South Asias Geography of Conflict_Robert D. Kaplan_0

8/8/2019 South Asias Geography of Conflict_Robert D. Kaplan_0

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/south-asias-geography-of-conflictrobert-d-kaplan0 1/24

A u g u s t

2 0 1 0soh Aia’ georaphy o Confic

By Robert D. Kaplan



Cover Image

(ISTOCK)

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Center for a New American Security CEO Nathaniel Fick and President John Nagl, and especially VicePresident and Director of Studies Kristin Lord for her meticulous editing. I also wish to thank Alyssa Ayres; LieutenantGeneral David W. Barno, USA (Ret.); Marshall Boutan; Richard Fontaine and C. Raja Mohan for their expert reading. All mis-takes are the author’s.



South Asia’s Geography o Confict

By Rbert D. Kaplan

A U G U S T 2 0 1 0



South Asia’s Geography o ConfictA U G U S T 2 0 1 0

2 |

About the Author

Robert D. Kaplan is is a senir fellw at the Center fr a New American Security, the authr f Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power , a natinal crrespndent f The

Atlantic and a member f the Defense Plicy Bard.



| 3

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

By Rbert D. Kaplan

India will emerge as the key Eurasian pivot statebecause o its eect on relations between theUnited States and China. o eectively deal withIndia, American policymakers must understandIndian geography and geopolitics throughout its

long history. In particular, Indian geography isthe story o invasions rom a northwesterly direc-tion, and India’s strategic challenges still inhere inthis act. Aghanistan, in Indian eyes, is not parto Central Asia but part o the Indian subconti-nent. Aghanistan is linked organically to India on

account o the record o empires past. Tis organicconnection to India is also true o Central Asia andIran. As or Pakistan, it is seen by Indians as themodern-day residue o medieval Muslim domi-nation over India. As the India-Pakistan disputeattests, nationalism is young and vibrant in the

subcontinent, as it was in early modern Europe.Te India-China rivalry, unlike the India-Pakistanone, is ar less emotional because it is not borne o historical grievances. India is quietly testing theUnited States in Aghanistan, to see to what extent

America will remain as a great power in Eurasia.

As the United States and China become greatpower rivals, the direction in which India tiltscould determine the course o geopolitics inEurasia in the 21st century. India, in other words,

looms as the ultimate pivot state. But even asthe Indian political class understands at a very intimate level America’s own historical and geo-graphical situation, the American political classhas no such understanding o India’s. Yet, i

Americans do not come to grasp India’s age-old,highly unstable geopolitics, especially as it con-cerns Pakistan, Aghanistan and China, they willbadly mishandle the relationship.

Indeed, America has come to grie in the past by

not understanding local histories. India is muchtoo important or us to commit a similar mistake.In act, India and South Asia in general have a dan-gerously misunderstood geography. Understandingthat geography delivers one to the core o South




4 |

like Java and Sumatra. India is another caseentirely. Like China, India is possessed o geo-graphical logic, ramed as it is by the Arabian Seato the west and southwest, by the Bay o Bengalto the east and southeast, by the mountainousBurmese jungles to the east, and by the Himalayas

and the knot o the Karakorams and HinduKush to the north and northwest. India, also likeChina, is internally vast. But to a lesser extent thanChina, India lacks a singular nursery o demo-graphic organization like the Wei Valley and lowerYellow River, rom which a polity could expand

outward in all directions. Even the Ganges RiverValley could not provide enough o a platorm orthe expansion o a unitary Indian state unto thesubcontinent’s deep, peninsular south. Te sub-continent’s various river systems beside the Ganges

– the Brahmaputra, Narmada, ungabhadra,Kaveri, Godaveri and so on – urther divide it.Moreover, India (along with Southeast Asia) hasthe hottest climate and most abundant and luxuri-ant landscape o all the Eurasian population hubs.Tereore its inhabitants, Fairgrieve tells us, lackedthe need to build political structures or the orga-

nization o resources, at least to the degree that thetemperate-zone Chinese and Europeans did. Tislast point, o course, may be overly deterministic

Asia’s political dilemma, which is about bordersthat can never be perect or even acceptable to allsides, so that the map o South Asia resembles thato war-torn, early-modern Europe, made worse by nuclear weapons. Indian history and geography

since early antiquity constitutes the genetic codeor how the world looks rom the vantage point o New Delhi.

Te broad arc o territory rom Aghanistan

southeastward into northern India was or longperiods under the embrace o a single polity, sothat Aghanistan is linked organically to India,even as Aghanistan matters more crucially toPakistan. Tus, giving up on Aghanistan wouldcarry momentous geopolitical implications or the

United States, as it would aect how elites in NewDelhi and other Asian capitals henceorth perceiveWashington. Aghanistan is a tipping point or theAmerican projection o power in Eurasia. It willaect at a visceral level how not just Indian, butalso Pakistani and Chinese elites, see the United

States. And the direction that Aghanistan takeswill aect how successul India is in overcomingthe problems on its borders in order to emerge asa world-class power. o give readers a rich sense o this, I rst delve into South Asian geography andhistory at some length.

The Indian Subcontinentin the Context o EurasiaTe great centers o population on the Eurasiansupercontinent are all on its peripheries: Europe,

China, Southeast Asia and India. Chinese and

European civilizations, as the British geographerJames Fairgrieve wrote in 1917, grew outward inorganic ashion rom the nurseries o the Wei RiverValley and the Mediterranean.¹ Southeast Asia’scivilizational development was more elaborate:

with Pyu and Mon peoples, ollowed by Burmans,Khmers, Siamese, Vietnamese, Malays and oth-ers – in turn, inuenced by southward migrationsrom China – coagulating along river valleys likethe Irrawaddy and Mekong, as well as on islands

Te key to understanding

India is the realization

that while as a

subcontinent India makes

eminent geographic sense,

its natural boundaries are,

nevertheless, quite weak

in places.



| 5

and perhaps inherently racist in its stark simplicity,a eature common to the era in which Fairgrievewrote. Yet, Fairgrieve’s larger analysis o India isessentially correct.

