The Revenge of Geography (38 page)

Behold, then, the Indian Subcontinent. Bounded by seas and mountains, it is still internally vast, and its lack of a natural basis for early political unity and organization shows up still, for China remains better organized and more efficiently governed than India, despite China’s lack of democracy. China adds more miles of highways per year than India has in total. Indian ministries are overbearing and weak reeds compared to China’s. China may be wracked by strikes and demonstrations, but India is wracked by violent insurrections; notably that of the Maoist-trending Naxalites in the central and eastern portions of the country. In this regard, Fairgrieve’s description of a “less advanced” civilization compared to some external ones still holds.
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He who sits in Delhi, with his back to Muslim Central Asia, must worry still about unrest up on the plateaus to the northwest. The United States will draw down its troops in Afghanistan, but India will still have to live with the results, and therefore remain intimately engaged. India is faced with a conundrum. Its great power status in the new century will be enhanced by its very political and military competition with China, even as it remains pinned down by frontiers with weak and semi-dysfunctional states inside the subcontinent. We have discussed Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there are Nepal and Bangladesh, too, to momentarily consider.

Following the dismantling of its monarchy and the coming to power of former Maoist insurgents, the Nepalese government barely controls the countryside where 85 percent of its people live. Never having been colonized, Nepal did not inherit a strong bureaucratic tradition from the British. Despite the aura bequeathed by the Himalayas, the bulk of Nepal’s population live in the dank and humid lowlands along the barely policed border with India. I have traveled through this region: it is in many ways indistinguishable from the Gangetic plain. If the Nepalese government cannot increase state capacity, the state itself could gradually dissolve. Bangladesh, even more so than Nepal, has no geographical defense to marshal as a state: it is
the same ruler-flat, aquatic landscape of paddy fields and scrub on both sides of the border with India; the border posts, as I have discovered, are run-down, disorganized, ramshackle affairs. This artificially shaped blotch of territory—in succession Bengal, East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh—could metamorphose yet again amid the gale forces of regional politics, Muslim religious extremism, and climate change. Like Pakistan, the history of Bangladesh is one of military and civilian regimes, few of which have functioned well enough. Millions of Bangladeshi refugees have already crossed the border into India as illegals. And yet the Bangladeshi government struggles on, improving its performance as of this writing. It could yet succeed as a hub of overland trade and pipeline routes connecting India, China, and a future free and democratic Burma.

The subcontinent from early antiquity was politically divided, and that is what ails it still. Now let us look at the extreme north, where the Karakoram meet the Himalayas. Here is the territory of Kashmir, crammed in between Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and China. The northern areas of the Karakoram Range, with the town of Gilgit, are held by Pakistan and claimed by India, as is the slice of Azad (“Free”) Kashmir to the west. The Ladakh Range in the heart of Kashmir, with the towns of Srinagar and Jammu, are administered by India and claimed by Pakistan, as is the Siachen Glacier to the north. To the far north and northeast lie the Shaksam valley and Aksai Chin, administered by China and claimed by India. Furthermore, the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (the Ladakh Range) has a Muslim majority of 75 percent, a fact that has helped fuel jihadist rebellions for years. The late Osama bin Laden in his pronouncements railed against Hindu India’s domination of Kashmir. And yet much of Kashmir is high-altitude, uninhabitable badlands. But wars have been fought on these territories and over them, and may be fought still. The Chinese fought India in 1962 because they wanted to build a road from Xinjiang to Tibet through eastern Kashmir. India fought China to obstruct the common border between China and Pakistan.

Kashmir, like Palestine, because of the effect of cyberspace and new media, could still fire hatred among millions, putting a solution
to its tangle of problems further out of reach. For the very technologies that defeat geography also have the capability of enhancing geography’s importance. The subcontinent is a blunt geographical fact, but defining its borders will go on indefinitely.

Whereas Chinese dynasties of old almost completely fall within the current borders of China, the dynasties to which India is heir, as we have seen, do not. Thus, India looks to Afghanistan and its other shadow zones with less serenity than does China to its shadow zones. India is a regional power to the degree that it is entrapped by this geography; it is a potential great power to the degree that it can move beyond it.

As University of Chicago scholar William McNeill has told us, India, China, and Greece all lay “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” protected as they were by mountains, deserts, and sheer distance.
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Of course, this protection was partial, for as we know, Greece was ravaged by Persia, China by the Mongols and the Turkic steppe people, and India by a surfeit of Muslim invaders. Nevertheless, geography provided enough of a barrier for three great and unique civilizations to take root. Lying in the immense space between these civilizations, as noted in an earlier chapter, was what McNeill’s Chicago colleague Marshall Hodgson referred to as the Oikoumene, an antique Greek term for the “inhabited quarter” of the world: this is Herodotus’s world, the parched temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass stretching from North Africa to the margins of western China, a belt of territory Hodgson also calls Nile-to-Oxus.
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Hodgson’s vision captures brilliantly several key and contradictory
facts: that the Oikoumene—the Greater Middle East—is an easily definable zone existing between Greece, China, and India, distinctly separate from all three, even as it has had pivotal influence on each of them, so that the relationships are extremely organic; and that whereas the Greater Middle East is united by Islam and the legacies of horse and camel nomadism—as opposed to the crop agriculture of China and India—it is also deeply divided within by rivers, oases, and highlands, with great ramifications for political organization to this day. The disparity between the Greater Middle East and China, say, is especially telling. John King Fairbank, the late Harvard China expert, writes:

This classical legacy of division remains with us most profoundly across the chasm of the millennia, and is therefore crucial to the volatile politics of the Greater Middle East today. While Arabic has come to unify much of the region, Persian and Turkish predominate in the northern plateau regions, and this is not to mention the many languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus. As Hodgson shows, many individual Middle Eastern states, while products of arbitrary, colonial-era map drawing, also have a sturdy basis in antiquity, that is, in geography. Yet the very multiplicity of these states, as well as the religious, ideological, and democratizing forces that operate within them, further reify their designation as part of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s
debatable ground. Indeed, the supreme fact of twenty-first-century world politics is that the most geographically central area of the dry-land earth is also the most unstable.

In the Middle East we have, in the words of the scholars Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, a “vast quadrilateral,” where Europe, Russia, Asia, and Africa intersect: with the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert to the west; the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and the Central Asian steppe-land to the north; the Hindu Kush and the Indian Subcontinent to the east; and the Indian Ocean to the south.
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Unlike China or Russia, this quadrilateral does not constitute one massive state; nor, like the Indian Subcontinent, is it even overwhelmingly dominated by one state, which might provide it with at least some semblance of coherence. Nor is it, like Europe, a group of states within highly regulated alliance structures (NATO, the European Union). Rather, the Middle East is characterized by a disorderly and bewildering array of kingdoms, sultanates, theocracies, democracies, and military-style autocracies, whose common borders look formed as if by an unsteady knife. To no surprise of the reader, this whole region, which includes North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, and, to a degree, the Indian Subcontinent, constitutes, in effect, one densely packed axis of instability, where continents, historic road networks, and sea lanes converge. What is more, this region comprises 70 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40 percent of its natural gas reserves.
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Too, this region is prone to all the pathologies mentioned by Yale professor Paul Bracken: extremist ideologies, crowd psychology, overlapping missile ranges, and profit-driven mass media as dedicated to their point of view as Fox News is to its. In fact, with the exception of the Korean Peninsula, nuclear proliferation is more of a factor in the Middle East than in any other area.

The Middle East is also in the midst of a youth bulge, in which 65 percent of the population is under the age of thirty. Between 1995 and 2025, the populations of Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Yemen will have doubled. Young populations, as we have seen in the Arab Spring, are the most likely to force
upheaval and change. The next generation of Middle Eastern rulers, whether in Iran or in the Arab states, will not have the luxury to rule as autocratically as their predecessors, even as democratic experiments in the region show that while elections are easily accomplished, stable and liberal democratic orders are processes that can take generations to refine. In the Middle East, youth bulges and the communications revolution have ignited a string of messy, Mexico-style scenarios (the replacement of decisive one-party states with more chaotic multifactional and multiparty ones), but without Mexico’s level of institutionalization, which, as limited as it is, remains ahead of most countries in the Middle East. Dealing with an authentically democratic Mexico has been harder for the United States than with a Mexico under effective one-party rule. Bristling with advanced armaments, to say nothing of weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East of the next few decades will make the recent era of Arab-Israeli state conflict seem almost like a romantic, sepia-toned chapter of the Cold War and Post Cold War, in which calculations of morality and strategic advantage were relatively clear-cut.

Hodgson’s Nile-to-Oxus essentially means Egypt to Central Asia, with Egypt as shorthand for all of North Africa. This terminology comprises both the southern, desert-and-plains component of the Middle East, which is Arab, and the northern mountainous tableland, which is non-Arab, and which begins by the Black Sea and ends by the Indian Subcontinent. The sprawling northern plateau region might also be dubbed Bosporus-to-Indus. Bosporus-to-Indus has been heavily influenced by migrations from Central Asia; Nile-to-Oxus by that, too, as well as by heavy sea traffic in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The fact that the Middle East is the intersection point of continents, with an internal geography more intricate than any save Europe, but vaster and spread across twice as many time zones as Europe, makes it necessary for the sake of this discussion to disaggregate the region into constituent parts. Obviously, electronic communications and air travel have overcome geography in
recent times, so that crises are defined by political interactions across the entire region. For example, the Israelis intercept a flotilla carrying relief supplies for Gaza and crowds in Turkey, Iran, and throughout the Arab world are inflamed. A fruit and vegetable vendor in south-central Tunisia immolates himself and not only does Tunisia erupt in demonstrations against dictatorial rule, but also much of the Arab world. Still, much can be discerned by studying the map and its inherent divisions.