace of the battle has picked up considerably evoking the times of the Russian and Ottoman Empires jostling for greater influence.
The most significant recent development was the agreement between Turkey and Armenia on "a road map" towards normalisation of relations after a yearlong series of secret negotiations in Switzerland initiated by Ankara. The borders between the two countries were closed after the 1992 war over the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabak in Azerbaijan and Armenian troops remain there since the ceasefire declared in 1994. Azerbaijan is an ally of Turkey and is linguistically close to it.
Historical memories run deep in southern Caucasus, and Armenians have never forgiven the killing of an estimated million Armenians in 1915 in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, classed as a genocide by Armenia and much of the West. Turks consider it as a consequence of the turmoil in those unsettled times in which Turks were killed as well. But those killings have remained a symbol of the enmity between the two countries, with closed borders making Armenia dependent upon Russia for its trade and commerce.
As long as the Army controlled the Turkish state, Ankara used the genocide charge as a foil to its ultra-nationalism, and it is an indication of Mr Erdogan's resolve and confidence that he sought to change the equations in the Caucasus by standing traditional attitudes on their heads by initially encouraging the formation of a joint reconciliation commission with Armenians. Russia, of course, supported Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabak war. The Russian Federation has now entered the field, initiating moves to resolve the contentious enclave problem by becoming the peacemaker. If Armenian troops could be withdrawn from the enclave in exchange for Russian peacemakers, Moscow would emerge the winner.
The opening of the Turkish-Armenian border would change the contours of the region, with neighbouring Turkish provinces gaining in prosperity and giving Ankara speedier access to Central Asia. And Azeri nervousness would be assuaged by the return of Azeri refugees to the enclave and an end to Armenian occupation of one-eighth of its territory.
These are, of course, not the only games being played in the region. The European Union (EU) has called a meeting of Plus Six — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine — ostensibly to promote regional stability and prosperity without offering the promise of membership. Despite the thaw in Belarus' relations with the EU, it has made it clear that it would not choose between the EU and Russia while Ukraine is frustrated that EU membership is ruled out as an agenda of the grouping's forthcoming meeting. Russia, on its part, is looking askance at the EU's activism, believing it to be an attempt to extend Brussels' influence beyond its eastern membership.
A few days before the scheduled Nato's military exercises in Georgia — a provocation in Russian eyes — Moscow signed security treaties with the two breakaway Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia it had earlier recognised, provoking Nato's "deep concern". The United States had been doing its own geopolitical engineering by encouraging the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum oil and gas pipelines bypassing Russia. The prize catch, of course, is Azeri gas and Gazprom remains a suitor. If Azerbaijan remains less than satisfied with the terms of a future Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, it could divert gas supplies to Russia.
Two new agreements have been signed: the opening of a 515-mile pipeline to carry Caspian oil from the Caucasian basin to west Ukraine, Georgia and Bulgaria and a treaty creating a new Black Sea train ferry route that would give Baku direct access to the West. And in a symbolic defiance of Russia, a midget military exercise of 100 soldiers from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine was held east of Tbilisi.
On its part, Iran has improved its relations with Azerbaijan.
It is becoming an increasingly crowded field, but Turkey is playing a key role. It has the option of the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline to transit Turkey. Mr Erdogan's Justice and Development Party suffered its first major reverse in seven years in recent local elections, but instead of nursing his wounds, he has responded by a sweeping revamping of his Cabinet, bringing in his foreign policy adviser, Ahmet Davutoglu, as foreign minister. In fact, the adviser's regional activism focusing on closer ties with West Asian neighbours earned him the sobriquet of "neo-Ottoman" from critics.
However, the moving spirit of Turkey's foreign policy initiatives remains Mr Erdogan, who has been undeterred by his troubled relations with the European Union on his country's membership prospects to pursue what he believes is Ankara's mission. This is defined as Turkey's uniqueness in straddling Europe and Asia, being a democratic Muslim-majority nation and being singularly qualified to be the peacemaker between a largely Christian West and a predominantly Muslim West Asia. Until the Gaza killings temporarily changed the equation between Ankara and Tel Aviv, Turkey was conducting indirect negotiations between Israel and Syria over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Until the advent of the AK (Justice and Development) Party, the dominant power in the land, the Army, had played on secularism and nationalism and close alignment with the United States as its main themes in exercising power. Although Mr Erdogan believes in the value of close relations with the US, he has altered the focus of foreign policy goals to a more pragmatic stance in accenting the country's own interests. These, in the AK Party's eyes, lie in its immediate neighbourhood and in amplifying the country's assets in the region at a time of mounting tensions fuelled in part by Islamic fundamentalism and the Western response to it.
Britain's Faustian pact
Premen Addy
At the time of India's independence, the standard-bearers of the British Raj scoffed at the idea of 'Hindu India' surviving as a nation. Instead, they put their faith in 'Muslim Pakistan' which they predicted would be stable and prosperous. Along with Jinnah's dream, that prediction lies in tatters
Swine flu hypochondria dominates the airwaves in London; after the financial meltdown nothing has so concentrated the mind on either side of the Atlantic and beyond. An irate caller from Kolkata told of a Communist CITU-led strike at the city's airport, but one didn't have the heart to ask if it was the virus or the swine that was to blame.
More immediate and infinitely more troubling are the continuing Taliban and Al Qaeda irruptions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the greater frequency of their depredations in the former's Punjabi heartland. The Obama Administration is at its wit's end mixing dollars with admonitions to its client in Islamabad, the British are witless, with an economy that sinks ever deeper into an abyss and a Prime Minister floundering from one PR disaster to another. Labour MPs and the party hoi-polloi fear a rout in next year's general election.
Against such depressing news came Mihir Bose's New Statesman meditation on the closing years of the British Raj in India. Mr Bose, the BBC sport's editor, has had two stabs at a biography of Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation), so his knowledge and understanding of the region's history and politics demand respect.
"It may be hard to credit now," he writes, "as 700 million (Indian) voters go to the polls in the world's biggtest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet Communism. India's predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability."
Nobody expressed these dark sentiments more forcefully than Lt Gen Sir Francis Tucker who had seen service with the Indian Army in North Africa in the Second World War. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, was published in 1950, the year India became a republic. Mr Bose quotes from Tucker's text: "Hindu India was entering the most difficult period of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything... then we may well expect in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion."
The departing good and great of the Raj were fixated by what they saw as the sly malevolence of the Brahmins and their Indian National Congress. Mahatma Gandhi's remarkable success with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Red Shirts in the Pashtun NWFP was quite irrational, pronounced Sir Olaf Caroe, scholar-governor of the province and a Russophobe reactionary. This unnatural liaison would end as Pashtun martial ardour came to the fore, he predicted.
I recall a photograph of Mohammed Ali Jinnah addressing a Pashtun crowd near Peshawar in English, with a translator at hand to make his words intelligible. The chord of hatred struck by the sainted Quaid-e-Azam — "Islam in danger from the Hindu infidel" — transcended the barrier of language. Contemporary Pakistan is surely his truest monument.
We would, however, do well to broaden the historical canvas to include the first half century of the British presence in the subcontinent. It was age of the enlightenment in Europe, when scepticism leavened belief and social Darwinism was still a distant fantasy. So William Jones presented his path-breaking linguistic studies on the common origins of Indo-European speech to scholarly acclaim, and Charles Wilkins published the first English translation of the Gita, with a foreword by his patron Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of British India and a notable Orientalist himself.
"I hesitate not to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality," wrote Hastings, "of a sublimity of conception reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian disposition, and most powerfully illustrating its fundamental doctrines"¦"
The Governor-General observed that "Not so long ago, the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life." Of the body of Sanskrit works that were being revealed to the European world, he ended on a high note of prophecy: "These will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance."
This early Indo-British encounter became a period of seed-time and remedy. The New Learning in India, particularly in Bengal and Bombay, led to a second modern revelation of India's classical past, the researches of British (and European) scholars being of seminal importance. When, deeper into the 19th century, the Oxford-based German academic Max Müller published his first edited volumes of the Veda, the Bengali Sanskritist Radha Kanta Deb wrote thus to him from Calcutta: "Accept therefore my most grateful and sincere thanks, which, in common with my countrymen, I owe to you." Swami Vivekananda was equally fulsome in his praise.
The Indo-British interaction of these years seeded Hindu social reform, cultural renewal and eventually gave rise to the movement for political emancipation, with the foundation of the Indian National Congress in Bombay on December 28, 1885, thanks principally to the endeavours of the Briton Allan Octavian Hume. Britons of the previous generations were loath to accept that the British Raj was cast in stone. It was only with the expansion and consolidation of the empire and its supremacist culture that suspicion of and aversion to Hindus gained currency. For Sir Lepel Griffin, the blimpish Governor of Punjab, the prospect of Indian self-determination (which he attributed to the machinations of 'Bengali Baboo' agitators) was as distasteful as the suffragette call back home in Britain.
India's democratic and pluralist culture took shape in the 19th century. Rammohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, the Tagores, Keshub Sen and Vivekananda in Bengal and such kindred spirits in the west of the country as MG Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and many others established the Servants of India Society. Mahatma Gandhi was a social reformer even as he became his country's foremost liberator from British colonial rule, and Jawaharal Nehru took this forward after independence.
British Imperialism, fearful of the loss of power through an anathemised partnership, made its Faustian pact with the All-India Muslim League. Theirs was a poisoned chalice, of which Pakistan today is the emblem.
analysis: A new game —Munir Attaullah
Let us not live in the fool's paradise of conspiracy theories and 'great games' but set our own house in order instead of looking for scapegoats. For, the 'Great Game' today is not geo-strategic conflict but trade
Listening to the discourse of many of our geo-strategic geniuses convinces me that they indeed are geniuses. Can they not effortlessly manage the normally impossible feat of squeezing the many quart sized political and security issues of our region into that one handy pint sized bottle labelled the 'Great Game'?
Now my opinion is that this 'Great Game' business is really no more than an artful canard. Worse, it is, to mix metaphors, a mighty heavy albatross round our neck that stifles our political respiratory system. Such a position needs some arguments to support it.
Incidentally, that word 'canard' I used above is the French word for 'a duck'. The English, in their usual creatively assimilative manner, have borrowed the word from the French idiomatic phrase, vendre un canard a moitie (meaning, literally, 'to half sell a duck') to express the general idea of 'a deliberately concocted false story'. The question remains why the English should choose to associate such a beautiful and harmless bird with such a baleful concept. And, as if that is not enough, we also talk of 'being a dead/lame duck' and being 'out for a duck'. Is that not defamatory of a lovely creature?
A little history first may not be out of place. In the heyday of expansionist Imperialism in the 19th century, the big powers actively pursued a policy of territorial acquisition and establishing 'spheres of interest'. Such policies inevitably and often brought two or more such Imperial powers into conflict on the outer fringes of their empires. Tsarist Russia had brought Central Asia under its direct control, and was knocking on the northern doors of Persia.
On the other hand, India was 'the jewel in the crown' of a British Empire that also had 'vital interests' in the Middle East to protect. A possible clash between these two powers could not therefore be ruled out, though the forbiddingly difficult terrain of an Afghanistan that separated the two empires strongly argued against such a possibility.
Ironically enough, there is no historical evidence whatsoever that Tsarist Russia was either worried about a British expansion northward, or had any intention itself of extending its influence southwards. But British military strategists took the reverse possibility much more seriously. Their idea was to control both sides of the Khyber Pass by either subjugating Afghanistan or bringing it under its sphere of interest to create a 'buffer' between the two empires.