While obviously constituting its own uniquecivilization, the Indian subcontinent, because o the above reasons, has through much o history lacked the political unity o China. What’s more,the subcontinent has been open to concentrated

invasions rom its northwest, the least dened andleast protected o its rontier regions, where India isdangerously close to both the Central Asian steppeand the Persian-Aghan plateau. Motivating theseinvasions throughout history has been the welcom-ing ecundity o the Punjab, watered as it is by the

Indus River and its tributaries at exactly the pointwhere the Persian-Aghan plateau drops to theoor o the subcontinent. Indeed, it is the invasionsand inltrations rom West and Central Asia thathave disrupted the quest or unity and stability inthe Indian subcontinent well into the modern era.

India’s advantages and disadvantages as it seeksgreat power status in the early 21st century inherestill in this wider subcontinental geography. As thelate historian Burton Stein notes, a map o India

through the medieval era would have extendedinto parts o Central Asia, Aghanistan and Iran,while at the same time showing only a tenuouslink between the Indus Valley in the northwest andpeninsular India south o the Ganges.² For just astoday’s China represents a triumphant culmination

o the relationship between the Inner Asian steppe-

land and the oodplains o the Chinese heartland,India was or millennia heavily inuenced by itshigher-altitude neighbors such as Aghanistan andBurma, which, unlike China’s, it has yet to domi-nate, so that India remains the lesser power.

Te ties between the Indian subcontinent andsoutheastern Aghanistan are obvious because o their contiguity, yet those between India and theCentral Asian steppe-land, as well as those between

India and the Iranian plateau, are equally proound.India and Iran have shared the predicament o being on the receiving end o Mongol onslaughtsrom Central Asia, even as the dynamism o Iranianculture, abetted by invasions since the time o the

Achaemenids (sixth to ourth centuries B.C.) ledto Persian being the ocial language o India until1835.³ Meanwhile, Urdu, the ocial language o Pakistan – the state that occupies the Indian sub-continent’s northwestern quadrant – draws heavily on Persian (as well as Arabic) and is written in a

modied Arabic script.⁴ India, thus, is both a sub-continent and a vital extremity o the greater MiddleEast, with a highly organic relationship to it.

Te key to understanding India is the realization

that while as a subcontinent India makes emi-nent geographic sense, its natural boundaries are,nevertheless, quite weak in places. Te result hasbeen various states throughout history that do notconorm to our spatial idea o India, and in actlie astride it. In act, the present Indian state still

does not conorm to the borders o the subconti-nent, and that is the heart o its dilemma: Pakistan,Bangladesh and (to a lesser extent) Nepal alsolie within the subcontinent and pose signicantsecurity threats to India, robbing India o politicalenergy that it would otherwise harness or power

projection throughout much o Eurasia.

It is not that human settlement rom early antiq-uity orward does not adhere to subcontinentalgeography. Rather, it is that India’s geography is

itsel subtle, particularly in the northwest, tell-

ing a dierent story than the map reveals at rstglance. At rst glance, the relie map shows abrown layer o mountains and tableland neatly marking o the cool wastes o middle Asia romthe green tropical oor o the subcontinent along

the present border between Aghanistan andPakistan. But the descent rom Aghanistan tothe Indus River, which runs lengthwise throughthe middle o Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, sothat or millennia similar cultures occupied both




6 |

the high plateaus and the lowland riverine plains,whether Harappan, Kushan, urkic, Mughal, Indo-

Persian, Indo-Islamic or Pushtun, to name but a

ew categories. And this is to say nothing o thealkaline deserts o Makran and Baluchistan thatunite Iran with the subcontinent, or the medievalsea trac that united Arabia with India by virtueo the predictable monsoon winds. “Te rontier o

Al-Hind,” as the South Asia scholar Andre Wink calls the whole region rom eastern Iran to westernIndia, has throughout history been very much auid cultural organism, and dening state bordersis inherently problematic.⁵

Indian Subcontinent: A History o EmpiresTe map o Harappan civilization, a complex net-work o centrally controlled chiefaincies rom thelate ourth to mid-second millennia B.C., is tell-ing. According to the archaeological remains, the

two major cities were Moenjodaro and Harappa,both alongside the Indus in northern Sindh andsouthern Punjab. Te Indus, rather than becom-ing a border dierentiating the subcontinent romInner Asia, constituted the heart o a civilizationin its own right. Te outlines o the Harappan

world stretched rom Baluchistan northeast up toKashmir and then southeast down almost to bothDelhi and Mumbai, skirting the Tar Desert. Itnearly touched present-day Iran and Aghanistan,covered much o Pakistan and extended into both

northwestern and western India. It was a complexgeography o settlement that adhered to landscapescapable o supporting irrigation, even as it sug-gested how a vast subcontinent had many naturalsubdivisions within it.

Aryans may have inltrated rom the Iranianplateau, and together with the subcontinent’sautochthonous inhabitants were part o a pro-cess that consolidated the political organizationo the Gangetic Plain in northern India around

1000 B.C. Tis led to a set o monarchies betweenthe eighth and sixth centuries B.C., culminat-ing with the Nanda Empire which in the ourthcentury B.C. stretched across northern India andthe Gangetic Plain rom Punjab to Bengal. In 321B.C., Chandragupta Maurya dethroned Dhana

Nanda and ounded the Mauryan Empire, whichcame to envelop much o the subcontinent exceptor the deep south, and thus or the rst time inhistory encouraged the idea o India as a politicalentity conorming with the geography o SouthAsia. Stein suggests that the merging o so many

city-states and chiefaincies into a single coherentsystem was, in addition to the “vigorous com-merce” between them, partially inspired by thethreat posed by Alexander the Great, who was onthe verge o conquering the Ganges River Valley

were it not or a mutiny o his soldiers in 326 B.C.Another actor buttressing unity was the emer-gence o the new, pan-subcontinental ideologies o Buddhism and Jainism that “captured the loyalty o commercial peoples,” as Stein writes.⁶

Te Mauryan kings embraced Buddhism, andran their empire on Greek and Roman imperialpractices that had seeped across the spinal route o migration in the temperate zone rom the Aegeanbasin and West Asia into India. Nevertheless, it

Mauryan and Mughal Empires at their Zenith

Source: Public Broadcasting Service and New World Encyclopedia

Mauryan Empire | 265

Mughal Empire | 1707



| 7

required all manners o human ingenuity to holdthe Mauryan Empire together. Chandragupta’sadvisor might have been one Kautilya, who penneda political classic, the Arthashastra or “Book o the State,” which shows how a conqueror can

create an empire by exploiting the relationshipsbetween various city-states: Any city-state thattouches one’s own should be considered an enemy because it will have to be subdued in the courseo empire-building; but a distant city-state thatborders an enemy should be considered a riend.

