The loom of time, p.39
The Loom of Time, page 39
The Americans had exchanged places with the Soviets.
The light and lethal footprint that the Americans adopted upon their October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, in which Green Berets and other special operations forces bonded with the Northern Alliance (the organizational descendant of the Tajik fighters aligned with Massoud), succeeded in toppling the Taliban regime. But soon afterwards, the Americans began to build massive bases and pour more and more troops into Afghanistan, unwittingly imitating what the Soviets had done: indeed, the principal Soviet fortification of Bagram, north of Kabul, became the principal American fortification. America’s longest war, which would last two decades, had begun; and Afghanistan, which in 2001 was already in its third decade of war, began to experience violent military conflict as a permanent multigenerational condition.
The American military was now dealing with a country that ranked near the bottom of the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Whereas Iraq on the eve of the 2003 U.S. invasion ranked 126th out of 189 countries, its literacy rate hovered around 70 percent. Afghanistan’s literacy rate by contrast was 28 percent. And Afghanistan encompassed 30 percent more territory than Iraq. Consider also that 77 percent of Iraqis lived in urban areas at the time of the heaviest U.S. military involvement, concentrated heavily in greater Baghdad, so reducing violence in the Iraqi capital had a calming effect on the entire country. In mountainous Afghanistan, urbanization stood at only 30 percent, thus counterinsurgency efforts in one village or region would likely have no effect on another.[22]
The American military tried nearly everything in Afghanistan. It applied counterinsurgency, in which relatively small numbers of troops lived among communities of Afghan civilians, protecting them from Taliban assaults while focusing on their humanitarian needs. Such small bases were spread throughout significant regions of the country. I was embedded as a reporter in two of them for weeks at a time in 2003 in eastern and southern Afghanistan. Because it was still early in the war, morale was reasonable at these bases and there was the expectation that the war would somehow be triumphant. But the years wore on. The American military frequently changed commanders, who each brought in his own new or improved strategy. The Americans surged more and more troops into the country. Periodically over the twenty-year period, a “new beginning” or some such was announced. We were always said to be making progress, even if we weren’t. We were always on the cusp of building democracy, even as the Afghan regimes we supported were brought to power in flawed and at times chaotic elections. These regimes were mired in corruption and infighting, and controlled relatively little of the countryside, where the Taliban roamed and ruled. Meanwhile, tensions over policy ebbed and flowed between the American military and the American embassy in Kabul, as well as with the contingents of coalition troops from other countries. Finally, after many years, it was privately admitted though never publicly stated that we remained in Afghanistan not because of any democratic ideals we believed would take root there, but because of fear of a humiliating repeat of Saigon in 1975, when the Vietnamese capital was overrun by Communist troops, with the last Americans and their Vietnamese dependents clinging to helicopters on the way out.
No other country in the world at the time symbolized the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan, especially immediately after the final, bloody, and chaotic withdrawal in the late summer of 2021. In the beginning, there was an idealistic sense of mission. Following that, once it became obvious that we couldn’t remake the country into a stable democracy, we felt we had, like the nineteenth-century British, to work with the tribes in order to avoid another 9/11 from being launched on Afghan soil. But that strategy, too, which represented imperialism in its highest and most mundane form, became politically impossible to sustain in Washington and on the home front.
In fact, while the Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, and Iranians are all developing energy and mining projects in and next door to Afghanistan, the United States has no commercial future in the country. It spent hundreds of billions of dollars there to create what could never be created: a self-sustaining democracy vaguely along Western lines. Only contiguous powers, especially China, through a combination of energy and commercial deals that bring some order and development, can help stabilize Afghanistan. The United States, obsessed as it was with Western-style democracy, could not.
Indeed, Afghanistan represents the triumph of the deterministic forces of geography, history, culture, and ethnic and sectarian awareness, with Pathans, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and others violently competing for patches of ground.[23] The American military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were all about the idea that we could remake societies, and that our historical experience was somehow more important to these countries than their own historical experiences and ideals.
China, which has been essentially uninterested in how its trading partners governed themselves, has had the advantage at least in this part of the world. For China is consciously realist, embracing stability over anarchy.
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The deterministic forces of geography also have quite a lot to say about twentieth- and twenty-first-century history in Pakistan. Pakistan covers the northwestern desert frontier of the Indian subcontinent. British civil administration extended only to Lahore, in the fertile Punjab, near Pakistan’s eastern border with India; its Mughal architecture, gardens, and rich bazaars give Lahore a closer resemblance to cities in India than to any other place in Pakistan. But the rest of Pakistan—the tribal agencies and the alkaline wasteland of Sind—has never really been subdued by the British or anyone else—certainly not by civilians. This area was grossly underdeveloped compared with British India. Even Karachi, a city of 27 million riddled by sectarian violence, was only an isolated settlement on the Arabian Sea when the British departed, thus it lacks the civilizing urbanity of Lahore. Islamabad, Pakistan’s sterile capital, with its avenues lined with Mughal-cum-Stalinist structures, was not built until the 1960s. Thus, when 7 million Muslim refugees, fleeing India at Partition, created Pakistan, the military naturally took control of this sprawling frontier land, beset by tribal and ethnic rivalries, where politics quickly became a bureaucratic forum for revenge and unsavory trade-offs, involving water wells, flour mills, electricity grids, and the like.[24] To repeat, Pakistan is a weak state, barely able to contain a plethora of strong, restive, and deeply committed groups. Likewise, whether officially under military or civilian government, Pakistan has always been essentially a military-run state that sets parameters for what the civilian politicians can and cannot do.
