The Revenge of Geography (37 page)

Afghanistan only emerged as a country of sorts in the mid-eighteenth century, when Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent in the Persian army of Nader Shah the Great, carved out a buffer
zone between Persia and a crumbling Mughal empire in the Indian Subcontinent, which was later to evolve into a buffer zone between czarist Russia and British India. Thus the case can be made that with the slow-motion dissolution of the former Soviet Empire in Central Asia, and the gradual weakening of the Pakistani state, a historic realignment is now taking place that could see Afghanistan disappear on the political map: in the future, for example, the Hindu Kush (the real northwestern frontier of the subcontinent) could form a border between Pushtunistan and a Greater Tajikistan. The Taliban, the upshot of Pushtun nationalism, Islamic fervor, drug money, corrupt warlords, and hatred of the American occupation, may, in the words of Asian specialist Selig Harrison, merely be the vehicle for this transition that is too broad and too grand to be in any way deterred by a foreign military run by impatient civilians back in Washington.

But there is another reality to counter this one: one that eschews such determinism. The fact that Afghanistan is larger than Iraq with a more dispersed population is basically meaningless, since 65 percent of the country lives within thirty-five miles of the main road system, which approximates the old medieval caravan routes, making only 80 out of 342 districts key to centralized control. Afghanistan has been governed more or less from the center since Ahmad Khan’s time: Kabul, if not always a point of authority, was at least a point of arbitration. Especially between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, Afghanistan experienced moderate and constructive government under the constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah, a descendant of Ahmad Khan. The major cities were united by a highway system on which it was safe to travel, even as malaria was on the point of eradication through estimable health and development programs. Toward the end of this period, I hitchhiked and rode local buses across Afghanistan, never felt threatened, and was able to send books and clothes back home through functioning post offices. There was, too, a strong Afghan national identity distinct from that of Iran or Pakistan or the Soviet Union. A fragile webwork of tribes it might have been, but it was also developing as more than just a buffer state. Pushtunistan might be a reality, but as in the way of dual citizenship,
so very definitely is Afghanistan. Blame for the three coup d’états in Kabul in the 1970s that led to the country’s seemingly never-ending agony of violence rests as much with a great and contiguous power, the Soviet Union, as with the Afghans. As part of a process to firmly secure the country within its sphere of influence, the Soviets unwittingly destabilized Afghan politics, which led to their December 1979 invasion. For Afghanistan, as a geographical buffer between the Iranian plateau, the Central Asian steppes, and the Indian Subcontinent, is breathtakingly strategic, and thus has been coveted by not just Russians, but also by Iranians and Pakistanis, even as Indian policymakers have been obsessed with it.

An Afghanistan that falls under Taliban sway threatens to create a succession of radicalized Islamic societies from the Indian-Pakistani border to Central Asia. This would be, in effect, a Greater Pakistan, giving Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate the ability to create a clandestine empire composed of the likes of Jallaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Lashkar-e-Taiba: able to confront India in the manner that Hezbollah and Hamas confront Israel. Conversely, an Afghanistan at peace and governed more or less liberally from Kabul would give New Delhi the ability to extricate itself from its historical nemesis on its northwestern frontier, as well as to challenge Pakistan on both its western and eastern borders. That is why during the 1980s India supported the Soviet puppet regime in Kabul of Mohammed Najibullah, which was secular and even liberal compared with some of the pro-Pakistani Islamist mujahidin trying to topple it: for the same reason India now supports Hamid Karzai’s Kabul government.

A stable and reasonably moderate Afghanistan becomes truly the hub of not just southern Central Asia, but of Eurasia in general. Mackinder’s Heartland exists in terms of the “convergence” of interests of Russia, China, India, and Iran in favor of transport corridors through Central Asia. And the most powerful drivers of Eurasian trade routes are the Chinese and Indian economies. Estimates for overland Indian trade across Central Asia to European and Middle Eastern markets foresee a growth of over $100 billion annually. It is
only because Afghanistan remains at war that New Delhi is not connected by trucks, trains, and trans-Caspian ships to Istanbul and Tbilisi; or to Almaty and Tashkent by road and rail. Nevertheless, India has contributed significantly to building Afghanistan’s road network, along with Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Indian-funded Zaranj–Delaram highway connects western Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chah Bahar on the Arabian Sea.
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Indians can taste the benefits that a quiescent Afghanistan can bring them, even as it has been violent for more than three decades. For a quiescent Afghanistan would spur road, rail, and pipeline construction not only in all directions across Afghanistan, but across Pakistan, too, and therein lies the ultimate solution to Pakistan’s own instability. Though a region at peace benefits India most of all, because its economy dwarfs that of any other state save for China.

But that is not the situation that currently obtains. For now, the Greater Indian Subcontinent features among the least stable geopolitics in the world. The register of empires and invasions constitutes a living history because of its relevance to deep-seated insecurities and political problems of today. In many ways, Greater India is like a map of early modern Europe, only worse because of nuclear weapons. In early modern Europe, there were competing ethnic and national groups that were in the process of congealing into bureaucratic states, even as they were engaged in complex balance of power arrangements that because of their frequent interactions and subsequent miscalculations broke down occasionally into open warfare. Modern nationalism was in a young and vigorous phase, as it is in South Asia today. But unlike the multipolarity of early modern Europe, South Asia evinces a bipolar struggle between India and Pakistan, with Afghanistan as one battleground, and the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir as another one. Unlike the bipolarity of the superpowers, however, there is nothing cool, dispassionate, or ritualistic about this conflict. This is not a clash of ideologies in which the opposing parties have no religious or historical hatred for each other, and are separated
by the wide berth of a hemisphere and Arctic ice. This is a clash between a Hindu-majority, albeit secular, state and a Muslim one, both in full-blooded phases of modern nationalism, and separated by a crowded, common border, with capitals and major cities nearby. Less than two hundred miles separate Pakistan’s Indus River heartland from northern India’s Ganges River heartland.
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In addition to everything else about this geography, it is a closed and claustrophobic one, the kind that Paul Bracken describes well in his cogitation of a new nuclear age.

