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muse compels attention. In response to his admonition to stay close to Kaplan's analysis while commenting, the following is submitted:
Perversity characterizes Pakistan. Only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher on this year's Failed States Index. The country is run by a military obsessed with -- and, for decades, invested in -- the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes. But despite an overbearing military, tribes "defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence," as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory. The absence of the state makes for 20-hour daily electricity blackouts and an almost nonexistent education system in many areas.
This is almost a necessary invocation to the gods while initiating an analytic description, and can be skipped.
The root cause of these manifold failures, in many minds, is the very artificiality of Pakistan itself: a cartographic puzzle piece sandwiched between India and Central Asia that splits apart what the British Empire ruled as one indivisible subcontinent. Pakistan claims to represent the Indian subcontinent's Muslims, but more Muslims live in India and Bangladesh put together than in Pakistan. In the absence of any geographical reason for its existence, Pakistan, so the assumption goes, can fall back only on Islamic extremism as an organizing principle of the state.
Kaplan contradicts himself - perhaps.
Here he states that there is no geographic reason for its existence; later, he turns around 180 degrees, and comes speeding up the road back at the reader.
What we know as modern-day Pakistan is far from an artificial entity; it is just the latest of the many spatial arrangements for states on the subcontinent. The map of the Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftaincies in the late fourth to mid-second millennium B.C., was one of its earliest predecessors. The Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and southeast down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, nearly touching present-day Iran and Afghanistan and extending into both northwestern and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to landscapes capable of supporting irrigation, and whose heartland was today's Pakistan.
This is a powerful argument against the
inherently Muslim nature of Pakistan argument, and should be considered carefully. India - cultural India, not geographical or political India - consisted of cultural growth around a set of rivers, so:
- The Ganga-aj;
- The Brahmaputra;
- The Mahanadi;
- The Krishna;
- The Godavari;
- The Kaveri;
- The Tungabhadra;
- The Narmada;
- The Indus;
While there was always strong cultural bonding between these foci of growth, it was the exception rather than the rule that they were all under a single political authority. It is quite natural to see present-day Pakistan as a successor state of the culture centred around the Indus, rather than as the artificial entity that seems to obsess everyone.
As has been pointed out again and again, if the people of Pakistan believe in Pakistan, that is the best reason for Pakistan to exist, rather than the religious reason. And the justification for the people of Pakistan to believe in Pakistan is precisely this, that Pakistan exists today, and never mind the original purpose; that Pakistan has everything in its favour to settle down to nationhood, and that the region today known as Pakistan actually has a history of distinctive existence and growth from at 1500 BC.
But this core assumption about what ails Pakistan is false. Pakistan, which presents more nightmare scenarios for American policymakers than perhaps any other country, does have geographical logic. The vision of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in the 1940s did not constitute a mere power grab at the expense of India's Hindu-dominated Congress party. There was much history and geography behind his drive to create a separate Muslim state anchored in the subcontinent's northwest, abutting southern Central Asia. Understanding this legacy properly leads to a very troubling scenario about where Pakistan -- and by extension, Afghanistan and India -- may now be headed. Pakistan's present and future, for better or worse, are still best understood through its geography.
Well, there we are, then.
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THE MUSLIM EXPERIENCE in South Asia begins with the concept of al-Hind, the Arabic word for India. Al-Hind invokes the vast tracts of the northern and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent that came under mainly Turko-Islamic rule in the Middle Ages and were protected from the horse-borne Mongols by lack of sufficient pastureland. The process of Muslim conquest began in Sindh, the desert tract south and east of Iran and Afghanistan, adjacent to the Arabian Sea, easily accessible to the Middle East by land and maritime routes.
The Umayyad Arabs conquered and Islamicized Sindh in the early eighth century. Then came the Turkic Ghaznavids (based out of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan), who conquered parts of northern India in the 11th century. The Ghaznavids were followed by the Delhi Sultanate, a military oligarchy between the early 13th and early 16th centuries, which preceded the splendorous rule of the Persianized Mughal dynasty on the subcontinent. All these Muslim warriors governed immense inkblots of territory that were extensions of the Arab-Persian world that lay to the west, even as they interacted and traded with China to the north and east. It was a land without fixed borders that, according to University of Wisconsin historian André Wink, represented a rich confection of Arab, Persian, and Turkic culture, bustling with trade routes to Muslim Central Asia.