Because holding such an immense subcontinentalempire together was dicult, Kautilya believedin complex alliance networks and in benevolencetoward the conquered, whose way o lie shouldbe preserved.⁷ Te Mauryan was a decentralizedempire, to say the least, with a heartland in the

eastern Gangetic Plain and our regional centersby the time o Chandragupta’s grandson, Ashoka:axila in the northwest, outside the Pakistani capi-tal o Islamabad; Ujjain on the Malwa Plateau inwestern-central India; Suvarnagiri in the southern

Indian state o Karnataka; and Kalinga along theBay o Bengal south o Kolkata.

It was an extraordinary achievement this early inhistory, with only primitive means o transporta-tion and communications available, or one empire

to cover so much o the subcontinent, and Indianpolicy intellectuals today are noticeably proud o it. Te Mauryans demonstrated the potential ora single state to employ geographic logic over a vast area or quite some time. Alas, the decline o

the Mauryans led to the amiliar invasions romthe northwest, notably through the Khyber Pass:Greeks in the second century B.C. and Scythiansin the rst century B.C. Tis encouraged theredivision o the subcontinent into regional dynas-ties: Sunga, Pandyan, Kuninda and so on. TeKushan Empire emerged in the rst century A.D.

in Bactria, where northern Aghanistan meetsajikistan and Uzbekistan, and its Indo-Europeanrulers conquered territory rom the Ferghana

Valley in the demographic heart o Central Asiato Bihar in northeastern India. Te very map o the Kushana domain is mind-boggling to ourmodern sensibilities, overlapping as it does or-mer Soviet Central Asia, Aghanistan, Pakistan

and much o northern India’s Gangetic Plain. TeKushan Empire ollows river valleys on one handbut crosses mountain ranges on the other, so that itboth adheres to and contradicts geography. It alsoconstitutes a signal lesson in the act that currentborders do not necessarily indicate the last word in

political organization o Central and South Asia.(o be sure, geography is not destiny, even as weneed to take it into account more than we have.)

Te Gupta Empire (320 to 550 A.D.) restored a

semblance o unity over the subcontinent, govern-ing rom the Indus in the west to Bengal in the east,and rom the Himalayas in the north to the DeccanPlateau in the center, albeit most o the south wasoutside its control, even as the Gupta rulers sueredincursions rom Central Asian horsemen driving

down rom the northwest into Rajasthan and thewestern Gangetic Plain. Moreover, like in the way o the Mauryan, the Gupta was less a unitary state thana weak system o client states united by trade andtribute to the Ganges core.

For more than six centuries ollowing the Guptadecline, which was hastened by the inux o Hunsrom Central Asia, came a congeries o smallstates indicating, yet again, that India was notquite China, with the latter’s greater propensity or

centralization and political unity. Indeed, the post-

Gupta kingdoms, in Stein’s words, were “denedless by administration than by language, sectarianaliations and temples.”⁸

From the seventh through 16th centuries, writesFairgrieve, Muslim peoples successively enteredIndia. “Te Arabs, as was natural, came rst by land along the coast, and by sea coasting along theshores, but they eected nothing permanent; theurks next, rom a little beore A.D. 1000 onward,




8 |

over the plateau o Iran and through Aghanistan,”he says. “In litt le over a century, largely because o disputes between Hindu rulers, the whole northernplain had acknowledged Mohammedan rule.”⁹Te Indian subcontinent was indeed grafed to the

Middle East. Among the highlights: Iraqi Arabsin the early eighth century occupied parts o Sind, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Te urkicMamluk warrior, Mahmud o Ghazni, headquar-tered in eastern Aghanistan, united in his early 11th-century empire present-day Iraqi Kurdistan,

Iran, Aghanistan, Pakistan and northwesternIndia as ar as Delhi, and raided Gujarat to thesouth on the Arabian Sea. From the 13th to theearly 16th century, the so-called Delhi Sultanateeatured rule over northern India and parts o thesouth by the urkic ughluq, the Aghan Lodi

and other dynasties rom Central Asia. At Delhi’sback was the Islamic world; in ront o it the Hinduworld. (By this time Buddhism had virtually disap-peared rom India, the land o its birth, to moveeastward and northeastward.) Geography has

determined that the subcontinent in the northwestis less a xed rontier than an interminable serieso gradations, beginning in Iran and Aghanistan,and ending in Delhi.

Te Mughal Empire was a cultural and political

expression o this act. Few empires have boastedthe artistic and religious eclecticism o theMughals – another dynasty that excites Indianelites these days. Te Mughals vigorously ruledIndia and parts o Central Asia rom the early

1500s to 1720 (afer which the empire declinedrapidly). Mughal is the Arabic and Persian ormo Mongol, which was applied to all oreignMuslims rom the north and northwest o India.Te Mughal Empire was ounded by Zahir-ud-din-Muhammad Babur, a Chaghtai urk, born in1483 in the Fergana Valley in today’s Uzbekistan,

who spent his early adulthood trying to captureamarlane’s (imur’s) old capital o Samarkand.Afer being decisively deeated by Muhammad

Shaybani Khan, a descendant o Genghis Khan,Babur and his ollowers headed south and cap-tured Kabul. It was rom Kabul that Babur sweptdown with his army rom the high plateau o Aghanistan into the Punjab. Tus, he was able

to begin his conquest o the Indian subcontinent.Te Mughal or imurid Empire, which took ormunder Akbar the Great, Babur’s grandson, had anobility composed o Rajputs, Aghans, Arabs,Persians, Uzbeks and Chaghatai urks, as well aso Indian Sunnis, Shias and Hindus, not to men-

tion other overlapping groups. It was an ethnicand religious world that began in southern Russiato the northwest and by the Mediterranean to thewest.¹⁰ India was very much a depository o ongo-ing cultural and political trends to its west andnorthwest.