To this end the bogey of Russia wanting 'access to warm waters' was assiduously promoted, even though there is not a shred of evidence from Russian historical archives of such intentions. These assumed and actual machinations soon came to be known in Britain (thanks in large part to Kipling) as the 'Great Game', with Afghanistan as the playing field. Frankly, it was never much of a game, let alone a 'great' one!
But this bogey of 'access to warm waters' came in handy for General Zia and the Americans when Russia did finally intervene in Afghanistan in the Cold War era. By suggesting an imminent threat to Pakistan, it justified our involvement as a frontline state. Only, no one bothered to ask why, what may well have been true a century ago, should the Russian fleet be now so desperate for a warm water port. Is this not the age of ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines that need not return to port for servicing for a long time?
The next sighting of the 'Great Game' genie followed the break-up of the Soviet empire. This time, allegedly, it was an all-American game (with the Russians as essentially helpless spectators) where the prize supposedly up for grabs was the rich natural resources of Central Asia. There was supposedly an additional bonus. By pre-empting the Chinese out of these resources, the US could keep in check Chinese ambitions to be a world power.
Such thoughts again reflect pre-globalisation thinking. Then, trade and political hegemony often went hand in hand. Today, the relationship between the two is much more tenuous. Why should simple business deals for mutual benefit be always given sinister geo-political overtones? Is the rest of the world not happy currently to satisfy the voracious appetite of the Chinese economy for raw materials? Is not the US a major investor in China and, along with Europe, a big supplier of capital to Russia?
Actually, the efficient exploitation of their natural resources by the Central Asian Republics (with the help of American capital, technology, and know-how) will, in due course, help, not throttle, the Chinese economy next door.
With the arrival of US forces in Afghanistan after 9/11, and the increasing instability in the region thanks to militant Islamic forces, coupled with closer US-Indian ties, new twists were added by conspiracy theorists to the 'Great Game' concept to update it and give it greater plausibility. Now everything — from the obscure China angle, to encircling Pakistan and stripping it of its nuclear weapons by bringing it under Indian hegemony — has been thrown into the 'Great Game' pot.
What is the factual reality? Can a country that totally ignored Afghanistan for 20 years after the Russian defeat, be really said to have a geo-political strategic interest in it? The correct perspective is that the US is only in Afghanistan as a direct consequence of 9/11 because of a real or perceived security threat from Al Qaeda.
Of more direct interest to us is this 'Indian hegemony' and 'stripping us of our nuclear assets' business that are part of the alleged Great Game now. Let me first deal with the latter in a commonsense way.
Nuclear capability is about know-how. Once you have it, you have it. Yes, you can destroy existing stockpiles and the related infrastructure but these can always be replaced in due course. So any effective 'stripping', if it has to come about at all, has to be voluntary rather than coercive.
What worries the world is not that we have nuclear weapons. India and Israel have them too. What worries the world is what might happen if they are controlled by a radical Pakistani state. The world is not so much anxious to strip us of our nuclear assets as it is to see that we reform ourselves into a responsible, non-radical state.
Now you may rubbish such fears as wholly unfounded. But I have heard many a supposedly educated and responsible person flatly state (in the Indian context) that, "why have we developed these weapons if we don't plan to use them?" Who twenty years ago could have predicted that our country would become the global epicentre of a special kind of terrorism and that today the state is under serious threat from extremists?
As for an American-Indian plot to sandwich us between India and an India-leaning Afghanistan, and destabilise and break up Pakistan before imposing Indian hegemony upon us, again consider the matter from a commonsense point of view.
Is there a Pakistani who will disagree that an unstable Afghanistan is a great danger to us, and that, conversely, a stable Afghanistan is in our great interest? Now why should India think any differently about us? It stretches my credulity, as it should yours, to believe that Indian policy makers would love nothing better than a nuclear-armed unstable country as a neighbour.
No, let us not live in the fool's paradise of conspiracy theories and 'great games' but set our own house in order instead of looking for scapegoats. For, the 'great game' today is not geo-strategic conflict but trade.
Pipelineistan Goes Af-Pak
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
Back in March, Pepe Escobar, that itchy, edgy global reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, began laying out the great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia, or what he likes to call Pipelinestan for its web of oil and natural gas pipelines. In his first report, he dealt with the embattled energy corridor (and a key pipeline) that runs from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Georgia and Turkey—and the Great Game of business, diplomacy, and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. that has gone with it.
Now, in the second of what will be periodic "postcards" from the energy heartlands of the planet, he plunges eastward into tumultuous Central and South Asia and the great devolving battleground that, in Washington, now goes by the neologism of Af-Pak (for the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations). There, the skies are filled with planes and unmanned aerial drones, and civilians as well as combatants die every day in increasing numbers as ever more frequent attacks and expanding conflicts make daily headlines, while, in Afghanistan, Washington continues to build new military bases and ready itself to send in reinforcementsThose are, of course, the front-page stories. Energy, especially in the form of oil and natural gas, fuels everything from civilization to its various discontents and means of destruction, and yet it remains largely on the business pages of our papers. Even in a time of relatively depressed oil and gas prices, energy runs like an undercurrent just beneath global headlines. Under the carnage of war, that is, courses what Escobar likes to call the Liquid War, and just how the energy flows and through which territories controlled by whom does turn out to make—quite literally—a world of difference, even if that isn't what captures our attention most of the time.
Today, let Escobar, whose latest book is Obama Does Globalistan, take you deep into the "New Great Game" that will determine the shape of our future planet. Tom
Blue Gold, Turkmen Bashes, and Asian Grids
Pipelineistan in Conflict
By Pepe Escobar
As Barack Obama heads into his second hundred days in office, let's head for the big picture ourselves, the ultimate global plot line, the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order. In its first hundred days, the Obama presidency introduced us to a brand new acronym, OCO for Overseas Contingency Operations, formerly known as GWOT (as in Global War on Terror). Use either name, or anything else you want, and what you're really talking about is what's happening on the immense energy battlefield that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean. It's there that the Liquid War for the control of Eurasia takes place.
Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland—Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI and TAPI. Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.
We've already seen Pipelineistan wars in Kosovo and Georgia, and we've followed Washington's favorite pipeline, the BTC, which was supposed to tilt the flow of energy westward, sending oil coursing past both Iran and Russia. Things didn't quite turn out that way, but we've got to move on, the New Great Game never stops. Now, it's time to grasp just what the Asian Energy Security Grid is all about, visit a surreal natural gas republic, and understand why that Grid is so deeply implicated in the Af-Pak war.
Every time I've visited Iran, energy analysts stress the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics." What they mean is the ultimate importance to various great and regional powers of Asian integration via a sprawling mass of energy pipelines that will someday, somehow, link the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia, Russia, and China. The major Iranian card in the Asian integration game is the gigantic South Pars natural gas field (which Iran shares with Qatar). It is estimated to hold at least 9% of the world's proven natural gas reserves.
As much as Washington may live in perpetual denial, Russia and Iran together control roughly 20% of the world's oil reserves and nearly 50% of its gas reserves. Think about that for a moment. It's little wonder that, for the leadership of both countries as well as China's, the idea of Asian integration, of the Grid, is sacrosanct.
If it ever gets built, a major node on that Grid will surely be the prospective $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline." After years of wrangling, a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. At least in this rare case, both Pakistan and India stood shoulder to shoulder in rejecting relentless pressure from the Bush administration to scotch the deal.
It couldn't be otherwise. Pakistan, after all, is an energy-poor, desperate customer of the Grid. One year ago, in a speech at Beijing's Tsinghua University, then-President Pervez Musharraf did everything but drop to his knees and beg China to dump money into pipelines linking the Persian Gulf and Pakistan with China's Far West. If this were to happen, it might help transform Pakistan from a near-failed state into a mighty "energy corridor" to the Middle East. If you think of a pipeline as an umbilical cord, it goes without saying that IPI, far more than any form of U.S. aid (or outright interference), would go the extra mile in stabilizing the Pak half of Obama's Af-Pak theater of operations, and even possibly relieve it of its India obsession.
If Pakistan's fate is in question, Iran's is another matter. Though currently only holding "observer" status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), sooner or later it will inevitably become a full member and so enjoy NATO-style, an-attack-on-one-of-us-is-an-attack-on-all-of-us protection. Imagine, then, the cataclysmic consequences of an Israeli preemptive strike (backed by Washington or not) on Iran's nuclear facilities. The SCO will tackle this knotty issue at its next summit in June, in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell—and will remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already clinched a $100 billion gas "deal of the century" with the Iranians, and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well as nuclear energy technology.
And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you may never have heard a thing about. Let's correct that now.
Gurbanguly Is the Man
Alas, the sun-king of Turkmenistan, the wily, wacky Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Nyazov, "the father of all Turkmen" (descendants of a formidable race of nomadic horseback warriors who used to attack Silk Road caravans) is now dead. But far from forgotten.
The Chinese were huge fans of the Turkmenbashi. And the joy was mutual. One key reason the Central Asians love to do business with China is that the Middle Kingdom, unlike both Russia and the United States, carries little modern imperial baggage. And of course, China will never carp about human rights or foment a color-coded revolution of any sort.
The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion. When China signed the agreement to build it in 2007, they made sure to add a clever little geopolitical kicker. The agreement explicitly states that "Chinese interests" will not be "threatened from [Turkmenistan's] territory by third parties." In translation: no Pentagon bases allowed in that country.
China's deft energy diplomacy game plan in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is a pure winner. In the case of Turkmenistan, lucrative deals are offered and partnerships with Russia are encouraged to boost Turkmen gas production. There are to be no Russian-Chinese antagonisms, as befits the main partners in the SCO, because the Asian Energy Security Grid story is really and truly about them.
By the way, elsewhere on the Grid, those two countries recently agreed to extend the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to China by the end of 2010. After all, energy-ravenous China badly needs not just Turkmen gas, but Russia's liquefied natural gas (LNG).
With energy prices low and the global economy melting down, times are sure to be tough for the Kremlin through at least 2010, but this won't derail its push to forge a Central Asian energy club within the SCO. Think of all this as essentially an energy entente cordiale with China. Russian Deputy Industry and Energy Minister Ivan Materov has been among those insistently swearing that this will not someday lead to a "gas OPEC" within the SCO. It remains to be seen how the Obama national security team decides to counteract the successful Russian strategy of undermining by all possible means a U.S.-promoted East-West Caspian Sea energy corridor, while solidifying a Russian-controlled Pipelineistan stretching from Kazakhstan to Greece that will monopolize the flow of energy to Western Europe.
The Real Afghan War
In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question—why Afghanistan matters—is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.
And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.
Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of U.S. foreign policy since President Richard Nixon's era in the early 1970s has been to split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused on this since the U.S. Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. That act clearly identified American geo-strategic interests from the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy corridor. Afghanistan, as it happens, sits conveniently at the crossroads of any new Silk Road linking the Caucasus to western China, and four nuclear powers (China, Russia, Pakistan, and India) lurk in the vicinity. "Losing" Afghanistan and its key network of U.S. military bases would, from the Pentagon's point of view, be a disaster, and though it may be a secondary matter in the New Great Game of the moment, it's worth remembering that the country itself is a lot more than the towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and immense deserts: it's believed to be rich in unexplored deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chrome, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, and iron ore, as well as precious and semiprecious stones.