To the extent that one area was the ganglion of this Muslim civilization, it was today's Pakistan. Fertile Punjab, which straddles the Pakistan-India frontier, "linked the Mughal empire, through commercial, cultural and ethnic intercourse, with Persia and Central Asia," writes University of Chicago historian Muzaffar Alam. This area of Pakistan has been for centuries the civilizational intermediary connecting the cool and sparsely populated tableland of Central Asia with the hot and teeming panel of cultivation in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan's many mountain passes, especially those of Khyber and Bolan, join Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan with the wheat- and rice-baskets thousands of feet below. The descent from Afghanistan to the Indus River, which runs lengthwise through the middle of Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, so for millennia various cultures occupied both the high plateaus and the lowland riverine plains. This entire middle region -- not quite the subcontinent, not quite Central Asia -- was more than a frontier zone or a bold line on a map: It was a fluid cultural organism and the center of many civilizations in their own right.
This is almost as misleading as the buffoon Dalrymple's latest effusion about the graveyard of empires, or, considering its eugenic design to be a headline, The Graveyard of Empires.
An historian would hesitate to say what Kaplan, in his role as geo-strategic political analyst, has just said. Every chronicler of those times knows that the pivot around which states in this trans-Indus (from my point of view) geography rotated was Khorasan. This was true for all the entities mentioned by Kaplan, except for Umayyad Sindh.
What we know as modern-day Pakistan is far from an artificial entity; it is just the latest of the many spatial arrangements for states on the subcontinent. The map of the Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftaincies in the late fourth to mid-second millennium B.C., was one of its earliest predecessors. The Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and southeast down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, nearly touching present-day Iran and Afghanistan and extending into both northwestern and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to landscapes capable of supporting irrigation, and whose heartland was today's Pakistan.
Is there some misunderstanding here? The IVC was entirely rain-fed.
The Mauryan Empire, which existed from the fourth to the second centuries B.C., came to envelop much of the subcontinent and thus, for the first time in history, encouraged the idea of India as a political entity. But whereas the area of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India all fell under Mauryan rule, India's deep south did not. Next came the Kushan Empire, whose Indo-European rulers conquered territory from the Ferghana Valley, in the demographic heart of Central Asia, to Bihar in northeastern India. Once again, the heart of the empire that linked Central Asia and India was in Pakistan; one of the Kushan capitals was Peshawar, Pakistan's frontier city today.
More unhappiness. There were excellent reasons why the deep south - Tamilakam - was not shown as Maurya territory. It was then, and continued to be for several hundred years more - tribal in nature, in terms of formation of statehood. The first moves towards statehood occurred in what is now described as early mediaeval India, between the seventh and eighth centuries AD, with the Pallavas, the Pandyas and the Cheras.
India is the counterfactual to Pakistan's dilemma. India's individual states are linguistically based and thus have confident identities: Kannada-speaking Karnataka, Marathi-speaking Maharashtra, Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh, Bengali-speaking West Bengal, Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh, and so forth. This might, in some scenarios, lead to local nationalism and irredentist movements, as is the case with Pakistan. Because central authority in New Delhi is restricted, however, diversity is celebrated and has become, in turn, a healthy basis for a pan-Indian national identity.
Objectionable.
A very complex scenario is reduced to three or four dimensions and presented, for the credulous to imbibe.
Deeply unsatisfactory.
At the same time, as Pakistan is primarily interested in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the part of Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush mountains may, if current trends continue, become more peaceful and drift into the economic orbit of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, especially given that Uzbeks and Tajiks live astride northern Afghanistan's border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This new formation would closely approximate the borders of ancient Bactria, with which Alexander the Great was so familiar.
Indeed, the past may hold the key to the future of al-Hind.
It's a four page article can be read here :
What's Wrong with Pakistan? - By Robert D. Kaplan | Foreign Policy