Kabul and Kandahar were a natural extension o this venerable Delhi-based dynasty, yet the strongly Hindu area in southern India around present-day Bangalore – India’s high-technology capital – was

much less so. Aurangzeb, the “world-seizer,” underwhose rule in the late 17th century the MughalEmpire reached the zenith o its expansion, was anold man in his 80s still ghting Maratha insurgentsin India’s south and west. In act, it was this long-running and intractable insurgency in southern

India that sapped the cohesion and morale o theMughal elite. Aurangzeb’s preoccupation with theMaratha warriors – to the exclusion o imperialproblems elsewhere – made it easier or the Dutch,French and British East India companies to gain

ootholds on the coast, which led eventually toBritish rule in India.¹¹

o emphasize the point: Aurangzeb’s situationwas that o Delhi-based rulers going back hun-dreds o years, as well as o even older rulers in

the subcontinent stretching back to antiquity.Tat is, the vast region that today encompassesnorthern India along with Pakistan and much o Aghanistan was commonly under a single pol-ity, even as sovereignty over southern India was



| 9

in doubt. For Indian elites, to think o not only Pakistan but Aghanistan as part o India’s hometur is not only natural but historically justied.Te tomb o Babur is in Kabul, not in Delhi. Tis

does not mean that India has territorial designson Aghanistan, but it does mean that New Delhicares prooundly about who rules Aghanistan,and wishes to ensure that those who do areriendly to India.

Great Britain’s LegacyGreat Britain, unlike previous rulers o India, con-stituted a sea power much more than a land power.It was rom the sea, as evinced by the Bombay,Madras and Calcutta presidencies, that the British

were able to conquer India. Consequently, it wasthe British who, ollowing more than two mil-lennia o invasions and migrations rom the westand northwest, restored to India as a political actthe basic truth o its geography: that it is indeeda subcontinent. A 1901 map o India wonderully

demonstrates this by showing a plethora o British-built rail lines ranging in arterial ashion over thewhole o the subcontinent – rom the Aghan borderto the Palk Strait near Ceylon in the deep south, androm Karachi in present-day Pakistan in the west toChittagong in present-day Bangladesh in the east.

echnology had allowed or the subcontinent’s vastinternal space to be nally united under one polity,rather than divided among several or administeredunder some weak imperial alliance system.

rue, the Mughals were the precursors to thisachievement, with their ability to ably administermuch o the subcontinent. But their rule, as bril-liant as it was, had signied yet another Musliminvasion rom the northwest, one that to this day

is denigrated by Hindu nationalists. Yet GreatBritain, the sea power, was a neutral in the histori-cal drama between Hindus and Muslims: a dramawhose basis lay in geography, with the bulk o India’s Muslims living both in the northwest, romwhere invasions had nearly always come, and in

East Bengal, the agriculturally rich, eastern termi-nus o the Gangetic Plain where Islam spread witha 13th century urkic-Mongol invasion and theclearing o the orest.¹²

Te British may have united the Indian subconti-nent with modern bureaucracy and a rai l systemin the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but by the hastened, tumultuous manner o their leavingin 1947, they helped redivide it in a way that wasboth more proound and more ormalized than

any previous imperial sundering. For in the past,the places where, or example, the Indo-Greeksmet the Gupta Empire or where the MughalEmpire met the Maratha Conederacy, were moreuid than today. Barbed wire and mine elds anddierent passports and war-by-media all belong

to a much later phase o technology. Te dividenow, unlike in the past, is a hardened, legal andcivilizational one.

Te lesson herein is this: While geography mat-

ters immensely, it is a lso true that the decisions

taken by individuals aect history even more.Had the British Cabinet made dierent deci-sions in the 1940s, prior to the partition o thesubcontinent, and had the Soviet Politburo madedierent decisions in the late 1970s, prior to its

invasion o Aghanistan, a modern Indian super-state may have emerged able to better integratewhat would have been peaceable northwesternborderlands.

For Indian elites, to think

o not only Pakistan

but Aghanistan as part

o India’s home tur is

not only natural but

historically justifed.




10 |

Aghanistan and PakistanBut while counteractuals are interesting to con-template, the current reality is what it is. o wit,

rom the historical perspective o India, Pakistanconstitutes much more than a nuclear-armedadversary, a state sponsor o terrorism and a large,conventional army breathing down its neck on theborder. Pakistan, lying to India’s northwest, wherethe mountains meet the plain, is now the very

geographical and national embodiment o all theMuslim invasions that have swept down into India

throughout its history. “Pakistan,” writes GeorgeFriedman, the ounder o SRAFOR, “is themodern-day remnant o Muslim rule over medievalIndia,” even as Pakistan’s southwest is the subcon-

tinental region rst occupied by Arab Muslimsinvading rom Iran and southern Aghanistan.¹³

o be sure, Indian decision makers are not anti-Muslim. India is home to 154 million Muslims,

the third-largest Muslim population in the worldafer Indonesia and Pakistan itsel. India has had

three Muslim presidents. But India is a seculardemocracy by virtue o the act that it has soughtto escape rom the politics o religion in order toheal the Hindu-Muslim divide in a Hindu major-

ity state. Pakistan, while also a democracy, is anIslamic republic with radical elements. Tus, insome ways, it is an aront to the very liberal unda-mentals on which India is based.

Te act that India’s ear o Pakistan – and vice versa – is existential should not surprise any-one. O course, India could deeat Pakistan in

a conventional war. But in a nuclear exchange,or a war-by-terrorism, Pakistan could achieve a

parity o a sort with India. And it goes beyondthat because it is not only Pakistan that encom-passes, afer a ashion, the threat o anotherMughal onslaught without the Mughals’ redeem-ing cosmopolitanism, It is Aghanistan, too. For,as we know, the border separating Pakistan rom

Aghanistan is largely a mirage, both today andin history. Even at the ocial Khyber border

post, tens o thousands o ethnic Pushtuns passthrough weekly without showing identity papers,while hundreds o jingle trucks pass daily unin-spected. Te lack o procedures attests not only to the same tribes on both sides o the rontier,

but also to the articial nature o the Aghan andPakistani states themselves, the ultimate causeo which is their lack o geographical coherenceas the heart o Indo-Islamic and Indo-Persianatecontinuums through which it is nearly impossibleto draw lines. Te Achaemenid, Kushan, Indo-

Greek, Ghaznavid, Mughal and other empiresall took in both Aghanistan and Pakistan aspart o their dominions, which either threatenedIndia or included portions o it. Ten there isthe Central Asian imur (amerlane) and theurkmen Nader Shah the Great, who in 1398

and in 1739, respectively, vanquished Delhi romimperial bases in present-day Iran, Aghanistanand Pakistan.