And there's something highly toxic to be added to this already lethal mix: don't forget the narco-dollar angle—the fact that the global heroin cartels that feast on Afghanistan only work with U.S. dollars, not euros. For the SCO, the top security threat in Afghanistan isn't the Taliban, but the drug business. Russia's anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov routinely blasts the disaster that passes for a U.S./NATO anti-drug war there, stressing that Afghan heroin now kills 30,000 Russians annually, twice as many as were killed during the decade-long U.S.-supported anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s.
And then, of course, there are those competing pipelines that, if ever built, either would or wouldn't exclude Iran and Russia from the action to their south. In April 2008, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India actually signed an agreement to build a long-dreamt-about $7.6 billion (and counting) pipeline, whose acronym TAPI combines the first letters of their names and would also someday deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India without the involvement of either Iran or Russia. It would cut right through the heart of Western Afghanistan, in Herat, and head south across lightly populated Nimruz and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban, various Pashtun guerrillas and assorted highway robbers now merrily run rings around U.S. and NATO forces and where—surprise!—the U.S. is now building in Dasht-e-Margo ("the Desert of Death") a new mega-base to host President Obama's surge troops.
TAPI's rival is the already mentioned IPI, also theoretically underway and widely derided by Heritage Foundation types in the U.S., who regularly launch blasts of angry prose at the nefarious idea of India and Pakistan importing gas from "evil" Iran. Theoretically, TAPI's construction will start in 2010 and the gas would begin flowing by 2015. (Don't hold your breath.) Embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who can hardly secure a few square blocks of central Kabul, even with the help of international forces, nonetheless offered assurances last year that he would not only rid his country of millions of land mines along TAPI's route, but somehow get rid of the Taliban in the bargain.
Should there be investors (nursed by Afghan opium dreams) delirious enough to sink their money into such a pipeline—and that's a monumental if—Afghanistan would collect only $160 million a year in transit fees, a mere bagatelle even if it does represent a big chunk of the embattled Karzai's current annual revenue. Count on one thing though, if it ever happened, the Taliban and assorted warlords/highway robbers would be sure to get a cut of the action.
A Clinton-Bush-Obama Great Game
TAPI's roller-coaster history actually begins in the mid-1990s, the Clinton era, when the Taliban were dined (but not wined) by the California-based energy company Unocal and the Clinton machine. In 1995, Unocal first came up with the pipeline idea, even then a product of Washington's fatal urge to bypass both Iran and Russia. Next, Unocal talked to the Turkmenbashi, then to the Taliban, and so launched a classic New Great Game gambit that has yet to end and without which you can't understand the Afghan war Obama has inherited.
A Taliban delegation, thanks to Unocal, enjoyed Houston's hospitality in early 1997 and then Washington's in December of that year. When it came to energy negotiations, the Taliban's leadership was anything but medieval. They were tough bargainers, also cannily courting the Argentinean private oil company Bridas, which had secured the right to explore and exploit oil reserves in eastern Turkmenistan.
In August 1997, financially unstable Bridas sold 60% of its stock to Amoco, which merged the next year with British Petroleum. A key Amoco consultant happened to be that ubiquitous Eurasian player, former national security advisor Zbig Brzezinski, while another such luminary, Henry Kissinger, just happened to be a consultant for Unocal. BP-Amoco, already developing the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, now became the major player in what had already been dubbed the Trans-Afghan Pipeline or TAP. Inevitably, Unocal and BP-Amoco went to war and let the lawyers settle things in a Texas court, where, in October 1998 as the Clinton years drew to an end, BP-Amoco seemed to emerge with the upper hand.
Under newly elected president George W. Bush, however, Unocal snuck back into the game and, as early as January 2001, was cozying up to the Taliban yet again, this time supported by a star-studded governmental cast of characters, including Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, himself a former Unocal lobbyist. The Taliban were duly invited back to Washington in March 2001 via Rahmatullah Hashimi, a top aide to "The Shadow," the movement's leader Mullah Omar.
Negotiations eventually broke down because of those pesky transit fees the Taliban demanded. Beware the Empire's fury. At a Group of Eight summit meeting in Genoa in July 2001, Western diplomats indicated that the Bush administration had decided to take the Taliban down before year's end. (Pakistani diplomats in Islamabad would later confirm this to me.) The attacks of September 11, 2001 just slightly accelerated the schedule. Nicknamed "the kebab seller" in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset and Unocal representative, who had entertained visiting Taliban members at barbecues in Houston, was soon forced down Afghan throats as the country's new leader.
Among the first fruits of Donald Rumsfeld's bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 was the signing by Karzai, Pakistani President Musharraf and Turkmenistan's Nyazov of an agreement committing themselves to build TAP, and so was formally launched a Pipelineistan extension from Central to South Asia with brand USA stamped all over it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did nothing—until September 2006, that is, when he delivered his counterpunch with panache. That's when Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed to buy Nyazov's natural gas at the 40% mark-up the dictator demanded. In return, the Russians received priceless gifts (and the Bush administration a pricey kick in the face). Nyazov turned over control of Turkmenistan's entire gas surplus to the Russian company through 2009, indicated a preference for letting Russia explore the country's new gas fields, and stated that Turkmenistan was bowing out of any U.S.-backed Trans-Caspian pipeline project. (And while he was at it, Putin also cornered much of the gas exports of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well.)
Thus, almost five years later, with occupied Afghanistan in increasingly deadly chaos, TAP seemed dead-on-arrival. The (invisible) star of what would later turn into Obama's "good" war was already a corpse.
But here's the beauty of Pipelineistan: like zombies, dead deals always seem to return and so the game goes on forever.
Just when Russia thought it had Turkmenistan locked in"¦
A Turkmen Bash
They don't call Turkmenistan a "gas republic" for nothing. I've crossed it from the Uzbek border to a Caspian Sea port named—what else—Turkmenbashi where you can purchase one kilo of fresh Beluga for $100 and a camel for $200. That's where the gigantic gas fields are, and it's obvious that most have not been fully explored. When, in October 2008, the British consultancy firm GCA confirmed that the Yolotan-Osman gas fields in southwest Turkmenistan were among the world's four largest, holding up to a staggering 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, Turkmenistan promptly grabbed second place in the global gas reserves sweepstakes, way ahead of Iran and only 20% below Russia. With that news, the earth shook seismically across Pipelineistan.
Just before he died in December 2006, the flamboyant Turkmenbashi boasted that his country held enough reserves to export 150 billion cubic meters of gas annually for the next 250 years. Given his notorious megalomania, nobody took him seriously. So in March 2008, our man Gurbanguly ordered a GCA audit to dispel any doubts. After all, in pure Asian Energy Security Grid mode, Turkmenistan had already signed contracts to supply Russia with about 50 billion cubic meters annually, China with 40 billion cubic meters, and Iran with 8 billion cubic meters.
And yet, none of this turns out to be quite as monumental or settled as it may look. In fact, Turkmenistan and Russia may be playing the energy equivalent of Russian roulette. After all, virtually all of Turkmenistani gas exports flow north through an old, crumbling Soviet system of pipelines, largely built in the 1960s. Add to this a Turkmeni knack for raising the stakes non-stop at a time when Gazprom has little choice but to put up with it: without Turkmen gas, it simply can't export all it needs to Europe, the source of 70% of Gazprom's profits.
Worse yet, according to a Gazprom source quoted in the Russian business daily Kommersant, the stark fact is that the company only thought it controlled all of Turkmenistan's gas exports; the newly discovered gas mega-fields turn out not to be part of the deal. As my Asia Times colleague, former ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar put the matter, Gazprom's mistake "is proving to be a misconception of Himalayan proportions."
In fact, it's as if the New Great Gamesters had just discovered another Everest. This year, Obama's national security strategists lost no time unleashing a no-holds-barred diplomatic campaign to court Turkmenistan. The goal? To accelerate possible ways for all that new Turkmeni gas to flow through the right pipes, and create quite a different energy map and future. Apart from TAPI, another key objective is to make the prospective $5.8 billion Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline become viable and thus, of course, trump the Russians. In that way, a key long-term U.S. strategic objective would be fulfilled: Austria, Italy, and Greece, as well as the Balkan and various Central European countries, would be at least partially pulled from Gazprom's orbit. (Await my next "postcard" from Pipelineistan for more on this.)
IPI or TAPI?
Gurbanguly is proving an even more riotous player than the Turkmenbashi. A year ago he said he was going to hedge his bets, that he was willing to export the bulk of the eight trillion cubic meters of gas reserves he now claims for his country to virtually anyone. Washington was—and remains—ecstatic. At an international conference last month in Ashgabat ("the city of love"), the Las Vegas of Central Asia, Gurbanguly told a hall packed with Americans, Europeans, and Russians that "diversification of energy flows and inclusion of new countries into the geography of export routes can help the global economy gain stability."
Inevitably, behind closed doors, the TAPI maze came up and TAPI executives once again began discussing pricing and transit fees. Of course, hard as that may be to settle, it's the easy part of the deal. After all, there's that Everest of Afghan security to climb, and someone still has to confirm that Turkmenistan's gas reserves are really as fabulous as claimed.
Imperceptible jiggles in Pipelineistan's tectonic plates can shake half the world. Take, for example, an obscure March report in the Balochistan Times: a little noticed pipeline supplying gas to parts of Sindh province in Pakistan, including Karachi, was blown up. It got next to no media attention, but all across Eurasia and in Washington, those analyzing the comparative advantages of TAPI vs. IPI had to wonder just how risky it might be for India to buy future Iranian gas via increasingly volatile Balochistan.
And then in early April came another mysterious pipeline explosion, this one in Turkmenistan, compromising exports to Russia. The Turkmenis promptly blamed the Russians (and TAPI advocates cheered), but nothing in Afghanistan itself could have left them cheering very loudly. Right now, **** Cheney's master plan to get those blue rivers of Turkmeni gas flowing southwards via a future TAPI as part of a U.S. grand strategy for a "Greater Central Asia" lies in tatters.
Still, Zbig Brzezinski might disagree, and as he commands Obama's attention, he may try to convince the new president that the world needs a $7.6-plus billion, 1,600-km steel serpent winding through a horribly dangerous war zone. That's certainly the gist of what Brzezinski said immediately after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, stressing once again that "the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia via Afghanistan to the south... will maximally expand world society's access to the Central Asian energy market."
Washington or Beijing?
Still, give credit where it's due. For the time being, our man Gurbanguly may have snatched the leading role in the New Great Game in this part of Eurasia. He's already signed a groundbreaking gas agreement with RWE from Germany and sent the Russians scrambling.
If, one of these days, the Turkmenistani leader opts for TAPI as well, it will open Washington to an ultimate historical irony. After so much death and destruction, Washington would undoubtedly have to sit down once again with—yes—the Taliban! And we'd be back to July 2001 and those pesky pipeline transit fees.
As it stands at the moment, however, Russia still dominates Pipelineistan, ensuring Central Asian gas flows across Russia's network and not through the Trans-Caspian networks privileged by the U.S. and the European Union. This virtually guarantees Russia's crucial geopolitical status as the top gas supplier to Europe and a crucial supplier to Asia as well.
Meanwhile, in "transit corridor" Pakistan, where Predator drones soaring over Pashtun tribal villages monopolize the headlines, the shady New Great Game slouches in under-the-radar mode toward the immense, under-populated southern Pakistani province of Balochistan. The future of the epic IPI vs. TAPI battle may hinge on a single, magic word: Gwadar.