India desperately wants to escape from this geography and from this history. Its very competition and fixation with China forms an element of this escape. India’s rivalry with China is not like the one with Pakistan at all: it is more abstract, less emotional, and (far more significantly) less volatile. And it is a rivalry with no real history behind it.

It has been nearly half a century since India fought a limited war with China over a disputed Himalayan border, in which combat occurred at altitudes of fourteen thousand feet in the Aksai Chin region near Kashmir in the northwest and in Arunachal Pradesh near Bhutan in the northeast. The background to this 1962 war, in which over 2,000 soldiers were killed and 2,744 wounded, was the 1959 uprising in Tibet that sent the Dalai Lama into exile in India, following the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet. An independent or autonomous Tibet that was even vaguely pro-Indian would make Chinese strategists exceedingly nervous. Given the tensions of the Tibet crisis, China saw the establishment of Indian outposts north of disputed border lines as a casus belli, and in one month of fighting in the autumn overran Indian forces. Neither side deployed its navy or air force, and so the fighting was limited to remote regions where few people lived, as opposed to the Indian-Pakistani border, that in addition to passing through swamps and deserts, cuts through the agriculturally rich Punjab inhabited by millions.

The Indo-Chinese border is still in some areas a matter of dispute. The Chinese have built roads and airfields throughout Tibet, and India now falls into the arc of operations of Chinese fighter pilots,
even as the Indian air force is the world’s fourth largest, with over 1,300 aircraft spread over sixty bases. Indian satellites and reconnaissance aircraft provide intelligence on Chinese troop movements in Tibet. Then there is the rise of both countries’ navies. The rise of the Chinese navy was covered in the preceding chapter. Because India has no equivalent of the Mediterranean, no enclosed seas and clusters of islands to lure sailors, even as the earth is warm and productive, India until recently has been more or less a land-bound nation framed against the open ocean. But that has suddenly changed with advances in military technology that have compressed oceanic geography, and with the development of the Indian economy, which can finance major shipbuilding and acquisitions. Another factor driving India seaward is the threat of China itself, as China’s own naval aspirations move it beyond the Western Pacific into the Indian Ocean.

China has been helping to build or upgrade ports around India: in Kyaukpyu, Burma; Chittagong, Bangladesh; Hambantota, Sri Lanka; and Gwadar, Pakistan. In all of these countries China is providing substantial military and economic aid, and political support. China, as we know, already has a great merchant fleet and aspirations for a blue-water oceanic navy that will guard its interests and protect its trade routes between the hydrocarbon-rich Middle East and China’s Pacific coast. This is occurring at the same time that India has aspirations for a Monroe Doctrine–style presence throughout the Indian Ocean from southern Africa to Australia. The greatly overlapping naval spheres of interest aggravate the border issues in the Himalayan north that are still outstanding. China is merely seeking to protect its own sea lines of communications with friendly, state-of-the-art harbors along the way. But India feels surrounded. The futuristic possibility of a Pakistani-Chinese naval center of operations near the entrance to the Persian Gulf in Gwadar has led to the expansion of the Indian naval port of Karwar on the Arabian Sea. The port and energy pipelines China is building at Kyaukpyu in Burma have caused India to initiate its own port and energy complex at Sittwe, fifty miles to the north, as India and China quicken their competition for routes and resources in western Indochina.

Still, one can only repeat, the Indian-Chinese rivalry represents a new struggle without the force of history behind it. The interactions that India and China have had in the distant past have usually been productive: most famously the spread of Buddhism from India to China in middle and late antiquity, as Buddhism went on to become the established religion of the Tang Dynasty. Despite the issue of Tibet, in which Tibetan autonomy or independence is in India’s geopolitical interest but clearly harmful to that of China, the high wall of the Himalayas essentially cuts the two countries’ populations off from each other. Only in recent decades, as indigenous militaries in the East have developed sea, air, and missile power, has a new Eurasian-wide geography of conflict come sharply into focus. The death of distance, much more than civilizational divides, is what ails India-China relations today. Only Indian policy elites worry about China, while the problem of Pakistan consumes the entire country, northern India especially. Moreover, India and China constitute among the world’s most dynamic and complementary trading relationships. In a way, the tension between India and China illustrates the problems of success: the momentous economic development that both New Delhi and Beijing can now utilize for military purposes, especially for expensive air and naval platforms. Certainly, the new India-China rivalry richly demonstrates Bracken’s point that the technologies of war and wealth creation go hand in hand, and the finite size of the earth is increasingly a force for instability, as military hardware and software shrink mileage on the geopolitical map.

To wit, for the first few decades following the Cold War, India and China had relatively low-tech ground forces that were content to watch their own borders and to serve as bulwarks for national consolidation. Thus, they did not threaten each other. But as planes, missiles, and warships entered their military inventories, even as their armies became more expeditionary, suddenly they saw each other at opposite sides of a new battlespace. This is not only true of India and China, but of states across the broad sweep of Eurasia—Israel, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and so on, who are in a new and deathly geographical embrace of overlapping missile ranges.