The Revenge of Geography (36 page)

To emphasize the point: Aurangzeb’s situation was that of Delhi-based rulers going back hundreds of years, as well as of even older rulers in the subcontinent stretching back to antiquity. That is, the vast region that today encompasses northern India along with Pakistan and much of Afghanistan was commonly under a single polity, even as sovereignty over southern India was in doubt. Thus, for Indian elites, to think of not only Pakistan but Afghanistan, too, as part of India’s home turf is not only natural but historically justified. The tomb of Babur is in Kabul, not in Delhi. This does not mean that India has territorial designs on Afghanistan, but it does mean that New Delhi cares profoundly about who rules Afghanistan, and wishes to ensure that those who do rule there are friendly to India.

The British, unlike previous rulers of India, constituted a sea power much more than a land power. It was from the sea, as evinced by the Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta presidencies that were to become the focal points of their rule, that the British were able to conquer India. Consequently, it was the British who, following more than two millennia of invasions and migrations from the west and northwest, restored to India as a political fact the basic truth of its geography: that it is indeed a subcontinent. A 1901 map of India wonderfully demonstrates this: showing a plethora of British-built rail lines ranging in arterial fashion over the whole of the subcontinent—from the Afghan
border to the Palk Strait near Ceylon in the deep south, and from Karachi in present-day Pakistan in the west to Chittagong in present-day Bangladesh in the east. Technology had allowed for the subcontinent’s vast internal space to be finally united under one polity, rather than divided among several, or administered under some weak imperial alliance system.

True, the Mughals (along with, to a lesser extent, the Maratha Confederacy in the early modern era) were the precursors to this achievement, with their ability to ably administer much of the subcontinent. But Mughal rule, as brilliant as it was, had signified yet another Muslim invasion from the northwest, one that to this day is denigrated by Hindu nationalists. Yet Great Britain, the sea power, was a neutral in the historical drama between Hindus and Muslims: a drama whose basis lay in geography; with the bulk of India’s Muslims living both in the northwest, from where invasions had nearly always come, and in East Bengal—the agriculturally rich, eastern terminus of the Gangetic plain, where Islam spread with a thirteenth-century Turkic-Mongol invasion and the clearing of the forest.
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The British may have united the Indian Subcontinent with modern bureaucracy and a rail system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by the hastened, tumultuous manner of their leaving in 1947, they helped redivide it in a way that was both more profound and more formalized than any previous imperial sundering. For in the past, the places where, for example, the Indo-Greeks met the Gupta Empire, or where the Mughal Empire met the Maratha Confederacy, did not signify—as such borders do today—barbed wire and minefields and different passports and war-by-media, which all belong to a later phase of technology. The divide now is a hardened legal and partly civilizational one, and became thus less because of geography than because of the decisions of men.

In short, from the historical perspective of India, Pakistan constitutes much more than even a nuclear-armed adversary, a state sponsor of terrorism, and a large, conventional army breathing down its neck on the border. Pakistan, lying to India’s northwest, where the mountains meet the plain, is the very geographical and national embodiment
of all the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history. Pakistan looms to the northwest of India, just as the great Muslim invasion forces of yore once did. “Pakistan,” writes George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, “is the modern-day remnant of Muslim rule over medieval India,” even as Pakistan’s southwest is the subcontinental region first occupied by Arab Muslims invading from Iran and southern Afghanistan.
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To be sure, Indian decision makers are not anti-Muslim. India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan itself. India has had three Muslim presidents. But India is a secular democracy by virtue of the fact that it has sought to escape from the politics of religion in order to heal the Hindu-Muslim divide in a predominantly Hindu state. Pakistan, as an Islamic republic, to say nothing of its radical elements, is in some ways an affront to the very liberal fundamentals on which India is based.