Essentially a fishing village, Gwadar is an Arabian Sea port in that province. The port was built by China. In Washington's dream scenario, Gwadar becomes the new Dubai of South Asia. This implies the success of TAPI. For its part, China badly needs Gwadar as a node for yet another long pipeline to be built to western China. And where would the gas flowing in that line come from? Iran, of course.
Whoever "wins," if Gwadar really becomes part of the Liquid War, Pakistan will finally become a key transit corridor for either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field heading for China, or a great deal of the Caspian gas from Turkmenistan heading Europe-wards. To make the scenario even more locally mouth-watering, Pakistan would then be a pivotal place for both NATO and the SCO (in which it is already an official "observer").
Now that's as classic as the New Great Game in Eurasia can get. There's NATO vs. the SCO. With either IPI or TAPI, Turkmenistan wins. With either IPI or TAPI, Russia loses. With either IPI or TAPI, Pakistan wins. With TAPI, Iran loses. With IPI, Afghanistan loses. In the end, however, as in any game of high stakes Pipelineistan poker, it all comes down to the top two global players. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets: will the winner be Washington or Beijing?
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for the Real News. Parts of this article draw on his new book, Obama does Globalistan. His first "postcard" from Pipelineistan, "Liquid War," was posted at TomDispatch.com in March. He may be reached at [email protected].
Indian influence has been reduced to the lowest level in current times compared to recent centuries. Everybody worried about China encircling India by itself. It is actually US encircled India. Now US is outsourcing some of that to China as part of Afpak strategy.
first map represents the US moves or options to contain China by (chiefly maritime) encirclement. It is actual response from all the forward bases to China conflict zone.
Chinese countermoves against Western domination by (a) pushing forward its sphere of influence to south and west on the "Asian" front upto the Middle East and (b) increasing its influence on the Pacific front through such proxies as Venezuela and Ecuador, sowing the seeds for future encirclement of America.
fault line which is showing up from the history of conflict across the fault zones in the last 100 years. This fault line has been described in Z Brzezinski book - The Grand Chess Board written in 1997.
first map represents the US moves or options to contain China by (chiefly maritime) encirclement. It is actual response from all the forward bases to China conflict zone.
Chinese countermoves against Western domination by (a) pushing forward its sphere of influence to south and west on the "Asian" front upto the Middle East and (b) increasing its influence on the Pacific front through such proxies as Venezuela and Ecuador, sowing the seeds for future encirclement of America.
fault line which is showing up from the history of conflict across the fault zones in the last 100 years. This fault line has been described in Z Brzezinski book - The Grand Chess Board written in 1997.
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The British Strategy For Global Conquest
US following 100 year old British Strategy
The military strategists of the British Empire have long had an actual plan for the military conquest and enslavement of the entire planet, and this plan for global conquest was based on the military realities which they believed any would-be world conqueror would encounter.
The British strategic plan for world conquest and the military perspective which it is based upon both predate World War One, and both probably existed long before that. The earliest known statement of this plan for world conquest was expressed by imperial strategist Halford Mackinder, who outlined the central global strategic problem in 1904 in a letter to the British Royal Geographical Society. The letter was entitled, "The Geographical Pivot of History." The most pertinent part of this letter is quoted later on, and requires only a minimum of reading between the lines.
The most recent significant restatement of this plan for world conquest was made by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who asserted that world domination would require the conquest of the center of the Eurasian landmass. They also believed that if they did not seize the Eurasian interior, whoever was in possession of it would have the global strategic edge, and would thus likely ultimately go on to conquer the world.
Here's why they formed this military perspective. Britain was a naval power, and therefore, as a rule of thumb, they could apply military force with relative ease near the shores of the oceans anywhere on the globe. That was the good news. The bad news was that the further from the coast their military objective was, the harder it was to apply force to it. The invading British armies were tethered to their fleets, because their armies needed the re-supply and the firepower support of their navy.
Look at a map of the world. You will see that the area furthest from any ocean is the deep interior of the Eurasian land mass. The British reasoned that if they could conquer the Eurasian interior, they would then be able to apply force from this region against the neighboring countries while the British fleet would attack as usual against their coastal regions. Thus Russia, China, India and all of Europe would be forever under British military dominance, and thereby be eliminated as competitors in the struggle for world conquest. They reasoned that the remainder of the globe was a far lesser military challenge, which could be managed with relative military ease by the British fleet, and thus easily accessible coastal regions of the remainder of the world were not the focus of their military plans as was the absolutely vital Eurasian interior.
One of the agenda items of the British Empire is the culling of most of the people on the planet Earth. They also intend that the mass of the remaining population will be reduced to peasant social status, and kept in perpetual ignorance so that any revolt against their overlords will be impossible. By these means they intend to establish a global empire which will rule the world for all time without any possibility of being overthrown, either by any competing empires, which will all have been eliminated, or by the peasants, who will be held in perpetual bondage and therefore likewise unable to rise up against the oligarchs.
The following quoted passage is from a letter written by British imperial strategist Halford Mackinder to the British Royal Geographical Society. The letter was entitled, "The Geographical Pivot of History."
"As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history, does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become evident? Is not the pivot region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse riding nomads, and is today about to be covered with a network of railways. There have been and are here the conditions of a mobility of military and economic power of a far-reaching and yet limited character. Russia replaces the Mogul empire. Her pressure on Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, on China replaces the centrifugal raids of the steppe-men. In the world at large she occupies the central strategically position held by Germany in Europe. In conclusion, it may be well expressly to point out that the substitution of some new control of inland area for that of Russia would not tend to reduce the geographical significance of the pivot point. Were the Chinese, for instance, organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and conquer its territory, they might constitute the Yellow Peril to the world's freedom."
The following passage is quoted from the book, "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives," which was written by
Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997.
""In that context, how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitical axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)
Other statements in his book make it clear that Brzezinski's geographic focus is on the new Islamic nations of South Central Asia that were formed out of the Breakup of the Soviet Union. Note that Brzezinski even used the name "Oceania" to refer to the British Empire.
The British plan for world conquest also called for the de-industrialization of all other nations so they would not be able to build modern weapons to fight back against British attacks. All major nations of the world were industrializing in the years prior to World War One, and the British Imperialists decided that all other nations must be both de-industrialized and depopulated so that they would never again be potential rivals for world domination.
The British reasoned that Russia was their primary rival for world dominance, partly because of it occupied much of the strategic heart of the Eurasian land mass, and partly because it huge population and abundant natural resources gave it vast military potential. Other smaller potential rivals such as France, Germany and Japan would be crushed later and reduced to depopulated puppet states with plantation economies. America, was not considered an immediate potential rival because it was effectively re-colonized and under British control, and had been since the assassination of President McKinley by British design in 1901.
The British planned to provoke a war between Russia and Germany so that Russia would be crushed and forced to accept a British-controlled puppet government that would de-industrialized Russia, and thus make it unable to defend the Eurasian heartland. The British also hoped that Germany would be exhausted by all the fighting, and would thus be an easy opponent in a subsequent war which would likewise result in its de-industrialization and depopulation. It didn't really matter to the British strategists which side Britain would be on in the war; their primary goal was the destruction of Russia industry, and the weakening of Germany as a hoped for bonus. The British imperialists didn't care much about the form of the new Russian government. The British didn't care if the new Russian government was communist or fascist or whatever; all they really cared about was that the new Russian government would suppress industrialization.
The British imperialists both planned and instigated World War One, but unfortunately for them, their primary goal of de-industrializing Russia was not achieved. Russia was defeated, but the post-war communist government instituted a program of industrialization and re-armament under both Lenin and Stalin. The post World War One situation looked exactly like the pre World War One situation as far as the disappointed British Imperialists were concerned. Russia was still the number one rival because of its dominance of Eurasia, and because it still had its huge population, and worst of all because it was still industrializing. Their other potential rivals were likewise still industrializing, just exactly as they were before the war.
The British imperialists planned and instigated World War Two in order to achieve the exact same strategic goal they had failed to achieve with World War One, and they used the exact same plan because in their eyes the strategic situation had not changed at all. The British imperialists therefore instigated World War Two between Russia and Germany in order to achieve the exact same goal, and once again they failed. Post war Russia continued to industrialize, and they were still in possession of the heart of Eurasia.
The Geostrategic situation is pretty much the same today as it was both before and after the two world wars that the British instigated, and all the evidence indicates that the British strategic plan for conquering the world remains exactly the same today as it was prior to World War One. The British and their puppet ally America have established military bases deep in the heart of Eurasia in the Islamic states that were formerly part of the old Soviet Union. They have invaded Afghanistan and are preparing to invade Iraq.
They will not abandon their campaign of looting of Eurasia, and they will not stop their callous slaughter of Asian people unless they are defeated militarily. If they succeed in their criminal aggression, they will be forced by their own imperial logic to go on and instigate similar wars of aggression against all their remaining potential rivals. Both China and India are now immensely powerful and growing in economic might and military capability. Both Britain and its puppet ally America are declining relative to both China and India in economic ability and military might. The Anglo-Americans have lost their nuclear monopoly. The Chinese will develop missiles capable of reaching America and Britain.
Time is working against the Anglo-Americans in both economic and military terms. The longer Britain waits to attack China and slaughter it back to the stone age, the harder the task will be. The British and their American stooge ally will not be able to defeat China if they wait another twenty years. Their own logic tells them that it is now or never as far as the British Empire is concerned. Britain will either conquer the world within the next few years, or Britain and its stooge ally America will slide first into insignificance, and then both will be torn apart in starvation-induced internal wars because they will no longer be able to extort the resources of the world at gunpoint.
In conclusion, it is clear that the century-old plan of the British for the conquest of the world is still in effect. It also seems undeniable that the culling of most of the world's population is a necessary and therefore built-in part of their plan to conquer the world. The exact role that vaccinations and other devices of mass murder will play in this blueprint for the coming global slaughter is still unclear. The British aristocracy regards this as their last throw of the dice to achieve world domination. From their perspective, it is now all or nothing. By their own perspective and by their own logic, these aristocrats will be compelled to use every device at their disposal, especially those of mass destruction . The British aristocrats fear that if they fail, they will be overthrown because they are utterly useless parasites, and the British people will rise in the wake of so many of them being used up in a war whose only goal is to preserve the dominance of the useless aristocrats.
Their hatred of humanity and the wickedness of their envisioned global and eternal police state should prepare us to expect them to employ every weapon at their disposal no matter how horrible. The recent media-friendly terrorist attack was the latest bit of theater in their final bid at world conquest. We can expect more such incidents, including even a nuclear detonation on American, which will precede the erection of a complete police state here in America, without which their plan for global conquest will not succeed.
The British aristocrats are not the daffy, absent-minded twits depicted in the mass media. These British aristocrats and their banker bedmates are the worst collection of cold-blooded gangsters and cynical mass murderers ever assembled. They will use diseases, revolutions, starvation, planned economic disasters, civil wars, concentration camps, nuclear bombs, and mass murder by vaccinations both here and abroad until such time as they win, or until they are removed from power. This broad outline of their plan for world conquest will provide a framework for understanding events as the world plunges toward this very real Armageddon unfolding in Asia.