Tis is a rich history that ew in the West know o,

while Indian elites know it in their bones. WhenIndians look at their maps o the subcontinent they see Aghanistan and Pakistan in the northwest, just as they see Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladeshin the northeast, as all part o India’s immediatesphere o inuence, with Iran, the Persian Gul, the

ormer Soviet Central Asian republics and Burmaas critical areas o inuence. Not to view theseplaces as such is, rom the prospect o New Delhi,to ignore the lessons o history and geography.

As this record o imperial to-ing and ro-ing

over the course o millennia shows, Aghanistanand the war there is not just another security issue or India to deal with. Only in the Western view is Aghanistan part o Central Asia; toIndians it is very much part o the subcontinent.¹⁴

Aghanistan’s geography makes it central not only as a principal invasion route into India or terror-ists in our day as or armies in days past, but alsoas a strategically vital rear base or Pakistan, India’sprimary enemy.



| 11

While India’s geographic logic is not perect,Pakistan, right-angled to the course o inva-sions past, has no geographic logic at all, andAghanistan has ar too little. Pakistan is anarticial puzzle piece o a territory, straddling the

rontier between the Iranian-Aghan plateau andthe lowlands o the subcontinent, encompassingthe western hal o the Punjab but not the easternhal, uniting the Karakorams in the north (someo the highest mountains in the world) with theMakran Desert almost 1,000 miles to the south

by the Arabian Sea.¹⁵ Pakistan is also the home o our major ethnic groups, each harboring hos-tility toward the others and each anchored to aspecic region: Punjab to the northeast, Sindh tothe southeast, Baluchistan to the southwest andthe Pushtun-dominated North-West Frontier

Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). Islam wassupposed to have provided the uniy ing glue orthe state but it has signally ailed in this regard.Even as Islamic groups in Pakistan have becomemore radical, Baluch and Sindhis continue to

see Pakistan as a oreign entity overlorded by thePunjabis, with the Pushtuns in the northwestdrawn more and more into the aliban-inectedpolitics o the Aghan-Pakistani border area.Without the Punjabi-dominated army, Pakistanmight cease to exist.

Founded in 1947 by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, aLondon-Bombay intellectual, who was the son o a merchant rom Gujarat, Pakistan was built onan ideological premise: that o a homeland or the

Muslims o the Indian subcontinent. And it wastrue, the majority o the subcontinent’s Muslimslived in West and East Pakistan (which becameBangladesh in 1971), yet many tens o millionso Muslims remained in India proper, so thatPakistan’s geographical contradictions renderedits ideology supremely imperect. Indeed, millions

o Muslims and Hindus became reugees uponPakistan’s creation. Te act is that the subconti-nent’s history o invasions and migrations makes

or a plenteous ethnic, religious and sectarian mix.

For example, India is the birthplace o several reli-gions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians have lived inIndia or hundreds and thousands o years. Te

philosophy o the Indian state accepts this reality and celebrates it; the philosophy o the Pakistani

state is ar less inclusive. Tat is partly why India isstable and Pakistan is not.

So central to India’s geopolitical ortunes over thecourse o near and distant history is Aghanistan.

It is a country with a lie expectancy rate o 44years, with a literacy rate o 28 percent (and arlower than that or women), with only 9 percento emales attending secondary schools and with

only a fh o the population enjoying access topotable water. Out o 182 countries, Aghanistan

ranks next to last on the United Nations’ HumanDevelopment Index. Iraq, on the eve o the U.S.invasion in 2003, was ranked 130, and its literacy rate is a reasonable 74 percent. While in Iraqurbanization stands at 77 percent, so that reduc-

ing violence in greater Baghdad during the troopsurge o 2007 had a calming eect on the entirecountry, in Aghanistan urbanization stands at

Aghanistan’s geography

makes it central not only

as a principal invasion

route into India or

terrorists in our day as or

armies in days past, but

also as a strategically vital

rear base or Pakistan,

India’s primary enemy.




12 |

only 30 percent, meaning that counterinsurgency eorts in one village or region may have no eecton another.

Whereas Mesopotamia, with large urban clus-ters over a at landscape, is conducive to military occupation orces, Aghanistan is, in terms o geography, barely a country at all. It is riven by cathedral-like mountain ranges that help sealdivisions between Pushtuns and ajiks and other

minorities, even as comparatively little in the way o natural impediments separates Aghanistanrom Pakistan, or Aghanistan rom Iran. Lookingat the relie map, and noting that more than hal o the world’s 42 million Pushtuns live insidePakistan, one could conceivably construct a coun-

try called Pushtunistan, lying between the HinduKush mountains and the Indus River, thus overlap-ping the Aghani and Pakistani states. Some peoplerecommend such an evolution as part o their planto break up Aghanistan. But I do not. Aghans, inthe way o dual-citizenship, have multiple identi-

ties, national and ethnic. Breaking it up would only cause more hardship.

Aghanistan only emerged as a country-o-sorts inthe mid-18th century, when Ahmad Khan, leader

o the Abdali contingent in the Persian army o Nadir Shah the Great, carved out a buer zonebetween Persia and a crumbling Mughal empirein the Indian subcontinent that was later to evolveinto a buer zone between Czarist Russia andBritish India. Tus, the case can be made that with

the slow-motion dissolution o the ormer Soviet

Empire in Central Asia, and the gradual weaken-ing o the Pakistani state, an historic realignmentis now taking place that could see Aghanistangradually disappear on the political map. In theuture, or example, the Hindu Kush (the real

northwestern rontier o the subcontinent) couldorm a border between Pushtunistan and a Greaterajikistan. Te aliban, the upshot o Pushtunnationalism, Islamic ervor, drug money, corruptwarlords and hatred o the American occupation,

may, in the words o Asian specialist SeligHarrison, merely be the vehicle or this transitionthat is too broad and too grand to be in any way deterred by a oreign military run by impatientcivilians back in Washington.