The fact that India’s fear of Pakistan—and vice versa—is existential should not surprise anyone. Of course, India could defeat Pakistan in a conventional war. But in a nuclear exchange, or a war by terrorism, Pakistan could achieve a parity of sorts with India. And it goes beyond that: since it isn’t only Pakistan that encompasses, after a fashion, the threat of another Mughal onslaught without the Mughals’ redeeming cosmopolitanism; it is Afghanistan, too. For as we know, the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan is largely a mirage, both today and in history. The crags and canyons of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (officially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. Even at the official Khyber border post, tens of thousands of ethnic Pushtuns pass through weekly without showing identity papers, while hundreds of jingle trucks pass daily uninspected. The lack of procedures attests not only to the same tribes on both sides of the frontier, but to the tenuous nature of the Afghan and Pakistani states themselves, the ultimate cause of which is their lack of geographical coherence as
the heart of Indo-Islamic and Indo-Persianate continuums through which it is nearly impossible to draw lines. The Achaemenid, Kushan, Indo-Greek, Ghaznavid, Mughal, and other empires all took in both Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of their dominions, which either threatened India or also included portions of it. Then there is the Central Asian Timur (Tamerlane) and the Turkmen Nader Shah the Great, who in 1398 and in 1739 respectively both vanquished Delhi from imperial bases in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

This is a rich history that few in the West know of, while sections of the Indian elite know it in their bones. When Indians look at their maps of the subcontinent they see Afghanistan and Pakistan in the northwest, just as they see Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh in the northeast, as all part of India’s immediate sphere of influence, with Iran, the Persian Gulf, the former Soviet Central Asian republics, and Burma as critical shadow zones. Not to view these places as such, is, from the vantage point of New Delhi, to ignore the lessons of history and geography.

As this record of imperial to-ing and fro-ing over the course of millennia shows, Afghanistan and the war there is not just another security issue for India to deal with. Only in the Western view is Afghanistan part of Central Asia; to Indians it is part of their subcontinent.
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Afghanistan’s geography makes it central not only as a principal invasion route into India, for terrorists in our day as for armies in days past, but as a strategically vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s primary enemy.

While India’s geographic logic is not perfect, Pakistan, right-angled to the course of invasions past, has, in the opinion of many, no geographic logic at all, and Afghanistan far too little. Pakistan can be viewed as an artificial puzzle piece of a territory, straddling the frontier between the Iranian-Afghan plateau and the lowlands of the subcontinent, encompassing the western half of the Punjab, but not the eastern half, crazily uniting the Karakoram in the north (some of the highest mountains in the world) with the Makran Desert almost a thousand miles away to the south by the Arabian Sea.
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Whereas the Indus should be a border of sorts, the Pakistani state sits on both
of its banks. Pakistan is the home of four major ethnic groups, each harboring hostility to the others and each anchored to a specific region: Punjab to the northeast, Sindh to the southeast, Baluchistan to the southwest, and the Pushtun-dominated North-West Frontier. Islam was supposed to have provided the unifying glue for the state but it has signally failed in this regard: even as Islamic groups in Pakistan have become more radical, Baluch and Sindhis continue to see Pakistan as a foreign entity overlorded by the Punjabis, with the Pushtuns in the northwest drawn more into the Taliban-infected politics of the Afghan-Pakistani border area. Without the Punjabi-dominated army, Pakistan might cease to exist—reduced to a rump of an Islamic Greater Punjab, with semi-anarchic Baluchistan and Sindh drawn closer into the orbit of India.

Founded in 1947 by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a London-Bombay intellectual, the son of a merchant from Gujarat, Pakistan was built on an ideological premise: that of a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent. And it was true, the majority of the subcontinent’s Muslims lived in West and East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971), yet many tens of millions of Muslims remained in India proper, so that Pakistan’s geographical contradictions rendered its ideology supremely imperfect. Indeed, millions of Muslims and Hindus became refugees upon Pakistan’s creation. The fact is that the subcontinent’s history of invasions and migrations makes for a plenteous ethnic, religious, and sectarian mix. For example, India is the birthplace of several religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians have lived in India for hundreds and thousands of years. The philosophy of the Indian state accepts this reality and celebrates it; the philosophy of the Pakistani state is far less inclusive. That is partly why India is stable and Pakistan is not.