THE NEW GREAT GAME: BLOOD AND OIL IN CENTRAL ASIA
Lutz KLEVEMAN, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 287 pages, Hardcover,
$24, ISBN: 0-87113-906-5
Nicholas DANFORTH
SOAS University
Lutz Kleveman was not the first person to refer to post Cold War Central Asian
geopolitics as "the New Great Game," but since he did use the phrase as the title
for a book, and since, in that book, he uses the phrase as often as possible, he can,
I believe, be asked to answer for it. The original "Great Game," as Kleveman notes,
referred to the late 19th Century struggle between the British and Russian for
control over the territory separating their two empires. For the British at least, this
struggle was "great" to the extent that it affected their control over India, which was
of far more importance than Central Asia itself would ever be. What made it a
game, however, was the setting. Unlike the ultimately more significant imperial
struggles taking place under fancy chandeliers in the conference halls of
continental Europe, this one was set against a backdrop of savage tribesmen,
impenetrable deserts, forbidden cities and fanatical Emirs. It is no coincidence that
the phrase was made famous by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, an adventure tale written
for young boys in an age where boys, still read adventure tales. Today, alas, the
romance which made the first "Great Game" such a great game is largely gone.
What remains is simply geopolitics – potentially fascinating for those interested in
geopolitics, less so for those interested in boy's adventure stories.
Unfortunately, Kleveman tries to have it both ways, and as a result his book
offers neither serious political analysis nor gripping travel journalism. While
contemporary Central Asia is hardly exotic by 19th century standards, it remains
about as exotic as anywhere gets these days, and Kleveman gamely sets out to try
to discover some of this exoticism. What he finds instead are some amusing, if
clichéd, moments of local color (though in all fairness, post-soviet clichés were
presumably not as clichéd before Borat so successfully capitalized on them): We
meet the Foreign Minister of the completely unrecognized Republic of Abkazia,
whose office is decorated with "a life-size embroidered picture of a naked woman
with remarkable breasts." On the same trip, Kleveman is flown by a Ukranian pilot
214
OAKA
Kitap "¹ncelemeleri
who greets him with vodka on his breath and the words "Come in! Welcome! No
problem, don't worry, no problem!"
But the present invariably pales in comparison past, and the reader suffers as a
result. Kleveman never had to be worried about being imprisoned in a vermin-ridden pit
by the Emir of Bukhara or captured by Turcoman slave traders. Still, one cannot
help but think there might have been a few more adventures worthy of retelling if
Kleveman had not exercised such sound judgement. At one point, for example,
when trying to cross overland into Chechnya, Kleveman meets a Russian soldier
who stops him and asks "If I let you carry on to Grozny, do you believe that you will
ever get there in one piece?" Kleveman thanks him and turns around. I do not fault
Kleveman for this. It was undoubtedly a smart choice, and certainly the one this
reader would have made. It is not, however, the choice that Alexander "Bokhara"
Burnes (torn apart by an Afghan mob, Kabul, 1841) or George Hayward (decapitated by the
orders of Chieftain Mir Wali, Dardistan, 1870) would have made.
In his political analysis, by contrast, Kleveman is too bold. His thesis,
supported by a mix of insinuation and argument, is that everything that happens,
and particularly everything bad that happens, in Central Asia is caused by oil. He
had argued that a lot of what happens in Central Asia is caused by oil his thesis
would have been correct but unremarkable. He had tried to explain what exactly
is caused by oil and what is not, the result would have been subtle and thought-provoking,
but getting there would probably have required him to do some serious research.
Instead he wanders from country to country in search of people to interview,
and insists on treating everything he's told as a scoop.
Kleveman's methods and conclusions fit together nicely, however, when he
finds himself trying to prove that, say Chinese policy in Xinjiang or American policy
in Afghanistan is a product of oil politics. In Xinjiang, Kleveman attempts to tie the
Chinese government's oppression of the native Uyghur population with the region's
importance both as a source of oil and as a transit corridor for Kazakh oil. As
evidence of this connection, he points out that China needs oil and that Xinjiang
has (a little) oil. Then, to cinch his case, he gives us David, a Han Chinese Engineer
from Shanghai who has come to Xinjiang with some friends to see the mountains.
In a paragraph that is fairly representative of his method, Kleveman writes:
"Xinjiang has belonged to China for two thousand years now, and we will not let
it go, never," David declares; he reasons that without Xinjiang China would
disintegrate and descend into civil war like the former Soviet Union. "And we also
need the oil and gas from here for our economy, David adds, but hardly as an
afterthought."
We readers will never know whether David really meant this as an afterthought
or not, though for the Chinese government it certainly could be. Consider Tibet. The
only oil the territory produces comes from melted yak butter (and is used to
flavor tea, not power cars) but Beijing has hardly been supportive of the local
separatists.
Kitap "¹ncelemeleri / Book Reviews
215
In Afghanistan, Kleveman once again uses coincidence to prove causation. His
argument here is that America's 2001 invasion was linked to its interest in building
a pipeline that would connect Turkmenistan to the world via Pakistan. The evidence:
in the 1990's, Unocal, an American company, negotiated with the Taliban about
building such a pipeline, but the deal was never finalized because of the region's
instability. After the 2001 invasion, some people in the American government and
energy community remain interested in building such a pipeline. Moreover, the first
US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalizad as well as President Karzai and his minister
of industry, were involved in the Unocal negotiations. But, the hopelessly naive
imperialist dupe is tempted to ask, if the US government was so committed to this
pipeline, wouldn't it have been cheaper, if no less cynical, for them to just pay off
the Taliban to support the pipeline? And why, for that matter, did the US wait until
the Taliban had finally begun to consolidate its control to unleash a whole new
wave of pipeline-delaying instability? Kleveman never says, but he offers a hint:
"After vigorous protests by American feminist groups against the oppression of
women in Afghanistan, the US government sought to distance itself from the
Taliban regime and Unocal's pipeline plans." In short, the US government, unable
to stand up to the aggressive feminist lobby, had no choice but to send in the
marines.
Regrettably, Kleveman's oil-is-everything approach undermines quite a bit of
good reporting he does on non-oil subjects. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, he spends
some time with the newly-arrived American troops, persuasively documenting the
many ways in which their behavior alienates the locals. The contrast between the
idealism of the troops and the clumsiness of their actions is troubling, whatever
you believe about the motives of the government that sent them.
Still, if this reviewer seems overly-critical, perhaps it is in part because he
cannot help thinking that this book was a lot more fun to write then it was to read
and he feels a little jealous as a result. Chapter by chapter, the Kleveman moves
from Azerbaijan to Georgia to Chechnya to Kazkakhstan to China to Iran, then on to
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyztan Afghanistan and Pakistan. It must have been
a hell of a trip. If there are any other obscure late-Victorian political concepts that
need to be revived through some half-baked journalism and several months of
traveling to exotic, dangerous parts of the world, I see no reason why Kleveman
should have all the fun. While I suspect "The New Scramble for Africa" and "The New
Opium Wars" have already been written, "The New Eastern Question" or perhaps
"The New Bulgarian Horrors" remain open for anyone with a backpack and a
tape-recorder.
Kitap "¹ncelemeleri / Book Reviews
216
THE GRAND CHESSBOARD
American Primacy and Its - Geostrategic Imperatives
American Primacy and Its - Geostrategic Imperatives
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI
EVER SINCE THE CONTINENTS started interacting politically,some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power. In different ways, at different times, the peoples Inhabiting Eurasia—though mostly those from its Western European periphery—penetrated and dominated the world's other regions as individual Eurasian states attained the special status and enjoyed the privileges of being the world's premier powers.
The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.
Eurasia, however, retains Its geopolitical importance. Not only is its western periphery—Europe—still the location of much of the world's political and economic power, but its eastern region—Asia—has lately become a vital center of economic growth and rising political influence. Hence, the issue of how a globally engaged America copes with the complex Eurasian power relationships—and particularly whether it prevents the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power—remains central to America's capacity to exercise global primacy. It follows that—in addition to cultivating the various novel dimensions of power (technology, communications, information, as well as trade and finance)—American foreign policy must remain concerned with the geopolitical dimension and must employ its influence in Eurasia in a manner that creates a stable continental
equilibrium, with the United States as the political arbiter. Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played, and that struggle involves geostrategy—the strategic management of geopolitical interests. It is noteworthy that as recently as 1940 two aspirants to global power, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, agreed explicitly (in the secret negotiations of November of that year) that America should
be excluded from Eurasia. Each realized that the injection of American power into Eurasia would preclude his ambitions regarding global domination. Each shared the assumption that Eurasia is the center of the world and that he who controls Eurasia controls the world. A half century later, the issue has been redefined: will America's primacy in Eurasia endure, and to what ends might it be applied? The ultimate objective of American policy should be benign and visionary: to shape a truly cooperative global community, in keeping with long-range trends and with the fundamental interests of humankind. But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book.
The Challenge of China
D. Ramana
The end of Cold War and followed by the collapse of Soviet Union have transformed the geo-politics globally. Consequently, ideological confrontation has been reduced to a competition between states. While the prospect of nuclear confrontation in Europe has significantly diminished, there remains the problem of reforming of Asian socialism, limited as it may be to China, Vietnam and North Korea. Recent initiatives by the United States to draw North Korea into the world community are encouraging and should be continued. However the moves seem to be driven by need for reducing instability in the Pacific Rim due to continuation of intransigence of the North Koreans. The impact of North Korean behavior in other regions due to propensity to proliferate WMD technology should be taken into account. They have been a source of missile proliferation to rogue states in the Middle East and South Asia (Pakistan). The profile of these transfers notwithstanding, North Korea was and remains a surrogate of People's Republic of China, and it the latter that requires a closer examination.
The Chinese Challenge
In order to understand the challenge that China represents, one needs to understand the challenge that the Soviet Union, another totalitarian state, once posed. The superpower label used to describe the Soviet Union was misleading, in that Soviet Union was chiefly an ideologically driven military and political power. Despite its prodigious output during World War II and after, the Soviet Union was by no means an economic power. Its inability to successfully transition from a war economy to a peacetime consumer economy ultimately proved to be its undoing. The West, led by United States, formulated the 'Containment' policy in order to contain the spread of Soviet power with its system of alliances. However one has to realize that the Soviet Union had already reached its limits of its power soon after end of WWII. Its expansion in Eastern Europe was due to the quest for buffer territory from Germany and later Western Europe. Its forays out of its 'near abroad' were limited and reciprocal. The Afghan war stretched its resources and sapped its morale. The economic collapse that followed the intervention led to its implosion and collapse as the 'other superpower'.
China in contrast is both a rising economic and political power. Its military though modernizing is limited to strategic weapons and does not have any real capability to influence any major event in the near term. Unlike Soviet Union, which was implementing a Western ideology, China's political thought is rooted in nationalism. It has been beating back invaders for over 3000 years. Few nations can boast of its continuity in history and a track record of survival. It has absorbed many invasions and has survived each of them. Its interlude with Communism should be seen in that light as another invasion – an invasion of ideas.