But there is another reality to counter this one,one that eschews such determinism. Te actthat Aghanistan is larger than Iraq with a moredispersed population is basically meaningless:

65 percent o the country lives within 35 mileso the main road system, which approximatesthe old medieval caravan routes, making only 80 out o 342 districts key to centralized control.Aghanistan has been governed more or less romthe center since Ahmad Khan’s time: Kabul, i not

always a point o authority was at least a point o arbitration. Especially between the early 1930s andthe early 1970s, Aghanistan experienced moderateand constructive government under the constitu-tional monarchy o Zahir Shah, a descendant o Ahmad Khan. Te major cities were united by a

highway system on which it was sae to travel, evenas malaria was on the point o eradication throughestimable health and development programs.Tere was, too, a strong Aghan national identity distinct rom that o Iran, Pakistan or the SovietUnion. A ragile webwork o tribes it might have

been, but it was also developing as more than justa buer state. Pushtunistan might be a reality, butas in the way o dual citizenship, so very denitely is Aghanistan. Blame or the three coup d’états inKabul in the 1970s that led to the country’s seem-

ingly never-ending agony o violence rests as muchwith a great and contiguous power, the SovietUnion, as with the Aghans. As part o a process tormly secure the country within its sphere o inu-ence, the Soviets unwittingly destabilized Aghanpolitics, which led to their December 1979 inva-sion. Aghanistan, as a geographical buer between

the Iranian Plateau, the Central Asian steppes andthe Indian subcontinent, is breathtakingly strate-gic, and thus has been coveted by not just Russians



| 13

but also by Iranians and Pakistanis, even as Indianpolicymakers have always been obsessed with it.

Consider an Aghanistan that alls under alibansway threatens to create a succession o radicalizedIslamic societies rom the Indian-Pakistani bor-der to deep inside Central Asia. Tis would be, ineect, a greater Pakistan, giving Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) the ability to

create a clandestine empire composed o the likes

o Jallaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyarand Lashkar-e-aiba – able to conront India in themanner that Hezbollah and Hamas conront Israel.Conversely, an Aghanistan at peace and governedmore-or-less liberally rom Kabul would give New

Delhi the ability to extricate itsel rom its mil-lennia-old historical nemesis on its northwesternrontier, as well as to challenge Pakistan on bothits western and eastern borders. Tat is why, dur-ing the 1980s, India supported the Soviet puppetregime in Kabul o Mohammed Najibullah, which

was secular and even liberal compared with thepro-Pakistani Islamist mujahidin trying to toppleit. For the same reason, India now supports HamidKarzai’s Kabul government.

He or she who sits in Delhi with his back toMuslim Central Asia must still worry aboutunrest up on the plateaus to the northwest. TeUnited States wil l draw down its troops one day in Aghanistan, but India will still have to livewith the results, and thereore remain intimately

engaged. Te quickest way to undermineU.S.-India relations is or the United States towithdraw precipitously rom Aghanistan. In theprocess o leaving behind an anarchic and radi-calized society, which in and o itsel is contrary

to India’s interests, such a withdrawal would sig-nal to Indian policy elites that the United Statesis surely a declining power on which they cannotdepend. Detente with China might then seemto be in India’s interest. Afer al l, China wantsa stable Aghanistan or trade routes; India, or

security. Because o India’s history and geography,an American ailure in Aghanistan bodes ill orour bilateral relationship with New Delhi. Putsimply, i the United States deserts Aghanistan, itdeserts India.

Indeed, India is quietly testing the United Statesin Aghanistan perhaps to the same intense degreeas Israel is very publicly testing the United Statesin regards to a nuclear Iran. I do not suggest thatwe should commit so much money and national

treasure to Aghanistan merely or the sake o impressing India. But I am suggesting that thedeleterious eect on U.S.-India bilateral relationso giving up on Aghanistan should be part o our national debate on the war eort there, or atthe moment it is not. Te act is that our ability to

inuence China will depend greatly on our ability to work with India, and that, in turn, will dependgreatly on how we perorm in Aghanistan.

In sum, the Indian subcontinent eatures among

the least stable geopolitics in the world. Te reg-

ister o empires and invasions constitutes a vivid,living history because o its relevance to the deep-seated insecurities and political problems o today.Although, in many ways, greater India is like amap o early modern Europe. In early modern

Europe, there were competing ethnic and nationalgroups that were in the process o congealing intobureaucratic states, even as they were engaged incomplex balance-o-power arrangements that,because o requent interactions and subsequent

Te quickest way to

undermine U.S.-India

relations is or the United

States to withdraw

precipitously rom

Aghanistan.




14 |

miscalculations, broke down periodically into openwarare. Modern nationalism was in a young and vigorous phase, as it is in South Asia today. Butunlike the multipolarity o early modern Europe,South Asia evinces a bipolar struggle between

India and Pakistan, with Aghanistan as the mainbattleground and the disputed Himalayan state o Kashmir as a secondary one. Unlike the bipolar-ity o the superpowers, however, there is nothingcool, dispassionate or ritualistic about this con-ict. Tis is not a clash o ideologies in which the

opposing parties have no religious or historicalhatred or each other and are separated by thewide berth o a hemisphere and Arctic ice. Tisis a clash between a Hindu-majority, albeit secu-lar, state and a Muslim one, both in ull-bloodedphases o modern nationalism and separated by

a crowded, common border, with capitals andmajor cities nearby. Less than 200 miles separatePakistan’s Indus River heartland rom northernIndia’s Ganges River heartland.¹⁶ So, in addition toeverything else about this geography, it is a claus-

trophobic one.

ChinaIndia desperately wants to overcome this geog-raphy and this history. Its very competition andxation with China orms an element o this

escape. India’s rivalry with China, which we nowconsider, is not like the one with Pakistan at all:It is more abstract, less emotional and (ar moresignicantly) less volatile. And it is a rivalry withno real history behind it.