But geography in this case is subject to different interpretations. From another perspective, Pakistan makes impressive geographic sense as a civilizational intermediary and conduit of trade routes connecting the subcontinent with Central Asia, the heart of the Indo-Islamic world; because André Wink’s concept of the Indo-Muslim
Al-Hind
is hard to define in terms of modern borders, one may ask, why is Pakistan any more artificial than India? After all, Lahore in Pakistan was as much a mother lode of Mughal rule as Delhi in India. The real geographic heart of the northern subcontinental plain is the Punjab, and that is split between the two countries, making neither whole from any historical or geographical view. Just as northern India grows out of the demographic core of the Ganges, Pakistan, it could be argued, grows out of that other vital demographic core, the Indus and its tributaries. In this telling, the Indus, rather than a divider, is a uniter.
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This point is best expressed in Aitzaz Ahsan’s
The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan
. A member of the late Benazir Bhutto’s Sindh-based Pakistan People’s Party, Ahsan asserts that the “critical dividing line” throughout history within the subcontinent is the “Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient”: running southwest from Gurdaspur in eastern Punjab to Kathiawar in Gujarat on the Arabian Sea, a line that approximates the present India-Pakistan border.
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But here is the conundrum. During the relatively brief periods in history when the areas of India and Pakistan were united—the Mauryan, Mughal, and British—there was no issue about who dominated the trade routes into Central Asia (Afghanistan and beyond). During the rest of history, there was also no problem, because whereas empires like the Kushana, Ghaznavid, and Delhi Sultanate did not control the eastern Ganges, they did control both the Indus
and
the western Ganges, so that Delhi and Lahore were under the rule of one polity, even as Central Asia was also under their control—so, again, no conflict. Today’s political geography is historically unique, however: an Indus valley state and a powerful Gangetic state both fighting for control of an independent Central Asian near-abroad.

Because the Indus and its tributaries, with Punjab at the heart, is the demographic core of the Indus-to-Oxus region, encompassing today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is not inappropriate from a historical or geographical sense that, for example, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), dominated by Punjabis, has a strong hand in the terrorist and smuggling operations of the Haqqani Network, which, in turn, operates throughout Indus-to-Oxus. ISI is
most interested in controlling the south and east of Afghanistan; that would leave the area north of the Hindu Kush to affect a merger of sorts with the Oxus and trans-Oxus region of southern Uzbekistan and southern Tajikistan—a revival of ancient Bactria. Truly, the early-twenty-first-century map could look like an ancient one.

As for Afghanistan itself—so central, as we have seen, to India’s geopolitical fortunes over the course of history—let us consider it for a moment. It is a country with a life expectancy of forty-four years, with a literacy rate of 28 percent (and far lower than that for women), with only 9 percent of females attending secondary schools, and with only a fifth of the population enjoying access to potable water. Out of 182 countries, Afghanistan ranks next to last on the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Iraq, on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003, was ranked 130, and its literacy rate is a reasonable 74 percent. While in Iraq urbanization stands at 77 percent, so that reducing violence in Greater Baghdad during the troop surge of 2007 had a calming effect on the entire country, in Afghanistan urbanization stands at only 30 percent: meaning that counterinsurgency efforts in one village or region may have no effect on another.

Whereas Mesopotamia, with large urban clusters over a flat landscape, is conducive to military occupation forces, Afghanistan is, in terms of geography, barely a country at all. It is riven by cathedral-like mountain ranges within its territory, which help seal divisions between Pushtuns and Tajiks and other minorities, even as comparatively little in the way of natural impediments separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, or Afghanistan from Iran. Looking at the relief map, and noting that more than half of the world’s 42 million Pushtuns live inside Pakistan, one could conceivably construct a country called Pushtunistan, lying between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River, thus overlapping the Afghani and Pakistani states.