China's evolution today represents the vision of two individuals- Mao Ze Dung and Deng Xiao Peng. The Mao's contributions are many, but key among them is his role as nation builder. In particular, he unified China under communist rule, obtained nuclear weapons, and consolidated China's place in the world. It took the Soviet Union seventy years to realize the folly of its economic policies. China, on the other hand, realized this in about thirty years and Deng launched the four modernizations to transform it. Significant among them is the absence of any devolution of political power. In fact soon after the modernization program was launched, the regime suffered a jolt in the form of political dissent form of the Democracy Movement and led to the Tienannmen Square massacres. This event shook the very core of the regime and hardened its attitudes towards political dissent. The West hopes that by constructive engagement it can bring about gradual changes to the Chinese polity. The hope is that the government will transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism to eventually democracy. The adoption of pragmatic policies by Deng Xiao Peng, and end of Cold War show that it is making the transition to authoritarian state. In all possibility this could be the most that will happen. Engagement with the West is bringing about tremendous pressure for political change from the newly rich. However, the regime in Beijing wants to keep all political freedoms in control while it leapfrogs from ox-carts to a modern economy without giving up anything on the political side. It fears democratization could derail the process of modernization and undermine the authority of the Communist Party. Consequently, economic liberalization has not been accompanied by political liberalization.
The challenge of Taiwan to the Chinese political system
Taiwan's democratic transformation throws up a major ideological challenge to the mainland's political system. Many mainlanders would question the authoritarian nature of their state if the Taiwan experiment succeeds. The mainland is tackling the challenge in two ways- by treating Taiwan as a renegade province it questions the legitimacy of that political system which could undermine it- this is accompanied by keeping up the military pressure and numerous threats. The second way is that of proposing 'one country two systems' type of government. Both these paths appear to be aimed at buying time while it grows stronger. As can be seen the fight is internal and will get resolved with the march of time. However it is in the interest of the world community that Taiwan exists as an example of contrast to the people of China.
China and the World
China is a member of many of the power bodies of the world. Its pretence at being a responsible international player is not matched by its actions on the ground. Despite being a member of the UN Security Council its participation in peacekeeping missions are few and that too in non-combatant roles. Despite being a member of many international treaties it has proliferated weapons of mass destruction in its own strategic interest and has thus spread suffering.
In order to understand its policy of proliferation, one must understand that this constituted practicing war by other means. Realizing that direct war can be costly, China has found the asymmetric weapon of proliferation to tie down its challengers- declared and potential. Its nurturing the North Korean regime to tie down South Korea and principally Japan has backfired. The latter is drawn more closely into security arrangements with the US than during the Cold War. And possibly that could be a goal of the Chinese- a Japan tied up in a relationship with the US is better than an autonomous Japan. And North Korean belligerent moves have prompted the neighbors into participating in US theater missile defenses, which in turn degrade China's posture. Its proliferation to Pakistan has prompted India to unveil its nuclear capability and it is a matter of time for the Indian posture to build up sufficiently to dissuade China. It is contributing to the instability in the Middle East by proliferation and hopes to weaken the US based alliances in the region. One has to see how this turns out in the future.
Taking a long view of China's history, the nearby regions have suffered whenever China had a weak center. From the time of the Mongol invasions to the colonial era, there has been negative fallout in the region whenever China had weak regimes. However strong centers have also resulted in a spillover of hegemonistic tendencies prompting a former Thai minister to say, "The best thing China can do is stay together and stay at home!" What is desirable is a benign son of heaven in Beijing for peace and prosperity in Asia and now in a globalized world. However till that happens, one has to be on guard.
Threat to India and responses
The post Cold War was hoped to give rise to multiple poles. China sees for itself a bipolar role globally and a unipolar role regionally. It is in this aspect that its moves to check India's rise to power should be seen. Most Indian observers state that the loss of Tibet as a buffer has brought about problems in the Indo- Sino relationship. However it is not understood that the occupation of Tibet was an essential element of the Chinese worldview for gaining domination in Asia. It is the desire to dominate and play a zero sum game that drives the dissonance in the relationship and than mere border disputes. Here again it has taken advantage of the confusion among the Indian elite in recognizing the challenge it presents to them. Here is an instance of Sun Tzu's precepts in practice to confuse the challenger in order to achieve strategic surprise.
Ever since Sumdrong Chu, China seems to have decided that direct confrontation is not a feasible option and has propped up Pakistan as a surrogate. The proliferation of delivery systems started in late 1988 along with the declarations of peace. It is notable that these transfers took place after the Cold War was waning and appears to be part of a long-term strategy to tie up India locally. The hoped for response did not materialize as India took steps to protect its strategic autonomy.
The potential areas where China could cause direct problems for India are mainly two – proliferation of WMD to Pakistan and support for insurgencies in the North- East region. It can cause indirect problems through dragging its feet on the unsettled border and veto India's membership in world councils. Proliferation of weapons and delivery systems to Pakistan increases instability and causes resources diverted to defense related systems. The umbilical can only be cut by forceful posture with Agni-III deployment and a visible the C3I system put in place. The nuclear tests in the late nineties and the deployment of the deterrent will contribute in mitigating the effects of the proliferation. Active dialog and steps have to be taken to raise the costs to the proliferators to dissuade them. Pursuing peace efforts in Kashmir with the local militants will go a long way to diffuse the situation and remove the rationale for Pakistan to offer 'moral ' support to the militancy.
The trouble in North East and an unsettled border lead to increase or sustained military/paramilitary expenditure, which reduces economic growth. These could be accompanied by encouraging intransigence in neighbors- Myanmar etc. Here again a mixture of economic and political measures should tackle the internal troubles. Integrating the North East into the mainstream of the Indian economy is an urgent and required step and should be pursued regardless. As regards the neighbors, expansion of BMIST, and a new regional economic integration are needed to ensure ASEAN type of system. This should go a long way in discouraging the propensity to support such behavior in neighbors.
Conclusion
Its threat is mainly an indirect one through proliferation to Pakistan and support of insurgencies in the North East. It could also harass India by prolonging the border settlement and oppose entry into world bodies. The response has to be increased economic growth and regional integration to reduce propensity for conflict accompanied by a watchful eye on defense related systems. As China eventually resolves for itself the role that it wants to play in the world, India has to be on its guard. China's attempts to constrain India are doomed to fail for India has historically never taken a back seat to China. The realization should be that it is not that China directly threatens India but rather it reduces and diminishes India's power.
Shanghai second fiddle
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would surely have wanted a substantive first trip abroad in his second term. He is stuck instead with the current compulsion to present himself at a forum — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — of which India is not a member. Moscow has left Delhi with no wiggle room by clubbing the SCO summit with the gathering of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) leaders at Yekaterinburg next week. Dr. Singh must now pay obeisance at both the SCO, owned by China, and the BRIC forum, run by Russia. At a moment when his own international standing has risen after the recent elections, Dr. Singh will now play a minor part in a big diplomatic parade.
The problem is not one of protocol. Realists don't mind diplomatic crawling if an important national purpose is served. But it is difficult to fathom India's gains at Yekaterinburg. Meanwhile, the contradictions between India's interests and those of Russia and China in the Great Game territory have become sharper. Russia would love to see the US humbled in Afghanistan. India, on the other hand, wants the Taliban defeated in the Af-Pak region. If the US turns its back on Afghanistan, Beijing knows, Kabul will come under the sway of Pakistan, China's all-weather friend. India's interest is the opposite — preserving Kabul's autonomy vis-a-vis Pakistan.
India can't object to the Chinese and Russian definition of their self-interests in Afghanistan. But there is no reason why Delhi should become a clapper boy for Beijing and Moscow in Central Asia. Delhi's differences Beijing and Moscow on the Af-Pak region are real and must be addressed purposefully. That, however, can only be done at solid bilateral engagements with the Chinese and Russian leaders; not at the diplomatic jamboree that Yekaterinburg promises to be.
Try the Saudis
Unlike his predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Dr. Singh does not much enjoy travel. That limits the amount of summit diplomacy India can do. If the South Block must reserve Dr. Singh for consequential diplomacy, the focus must necessarily be on strategic bilateral relationships rather than multilateral talk-shops.
The one bilateral destination that should be at the top of Dr. Singh's itinerary is Riyadh. After the Saudi King Abdullah visited Delhi in January 2006, all efforts to organise a return visit for Dr. Singh came to naught. Engaging Saudi Arabia holds the key to many important Indian political objectives, none more critical than shaping the Af-Pak region. If Persia is important as a neighbour to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Arabia exerts more powerful leverage thanks to its enduring influence in Washington, growing clout in Pakistan, and the vast ideological and material resources at its command.
Recall that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the only governments other than Pakistan to recognise Taliban rule during the 1990s. In the 1980s the Saudis helped construct the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
At the current juncture, too, the Saudis are critical for the political outcomes in the Af-Pak region. Beginning a strategic conversation and finding a common ground with the House of Saud might be far more important for Dr. Singh than the rhetorical flourishes at Yekaterinburg.
Ludhiana School
If you think Ludhiana and high politics are mutually exclusive, think again. Historians of the Great Game tell you that in the early decades of the 19th century, the Ludhiana Residency was the Raj's principal observation post for Punjab and Afghanistan and home to some inspired strategic thinking. The officers of the Raj at Ludhiana developed a set of theses about the frontier that eventually came to be known as the Punjab School. They ran a prolonged argument with the Bombay Presidency on how Calcutta should secure India's north-western borderlands.
The former eventually became the 'close-border' school calling for a defence of British India on the Indus while the latter turned into the 'forward school' demanding power-play way beyond the Indus.
If Bombay was focused on Persia, Ludhiana concentrated on the kingdoms run by the Sikhs and Pashtuns. The Ludhiana school's preoccupation was with the dynamic tension between Lahore and Kabul. Some things obviously don't change in the Great Game. The success of Delhi's own Af-Pak policy might depend on thinking creatively about balancing Lahore and Kabul.
The writer is a Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Gilgit and Baltistan - Strategic Relevance
VIKRAM SOOD
Gilgit and Baltistan are parts of India, as much as the rest of the J & K state is, but this region does not seem to figure too prominently on our collective radar screen. Instead, we seem to have made the sanctity of the LOC an article of faith and never "violate" it even though Pakistan began its invasion on India on October 22, 1947 and has continued to violate the LOC since the cease-fire 56 years ago. The implication is that we are prepared to negotiate on the basis of the LOC as a boundary. Our media or our weather bureau seems to have forgotten this area also. Weather maps of the region do not show conditions in Gilgit, Skardu or Diamar like PTV, which never fails to tell us the weather conditions in Srinagar and Baramullah in 'Maqbooza' Kashmir. These are symbolisms but are important ones.
Although most of us know the strategic importance of J&K and the symbolism attached to multi-religious but predominantly Muslim J&K, to our ideals of secularism and nationhood, strategic issues connected with Gilgit and Baltistan are quite often not very central in our thought processes. Maybe one could get a better idea if one imagined that what we showed on our maps reflected reality on the ground. If we had what we show on our maps then the reality would have been something like this.
India would have had a border with NWFP - something that Pakistan could not tolerate given its sensitivities about the Durand Line, and the fear that India could play up this issue, and the traditionally friendly India-Afghan relations would be a disadvantage for Pakistan. All the waters of Indus and its tributaries would have substantially flown through Indian territory making the feudal farmers of Pakistan Punjab even more dependent on India. Domel, Muzaffarabad and the Haji Pir Bulge would have been in India's control making GHQ Rawalpindi more vulnerable. India would have had access to Afghanistan through the Wakhan corridor - not the easiest of routes, but not unsurpassable, and definitely not at the mercy of Pakistan. The Karakoram Highway would not have existed and Pakistan would not have got its clandestine supplies from China and North Korea. China would not have had access to Gwadar and be able to connect Kashgar with Gwadar; nor would it have kept Pakistan supplied with lethal material clandestinely through the Karakoram Highway to counterbalance India.