It has been nearly hal a century since Indiaought a limited war with China over a disputedHimalayan border, in which combat occurred ataltitudes o 14,000 eet in the Aksai Chin regionnear Kashmir in the northwest and in Arunachal

Pradesh near Bhutan in the northeast. Te back-ground to this 1962 war, in which over 2,000soldiers were killed and 2,744 wounded, was the1959 uprising in ibet that sent the Dalai Lamainto exile in India, ollowing the 1950 Chinese

invasion o ibet. An independent or autonomousibet that was even vaguely pro-Indian wouldmake Chinese strategists exceedingly nervous.Given the tensions o the ibet crisis, China sawthe establishment o Indian outposts north o

disputed border lines a casus belli, and in onemonth o ghting in the autumn overran Indianorces. Neither side deployed its navy or air orce,so the ghting was limited to remote regions wherenobody lived, as opposed to the Indian-Pakistaniborder, which cuts through the agriculturally rich

Punjab inhabited by millions in addition to passingthrough swamps and deserts.

Te Indo-Chinese border is still in some areas amatter o dispute. Moreover, as the Chinese have

built roads and airelds throughout ibet, Indianow alls into the arc o operations o Chineseghter pilots, even as the Indian air orce is theworld’s ourth largest, with over 1,300 aircrafspread over 60 bases. Ten there is the rise o bothcountries’ navies. Because India has no equivalent

o the Mediterranean, no enclosed seas and clusterso islands to lure sailors, even as the earth o thesubcontinent is warm and productive, India untilrecently had been a land-bound nation ramedagainst the open ocean. But that has suddenly changed: Te growth o the Indian economy can

nance major ship building and acquisition; theadvances in military technology have compressedgeography; and the threat o China itsel has grownas China’s own naval aspirations move beyond thewestern Pacic into the Indian Ocean.

China has been building or upgrading ports allaround India: in Kyaukpyu, Burma; Chittagong,Bangladesh; Hambantota, Sri Lanka; and Gwadar,Pakistan. In all o these countries, China is pro- viding substantial military and economic aid and

political support. China already has a great mer-chant eet and aspirations or a blue water-oceanicnavy that will guard its interests and protect itstrade routes between the hydrocarbon-rich MiddleEast and China’s Pacic coast. Tis is occurring



| 15

at the same time that India has aspirations or aMonroe Doctrine-style presence throughout theIndian Ocean rom southern Arica to Australia.Tese overlapping naval spheres o interest com-pound the border issues in the Himalayan north

that are still outstanding. China is merely seekingto protect its own sea lines o communicationswith riendly, state-o-the-art harbors along theway. But India eels surrounded. Te possibility o a Pakistani-Chinese naval center o operationsnear the entrance to the Persian Gul in Gwadar

has led to the vast expansion o the Indian navalport o Karwar on the Arabian Sea. Te port andenergy pipelines China is building at Kyaukpyuin Burma have caused India to initiate its ownport and energy complex at Sittwe, 50 miles to thenorth, as India and China quicken their competi-

tion or routes and resources in Burma.

Still, one can only repeat, the Indian-Chineserivalry represents a new struggle without the orceo history behind it. Te interactions that India

and China have had in the distant past have usu-ally been productive: most amously, the spreado Buddhism rom India to China in middle andlate antiquity. Despite the issue o ibet, in whichibetan autonomy or independence is in India’sgeopolitical interest but clearly harmul to that

o China, the high wall o the Himalayas essen-tially cuts the two countries’ populations o romeach other. Only in recent decades, as indigenousmilitaries in the East have developed sea, air andmissile power, has a new potential Eurasian-wide

geography o conict come sharply into ocus. Tedeath o distance, much more than civilizationaldivides, is what ails India-China relations today.Only Indian policy elites worry about China,while the problem o Pakistan consumes the entirenorthern part o the country. Moreover, India andChina constitute among the world’s most dynamic

and complementary trading relationships. In a way,the tension between India and China illustratesthe problems o success: the momentous economic

development that both New Delhi and Beijing cannow utilize or military purposes, especially orexpensive air and naval platorms. Certainly, thenew India-China rivalry richly demonstrates YaleProessor Paul Bracken’s point that the technolo-

gies o war and wealth creation go hand–in-hand,and the nite size o the earth is increasingly aorce or instability, as military hardware and sof-ware shrink mileage on the geopolitical map.¹⁷

o wit, or the rst ew decades ollowing theCold War, India and China had relatively low-techground orces that were content to watch their ownborders and to serve as bulwarks or national con-solidation. Tus, they did not threaten each other.But as planes, missiles and warships entered their

military inventories, even as their armies becamemore expeditionary, suddenly they saw each otherat opposite sides o a new battlespace. Tis is notonly true o India and China, but o states acrossthe broad sweep o Eurasia – Israel, Syria, Iran,Pakistan, North Korea and so on, who are in a new

deathly geographical embrace o overlapping mis-sile ranges.

Behold, then, the Indian subcontinent. Bounded by seas and mountains, it is still internally vast, and

its lack o a natural basis or early political unity and organization shows up still: China remainsbetter organized and more eciently governedthan India, despite China’s lack o democracy.China adds more miles o highways per year thanIndia has in total. Indian ministries are overbear-

ing and, at the same time, inecient compared

to China’s. China may be wracked by strikes anddemonstrations, but India is wracked by violentinsurrections, notably that o the Maoist-trendingNaxalites in the central and eastern portions o thecountry. In this regard, Fairgrieve’s description o

a “less advanced” civilization compared to someexternal ones still holds.¹⁸

India is aced with a conundrum. Its great powerstatus in the new century will be enhanced by both




16 |

its political and military competition with China,even as it remains pinned down by weak rontiersbounding dysunctional states inside the subconti-nent itsel.

Nepal, Bangladesh and the Confictin KashmirFollowing the dismantling o its monarchy and thecoming to power o ormer Maoist insurgents, theNepalese government barely controls the coun-

tryside where 85 percent o its people live. Neverhaving been colonized, Nepal never inherited astrong bureaucratic tradition rom the British.Despite the aura bequeathed by the Himalayas, thebulk o Nepal’s population lives in the dank andhumid lowlands along the barely policed border

with India. Bangladesh, even more so than Nepal,has no geographical deense to marshal as a state:It is the same ruler-at, aquatic landscape o paddy elds and scrub on both sides o the border withIndia. Tis articially shaped blotch o territory –in succession Bengal, East Bengal, East Pakistan

and Bangladesh – could metamorphose yet againamid the gale orces o regional politics, Muslimreligious extremism and climate change itsel.Like Pakistan, the history o Bangladesh is one o military and civilian regimes, none o which haveunctioned remotely well. Millions o Bangladeshi

reugees have already crossed the border into Indiaas illegals.