There would not have been any terrorists hiding in the Neelam Valley to be launched into India and there would not have been any Kargil adventure nor the need for any troops on the heights of Siachen. There would not possibly have been displaced Mirpuris from the Mangla Dam reservoir area to migrate to the UK and form the core of anti-Indian protest in Europe. But even more crucial than the POK area, has been the Gilgit Baltistan area, and this is the one that does not figure in our strategic thinking, because this is the one that sits on the routes to China and Central Asia. The Karakoram Highway and the strategic Gwadar port close to the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf provide China vital access to the sea-lanes in the area. The US as inheritor of British imperial interests, in pursuit of Cold War first and then its new doctrine of pre-emption, would need this corridor to have access to the troubled Xinjiang.
For long, Indians have felt suspicious, and said so very often, that it was imperialist designs that got us into this situation. In two recently published books based on British Government, documents now made public set this doubt at rest. Clearly the entire exercise beginning with the impetus for the creation of Pakistan was the handiwork of British acting through their Viceroy in India. Tactical errors by the Congress when they resigned from the provincial governments at the start of the Second World War, in protest against dragging the country into their war without consulting the elected representatives, did not help.
Chandrashekhar Dasgupta's "War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48"³ depicts the two crucial years, when India lost POK and Gilgit Baltistan, not because of the superiority of the Pakistani forces, but because of three men essentially and the tangled web they wove. It was Mountbatten in Delhi, Bevin in Whitehall London and Noel-Baker in New York, who was particularly more loyal than the King. While in New York, Noel Baker zealously overplayed his hand in his blind love for Pakistan that even embarrassed Attlee. Bevin would give incomplete and slanted assessments, and in New Delhi, Mountbatten and his British officers in the Indian Army, invariably tried to underplay Pakistani transgressions, instead sought concessions from a trusting Nehru, and at the same time remained silent when it came to remotely blaming Pakistan. The ploy was the same - how could the raiders be asked to leave unless India also vacated. The same argument in different forms is applied today. This indirectly encouraged Pakistani obduracy and adventurism in Kashmir. Gradually India was pushed towards calling off operations into areas that later became to be known as Pak Occupied Kashmir and the Northern Areas; gradually India was inveigled into the UNSC route, and to find to its horror, that the tables had been turned on an unsuspecting but idealistic and newly independent government.
The stage for all this had been set in a way by the years preceding India's independence. Nirendra Singh Sarila's recent book "The Shadow of the Great Game- The Untold Story of India's Partition" describes this vividly. Jinnah, and thereby Muslim League, was encouraged in his demands partly as punishment for "Hindu" Indian National Congress refusal to help the Empire in its war in Europe. The readiness of the British to help create Pakistan was more than just annoyance and pique. Imperial strategic interests are not determined solely by this sort of sentimentality. Both these books should be read by all those interested in learning how empires are managed.
The creation of Pakistan was an exercise in the preservation of imperial interests in the region. At that the time, (in the early years of the war when the British did not anticipate they would have to quit India so soon) the main perceived threat to British interests, was the growing might of the Soviet Union, and Britain was worried about a possible Soviet thrust into Chitral, Gilgit and Swat. China did not figure in imperial calculations at that time because Chiang Kai Shek was an ally. It was argued, that a friendly Muslim Pakistan, would be a better bet at handling the expanding Russian Empire, and more likely to co-operate with British military and foreign policy matters, rather than a Hindu India sitting far way from the actual scene of action. British withdrawal would severely impair that country's ability to protect its interests in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean region - the vital sea and trade routes-and this breach could be filled by a pliant new Muslim state. The Indus valley, western Punjab and Balochistan were vital to the preservation of British security interests in the region. Besides, after Pakistan was created, the British did not want to be seen doing anything anti-Muslim, lest it further exacerbated the wrath of the Arab Muslim world, which was already angered by the creation of Israel.
From then on, it was a familiar story repeated on each occasion - Pakistan became intransigent and we know the reactions in 1965, 1971, 1999 and even in 2001. Each time there was a reluctance to blame Pakistan, and each time there was pressure on India to show restraint. We must also remember that in 1965 and 1971, neither country was a nuclear power, and so there was no question of there being a nuclear powder keg. Cold War interests reigned. Later, interests emanating from a desire for global dominance meant that the West turned a blind eye to Gen Zia ul Haq's feverish and clandestine schemes to acquire the nuclear weapon in the 80s because Pakistan was the base country for the jehad against the Soviet Union. Then later, the AQ Khan nuclear sales have been sought to be underplayed because Pakistan is a vital ally in the war against terror. In essence, the situation today is very much the same as it was 60 years ago. Pakistan has continued its well organised and carefully calibrated war against India, with the West trying to shackle India in various ways, insisting that concessions should come from India, the bigger country. It was Attlee who urged India to exercise restraint in 1947 and it was Blair who made similar requests in 1999 and 2001. All this is history that may not have fully played itself out and likely to be repeated as the New Great Game warms up.
We need to pay more attention to this area of "Pak Occupied Gilgit and Baltistan," as the Chairman of the Balawaristan National Front (BNF), refers to his land. The people of Baltistan (Skardu and Astore) have had close ethnic, religious ties with people of Ladakh; the Shias and Ismailis of Gilgit and Baltistan have had close ties with the Shias of Kargil and have been oppressed by the Sunnis of Pakistan. The Shias were 85 percent of the population in 1948 but are now down to 50 percent. Pakistani authorities have systematically settled Sunni Wahabbis in Gilgit and Baltistan through unfair land allocations or employment. Shias resent the education syllabus thrust on them.
The Northern Light Infantry, which was mainly manned by locals, is now increasingly manned by 'outsiders' because the locals, mostly Shias, are no longer trusted. All prominent bureaucratic positions are held by Sunnis from NWFP and Punjab. There is no freedom of expression and journalists are frequently locked up for reporting dissent. There are no writ petitions, no appeals to Supreme Court against any arbitrary action by the State. There has been no economic development in the area except for the construction of the Karakoram highway. No political activity is permitted. There are a few brave individuals like Abdul Hamid Khan of the BNF who carry on their campaign against Islamabad. More and more Gilgitis now seek self-determination and not a merger with Pakistan. And that their views must be taken into consideration for any discussions on the Kashmir question.
Anti-Shia violence continues in Gilgit and Baltistan and more than 80 persons had been killed in 2005 by October in clashes with State forces as Shias protested against state oppression or demanded better conditions. The practice of anti-Shia pogrom started in the 80s, and one of the persons who led a brutal campaign against the Shias in Gilgit in 1988, was Brig (now Gen) Pervez Musharraf, who was then based in Khapalu.
India needs to refocus attention on this region of Gilgit and Baltistan in the new globalisation context. If we are to be dependent on the uncertainties and unreliability of Pakistan for our energy supplies, it is also necessary to look elsewhere. Land routes from Russia and Kazakhstan through Kashgar could also reach India. Undoubtedly this means some negotiations with China on the boundary and trade issues. It means a new approach, less dependent on a volatile West Asia and a neighbour with whom the trust deficit remains high and will remain so for a long time to come. It means looking at the boundary question differently. It also means that we should now put 1962 behind us without forgetting the lessons of realpolitik. China may be described as a competitor or a threat on different occasions but it is equally an opportunity. It means giving shape to the Russia-India-China strategic triangle - among the three largest landmasses in the world, the largest markets in size and diversity, countries with the highest rates of growth, a Russia that would need manpower imports in the years ahead, and which could remain militarily and economically strong without total dependence on sea lanes controlled by others. This is what an Asian Century should be all about.
the drive for bases that spurs the 'cashmere' initiatives, then its the drawdown in Iraq and the slow boil in TSP that are spurring the renewed interest in 'cashmere'.....
17 December 2002
The Pioneer
Claude Arpi
Younghusband, who became famous after his military expedition in 1904, once wrote: "We, who have dealt with Asiatics, can appreciate so well (the following tactic): Taking the opportunity, striking while the iron is hot, not letting the chance go by, knowing our mind, knowing what we want, and acting decisively when the exact occasion arises." For decades, London scrupulously followed Younghusband's advice. In 1946-47, although the British had decided to leave the subcontinent, they were not ready to renounce their influence in Asia. In the 1940s, two new factors appeared on the strategic scene: Aviation and the need for petrol. London took note of the new changes. In a report on the strategic consequences of the subcontinent's independence, the British generals concluded that Pakistan was the more important than India for 2 reasons. First, Pakistan was a Muslim nation and friendship with Pakistan could facilitate the rapport with oil-rich Muslim states in the Gulf; second, Pakistan was ideal for installing air bases to control Russia and Central Asia. This explains why London systematically took Pakistan's side in the Kashmir issue.
The US has stepped into British shoes. The same basic principles remained: Control over the air bases to control the region. The sober French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique published recently an article arguing that the US, the last colonial empire, did not require allies, but vassals. The US position vis-a-vis Kashmir, for the past 50 years, has to be seen in this perspective. Successive US administrations have been trying to find a pliable vassal in the region which will allow bases to keep a tab on Afghanistan, the Central Asian republics, Xinjiang and Tibet. The best bet for the US was, therefore, to have an independent Kashmir which they could fund and directly influence. Just a look at the map of Jammu and Kashmir makes one realise the extraordinary strategic importance of the state. The British knew it. Back in 1873, the GOvernor General of British India informed the Maharaja that London had decided to post a British Resident in Kashmir "in view of the important position of Your Highness's territories on the northwestern frontiers of British India." The concept of an independent Kashmir continued to ripen with the US administration. In May 1953, Adlai Stevenson came to Srinagar to discuss with Abdullah the creation of an independent Sheikhdom. It suited perfectly the US interests: They could thus check Chinese advances in Xinjiang and Tibet and the Soviets' in Afghanistan. A "non-aligned" Nehru could certainly not be considered as a reliable ally for the purpose. Unfortunately for them, Abdullah was arrested in August 1953 and the idea had to be temporarily abandoned.
In the '80s, the US fell back on Pakistan as a palliative to dominate the region and get rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan. By the time the SOviet Union collapsed, the US had begun to realise the danger of the ISlamic fundamentalism: The genie they had liberated was now out against them. On September 11, 2001, the US experienced the dimension of the problem. Supporting terrorism whether in overt or covert form was no longer in their interests. hence the slow shift in their Kashmir policy. However, to assert their world supremacy, a new target had to be found. Iraq for several reasons became the ideal one. An American think-tank Stratfor.com published recently an in-depth analysis of the US motivations for a military take-over of Iraq. Their conclusion was similar to the one reached 55 years ago by the British: "The primary reason is geography. If we look at a map, Iraq is the most strategic country between the Levant and the Persian Gulf. It shares borders with Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and most of all, Saudi Arabia.... It would have ample room for deploying air power in the heart of the region...Within a matter of months, the US would become the most powerful military force native to the region."
After their timid Afghan campaign against the Taliban, an independent Kashmir lost its meaning. With a strong nuclear India, the idea of an "autonomous" Kashmir receded further. The US also realised that the heart of Islamic fundamentalism was not a resourceless Pakistan, but the oil-rich Gulf countries which had the means to sustain it. Therefore, the shift towards Iraq. This change in US policy was noticed when Ambassador Blackwill visited the Valley. For the first time, a US Ambassador did not meet the Hurriyat leaders. Instead, he lauded India for the peaceful conduct of the elections.
Exit Kashmir, enter Iraq
17 December 2002
The Pioneer
Claude Arpi
Younghusband, who became famous after his military expedition in 1904, once wrote: "We, who have dealt with Asiatics, can appreciate so well (the following tactic): Taking the opportunity, striking while the iron is hot, not letting the chance go by, knowing our mind, knowing what we want, and acting decisively when the exact occasion arises." For decades, London scrupulously followed Younghusband's advice. In 1946-47, although the British had decided to leave the subcontinent, they were not ready to renounce their influence in Asia. In the 1940s, two new factors appeared on the strategic scene: Aviation and the need for petrol. London took note of the new changes. In a report on the strategic consequences of the subcontinent's independence, the British generals concluded that Pakistan was the more important than India for 2 reasons. First, Pakistan was a Muslim nation and friendship with Pakistan could facilitate the rapport with oil-rich Muslim states in the Gulf; second, Pakistan was ideal for installing air bases to control Russia and Central Asia. This explains why London systematically took Pakistan's side in the Kashmir issue.
The US has stepped into British shoes. The same basic principles remained: Control over the air bases to control the region. The sober French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique published recently an article arguing that the US, the last colonial empire, did not require allies, but vassals. The US position vis-a-vis Kashmir, for the past 50 years, has to be seen in this perspective. Successive US administrations have been trying to find a pliable vassal in the region which will allow bases to keep a tab on Afghanistan, the Central Asian republics, Xinjiang and Tibet. The best bet for the US was, therefore, to have an independent Kashmir which they could fund and directly influence. Just a look at the map of Jammu and Kashmir makes one realise the extraordinary strategic importance of the state. The British knew it. Back in 1873, the GOvernor General of British India informed the Maharaja that London had decided to post a British Resident in Kashmir "in view of the important position of Your Highness's territories on the northwestern frontiers of British India." The concept of an independent Kashmir continued to ripen with the US administration. In May 1953, Adlai Stevenson came to Srinagar to discuss with Abdullah the creation of an independent Sheikhdom. It suited perfectly the US interests: They could thus check Chinese advances in Xinjiang and Tibet and the Soviets' in Afghanistan. A "non-aligned" Nehru could certainly not be considered as a reliable ally for the purpose. Unfortunately for them, Abdullah was arrested in August 1953 and the idea had to be temporarily abandoned.
In the '80s, the US fell back on Pakistan as a palliative to dominate the region and get rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan. By the time the SOviet Union collapsed, the US had begun to realise the danger of the ISlamic fundamentalism: The genie they had liberated was now out against them. On September 11, 2001, the US experienced the dimension of the problem. Supporting terrorism whether in overt or covert form was no longer in their interests. hence the slow shift in their Kashmir policy. However, to assert their world supremacy, a new target had to be found. Iraq for several reasons became the ideal one. An American think-tank Stratfor.com published recently an in-depth analysis of the US motivations for a military take-over of Iraq. Their conclusion was similar to the one reached 55 years ago by the British: "The primary reason is geography. If we look at a map, Iraq is the most strategic country between the Levant and the Persian Gulf. It shares borders with Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and most of all, Saudi Arabia.... It would have ample room for deploying air power in the heart of the region...Within a matter of months, the US would become the most powerful military force native to the region."
After their timid Afghan campaign against the Taliban, an independent Kashmir lost its meaning. With a strong nuclear India, the idea of an "autonomous" Kashmir receded further. The US also realised that the heart of Islamic fundamentalism was not a resourceless Pakistan, but the oil-rich Gulf countries which had the means to sustain it. Therefore, the shift towards Iraq. This change in US policy was noticed when Ambassador Blackwill visited the Valley. For the first time, a US Ambassador did not meet the Hurriyat leaders. Instead, he lauded India for the peaceful conduct of the elections.
Islamist fighters on the Silk Road
M.K. Bhadrakumar
A steadily rising curve of Islamist activities is becoming visible in Central Asia.
In his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, noted Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid describes how the United States' Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's MI6 and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence drew up a provocative plan in 1986 to launch mujahideen attacks in the Soviet territory, presently within Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The task was given to the ISI's favourite mujahideen leader, Gulbuddi n Hekmatyar. Of course, the idea itself — the use of militant Islamists as a geopolitical tool to lacerate the "soft underbelly" of the Soviet Union — belonged to the U.S. National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Years later, in 1998, when a Le Nouvel Observateur interviewer asked him whether he regretted using political Islam as a natural ally, Brzezinski was unrepentant. He asked: "What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Indeed, it wasn't an idea that was born in Brzezinski's clever mind. When the idea of the U.S.' utilitarian alliance with the benighted version of Islam first appeared in the mid-1950s as the underpinning of the U.S. strategy to gain control of the oil in the Middle East and ward off Arab nationalism, American strategists called it the "Eisenhower Doctrine." And its current reputation has been ably theorised by ideologues such as Bernard Lewis.
That is why, the latest stirrings on the political accommodation of the neo-Taliban in Afghanistan by the U.S. cause immense anxiety and concern in the region. The issue is not about an Afghan settlement. Surely, for a settlement to be durable, it needs to be inclusive and broad-based and cannot possibly exclude a sizeable group such as the Taliban, which does have indigenous roots. The issue, rather, is about the nature of Afghan reconciliation. Outside powers should not be prescriptive. On the other hand, the process must evolve through an intra-Afghan dialogue.
The Pakistan military's spokesman, Athas Abbas, recently admitted in an interview with the CNN that the ISI continues to be in contact with the Taliban's hardcore leader and that it can bring him and other commanders to the negotiating table. No matter what prompted Major General Abbas to open up, Washington chose to let it pass. The fine line of distinction between the "good" and the "bad" Taliban is slowly and steadily blurring, and the vista is opening up for a dialogue with Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Hekmatyar.
Mr. Abbas' "chatter" appeared with hardly a few weeks to go for the Afghan presidential election due on August 20. The western capitals are panicky about the prospect of President Hamid Karzai securing a second term. A nasty media campaign against him is under way. But what happens if Mr. Karzai wins the election? Conceivably, an "Iran-like" situation would develop. It is a real possibility. The British commander in Helmand province, Colonel David Haight, has openly speculated that Mr. Karzai's re-election could trigger a "violent backlash" from the Afghan public.
The western capitals are backing the candidacy of former Afghan Finance Minister and World Bank official Ashraf Ghani. One of the attractions about Mr. Ghani's electoral platform is that he has openly called for ending the war and offers the Taliban a three-year ceasefire. On the contrary, Mr. Karzai's two vice-presidential running mates are former Northern Alliance stalwarts Mohammed Fahim, who used to be the intelligence chief under Ahmed Shah Massoud, and Karim Khalili, the Hazara Shia leader from Bamyan. More irksome for the U.S. seems to be the prospect that while Mr. Fahim has had close dealings with Russian intelligence over the years, Mr. Khalili has been Tehran's steady ally through a quarter century. Thus Mr. Karzai's ticket is not only pan-Afghan but also enjoys the trust of Russia and Iran (and India). Again, Afghan Uzbeki leader Rashid Dostum and Hazara commander Mohammed Mohaqiq from the Amu Darya region — two key figures in the anti-Taliban resistance in the 1990s — have announced their backing for Mr. Karzai, and they are as equally opposed to the return of a Taliban regime as Mr. Fahim or Mr. Khalili could be.
A Karzai victory, in short, means that any reconciliation with the Taliban can only be on the basis of an inter-ethnic, national consensus among the Afghan people. Neither the U.S. nor Pakistan seems ready for such transparency in the Afghan political process. All in all, therefore, the U.S. may well opt for a regime change in Kabul.
This is a high-stakes game, as the nature of the power structure in Kabul holds profound implications for the security of the Central Asian region and North Caucasus — and Xinjiang. All evidence points to an intensification of the big power struggle for influence in the energy-rich regions of the Caspian and Central Asia. A defining moment is coming up by the year-end when the 7000-kilometre long gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Xinjiang will become operational. The pipeline will be a game-changer. The U.S. is keenly advancing the agenda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's expansion into the region and it is meeting with resistance from both Russia and China.
Against this backdrop, a steadily rising curve of Islamist activities is becoming visible in Central Asia. Armed attacks by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group affiliated to the al-Qaeda, resumed since late May. There are reports that the Islamist commander of the Tajik civil war (1992-97), Mullah Abdullo, recently crossed the Afghan border into Tajikistan with some 300 followers and took shelter in Tavildara, which is situated in the Rasht Valley in the rugged Pamir Mountains, some 20 km from the Afghan border. Tavildara used to be the base of the Islamist fighters in the Tajik civil war.
Abdullo had enjoyed the ISI's backing. He never recognised the 1997 Peace Accord and instead took shelter in Kandahar where he was arrested in 2001 when the U.S. intervened in Afghanistan, but for some obscure reason he was allowed to disappear. Since then, he has been hiding with the Taliban leadership. In the past few months, Russian intelligence repeatedly warned of the imminence of a military conflict and insurgency in Central Asia. The threat perception finally compelled Russia to establish a second military base in Kyrgyzstan in the southern city of Osh. Situated on the edges of the densely populated Ferghana valley, Osh is an extremely strategic location near Afghanistan and Xinjiang. A big-scale Russia-China joint military drill to fight terrorism commences on Wednesday. Curiously, Moscow lost no time expressing support to Beijing over the recent unrest in Urumqi, following a telephone conversation between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi at the latter's initiative.
The U.S. commentators have given a spin that the Central Asian militants are returning home due to the Pakistani military stepping up its operations along the Afghan border region. According to the local opinion in Afghanistan, however, U.S. special forces are providing the logistics to Central Asian Islamists to reach the Tajikistan border from Pakistan-Afghan tribal areas. Kunduz, Islam Qala, Imam Zahib, Aliabad and Chardara district in northern Afghanistan have become staging points for militants to cross into Tajikistan. There are reports that U.S. special forces facilitated the movement of "foreign fighters" from the Wazir tribes on the Pakistani-Afghan border into Chardara district. (Chardara is a Pashtun enclave.) These are very alarming signals reminiscent of the run-up to the Andizhan uprising in the Ferghana valley in May 2005, which had covert American involvement. Conceivably, the security situation may worsen along the route of the Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline.
Thus, several tendencies are concurrently appearing on the geopolitical landscape — possible "regime change" in Kabul; prospects of the U.S. reconciliation with the Taliban under the ISI's mediation; "homecoming" by Central Asian Islamists from their bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan; role of U.S. special forces; militant activity in the Ferghana valley; commissioning of the gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan and Xinjiang; unrest in Urumqi, etc.
The security situation in Russia's North Caucasus region — primarily in the eastern part, including Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria — has also taken a turn for the worse. A Carnegie scholar recently wrote that the Russian Caucasus is returning to "some ancient period" and "gunshots, explosions, assassination attempts have become daily routine." Traditional Caucasian Islam, Sufism, is giving way to Wahhabism and is becoming a political tool while the "secular and religious elites have been fusing." In an interview with the U.S. government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently, Russia's most wanted terrorist, Doku Umarov, claimed that he was mobilising for stepped-up insurgency in Chechnya, where Moscow previously announced a successful end to counter-insurgency operations.
To be sure, a second post-Soviet wave of Islamism is appearing in the region. Islamist fighters are arriving on the Silk Road, poking Russia's — and China's — "soft underbelly" in a way that will do Brzezenski proud.