Te subcontinent rom early antiquity was politi-cally divided, and that is what ails it still.

Finally, now let us turn to the extreme north,where the Karakorams meet the Himalayas.Here is the territory o Kashmir, crammed inbetween Pakistan, Aghanistan, India and China.

Te Northern Areas o the Karakoram Range,with the town o Gilgit, are held by Pakistan andclaimed by India, as is the slice o Azad (“Free”)Kashmir to the west. Te Ladakh Range in theheart o Kashmir, with the towns o Srinagar andJammu, are administered by India and claimed by

Pakistan, as is the Siachen Glacier to the north.o the ar north and northeast lie the ShaksamValley and Aksai Chin, administered by Chinaand claimed by India. Furthermore, the Indianstate o Jammu and Kashmir (the Ladakh Range)

has a Muslim majority o 75 percent, a act thathas helped uel jihadist rebellions or years.Osama bin Laden in his pronouncements hasrailed against Hindu-majority India’s dominationo Kashmir. And yet much o Kashmir is high-altitude, uninhabitable badlands. But wars have

been ought on these territories and over them,and may be ought still. Te Chinese ought Indiain 1962 because they wanted to build a road romXinjiang to ibet through eastern Kashmir. Indiaought China to obstruct the common borderbetween China and Pakistan.

Moreover, because o the eect o cyberspace andnew media, Kashmir, like Palestine, res hatredamong millions, putting a solution to its tangle o problems urther out o reach. Te very technolo-

gies that deeat geography also have the capability o enhancing geography’s importance. Te subcon-tinent is a blunt geographical act, but dening itsborders will go on indenitely.

ConclusionWithout a doubt, while India overwhelmingly dominates the subcontinent, the subcontinent’srontiers are, in a geographical sense, subtle transi-tion zones that have allowed or other, smallerstates to establish themselves. And because these

other states, precisely because they occupy these

transition zones, are ofen prone to ethnic, sec-tarian and regional divisions, they are also, inturn, prone to radical and unstable politics. Tus,India is stuck with neighbors that are volatile anddysunctional, even as Indian history shows a long

tradition o dominance over this entire region.Whereas Chinese dynasties o old almost com-pletely all within the current borders o China, thedynasties to which India is heir, as we have seen,do not. Tus, India looks toward Aghanistan and



| 17

its other outlying regions with less serenity thandoes China toward its outlying regions, or shadowzones. India is a regional power to the degree thatit is entrapped by this geography; it is a potentialgreat power to the degree that it can get beyond it.

Tis millennia-old imperial history is somethingthat Indian elites eel deeply about, whether ornot they are intimate with all the details. For evenas Americans separate Eurasia into smaller and

more manageable geographical areas, Indianssee the supercontinent holistically, so that bothAghanistan and China are part o one integratedmap in which every place aects every place else.Te United States should think likewise.




18 |

1. James Fairgrieve, Geography and World Power: 253.

2. Burton Stein, A History o India (Oxord, England: Blackwell, 1998): 6-7.

3. Persian traveled to India as a literary language in the 12th century, with its

ormal role consolidated in the 16th.

4. Nicholas Ostler, Empires o the Word: A Language History o the World (New

York: HarperCollins, 2005): 223.

5. Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making o the Indo-Islamic World. Volume I: Early

Medieval India and t he Expansion o Islam 7th-11th Centuries (Boston: Brill

Academic Publishers, 1996): Chapter IV.

6. Stein, A History o India: 75-76.

7. Adam Watson, The Evolution o International Society: A Comparative

Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992): 78-82.

8. Stein: 121.

9. Fairgrieve: 261.

10. Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future o American

Power (New York: Random House, 2010): 119 and 121.

11. Kaplan, Monsoon: 122-23. John F. Richards, The New Cambridge His tory o

India: The Mughal Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 239

and 242.

12. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise o Islam and th e Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760

(Berkeley, Cali.: University o Caliornia Press, 1993): xxii-xxiii a nd 313.

13. Ge orge Friedman, “The Geopolitics o India: A Shiting, Sel-Contained

World” (16 December 2008).

14. The geographical and cultural relationship between India and Iran is

almost equally close.

15. The Punjab means “fve rivers,” all tributaries o the Indus: the Beas,

Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi and Sutlej.

16. Friedman, “The Geopolitics o India.”

17. Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Ris e o Asian Military Power and the

Second Nuclear Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999): xxvi and 30.

18. Fairgrieve: 253.

E N D N o T E S







About the Center for aNew American Security

The mission o the Center or a New AmericanSecurity (CNAS) is to develop strong,pragmatic, and principled national securityand deense policies. Building on the expertiseand experience o its sta and advisors, CNASaims to engage policymakers, experts and thepublic with innovative act-based research,ideas, and analysis to shape and elevate thenational security debate. A key part o ourmission is to help inorm and prepare thenational security leaders o today and tomorrow.

CNAS is located in Washington, D.C., and wasestablished in February 2007 by Co-oundersKurt M. Campbell and Michèle A. Flournoy. CNASis a 501c3 tax-exempt nonproft organization.Its research is nonpartisan; CNAS does not takespecifc policy positions. Accordingly, all views,positions, and conclusions expressed in this

publication should be understood to be solelythose o the author.

© 2010 Center or a New American Security.

All rights reserved.

Center for a New American Security1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWSuite 403Washington, DC 20004

TEL 202.457.9400FAX 202.457.9401EMAIL [email protected]



1301 Pennslvania Avenue, NW

Suite 403

Washington, DC 20004

STRONG, PRAGMATIC AND PRINCIPLEDNATIONAL SECURITy AND DEFENSE POLICIES

TEL 202.457.9400

FAX 202.457.9401

EMAIL [email protected]

www.cnas.org

Documents

South Asias Geography of Conflict_Robert D. Kaplan_0