This is not to say that Pakistan is an artificial creation, as much of the conventional wisdom has it. Rather than a simulated modern entity, Pakistan is the very geographical and national embodiment of all the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history, while Pakistan’s southwest is the subcontinental region first occupied by Muslim Arabs invading from the Middle East. The Indus River, much more than the Ganges, has always had an organic relationship with the Arab, Persian, and Turkic worlds. It is historically and geographically appropriate that the Indus Valley civilization, long ago a satrapy of Achaemenid Persia and the forward bastion of Alexander the Great’s Near Eastern empire, today is deeply enmeshed with political currents swirling through the Middle East, of which Islamic extremism forms an element. This is not determinism but merely the recognition of an obvious pattern.
But being historically and geographically well rooted does not in itself guarantee stability. Although a Muslim frontier state between mountains and plains has often existed in the subcontinent’s history, that past belonged to a world not of fixed borders, but rather of perpetually moving spheres of control as determined by the deployments of armies—such was the medieval world. The Ghaznavids, the Delhi sultanate, and the Mughal dynasty all controlled the subcontinent’s northwestern frontier, but their boundaries were vague and somewhat different from one another. Thus, Pakistan cannot claim its borders are legitimated by history alone. Legitimacy can only come from good governance and strong institutions. Without that, we are back to the medieval map, what in Washington’s eyes is “AfPak.”[25]
The fact that Pakistan’s political personality is seen as perverse (prone to religious extremism and conspiracy theories) is usually blamed on its dictatorial and military character. But as I have said, quoting Anatol Lieven, Pakistan’s perversity emerges not from the absolutist power of its regime but from its very institutional weakness. Pakistan’s weakness is responsible for its corruption, its atrocities, human rights violations, and so forth. Rather than drill power down from elected parliamentary institutions to the public space, Pakistan’s so-called democratic institutions are merely a forum for crooked deal-making, as gangs, bosses, feudals, and all sorts of unsavory elements subvert a system that works only in the abstract. Democratic institutions in the West are by definition impersonal—that is, one’s connections are not supposed to ultimately matter that much. But in Pakistan the situation is the opposite, since institutions only work on the basis of various patronage and kinship patterns. Politics at the geographical point where the Near Eastern Muslim world meets the Sanskrit civilization of India is in the final analysis not modern but feudal, because with the exception of the Taliban it is based not on ideas or ideologies, but on family dynasties and other personal relationships. Pakistan is a “negotiated state,” where the heavily armed Pathans are co-opted by being given a substantial role in the military and bureaucracy, and the far more numerous Punjabis get to run things.[26] And because the Pathans live on both sides of a weak and porous border, Pakistan has been undermined for almost half a century by war in Afghanistan.
Western lectures about democracy will not fix Pakistan. Democracy is merely a bureaucratic formula whose intrinsic value depends on the culture in which it operates. Pakistan already has democracy, more or less, and it has not resolved its fundamental problems of governance. What can shake Pakistan going forward is not the West or democracy, but the larger forces of the natural environment and China’s emergence as a great power. Floods on a biblical scale, like in 2022, and China’s energy and transport corridor have become pivot points of Pakistan’s destiny.
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Pakistan’s diminishing underground water table and overused soils have been in a critical state for decades actually, and the situation is only getting worse. At some point these environmental background noises can aggravate already tense intercommunal relations, and tempt anarchy in the process. Or the reverse might happen. An environmentally driven “hard regime” might emerge, in the phrase coined by Canadian political scientist and environmental expert Thomas Homer-Dixon: a regime more authoritarian than any Pakistan has known in the past.[27] But given Pakistan’s institutional weakness and the many armed groups in the tribal agencies and elsewhere, this seems like less of a viable alternative than the semi-anarchy mentioned above. It is possible to get a combination of both.
China’s increasing influence in Pakistan may indicate a more hopeful scenario. Pakistan is key to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), since only the Silk Road through Pakistan can join China’s land Silk Road across Eurasia with its maritime Silk Road across the Greater Indian Ocean. China is investing $46 billion to build an 1,800-mile superhighway and high-speed railway from China’s western Xinjiang Province south all the way through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, near the entrance of the Persian Gulf. Nothing since independence in 1947 carries the potential to help stabilize Pakistan’s unruly badlands more than the successful completion of this project, because the very process of building this energy and transportation corridor could create jobs, spur development, and therefore calm regional insurgencies, making Pakistan in effect more governable. Ideally, it could be a virtuous cycle, as Pakistan is swept into a Eurasian system of trade and finance, which, while certainly not clean or absent of corruption, would nevertheless be more efficient, cleaner, and less corrupt than the type of governance Pakistan has experienced over the past seventy-five years.
But it could also turn out very differently. This leads to a discussion of “AfPak” and Central Asia in the early and mid twenty-first century, which means introducing geopolitical theory. And that starts with Halford Mackinder.
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Halford Mackinder, the great British geographer of the early twentieth century, vaguely foresaw both world wars when he proposed that, as the European imperial powers had staked out the habitable part of the earth by the end of the nineteenth century, they would henceforth have no further outlet for their energies except to fight each other. Mackinder also announced that with the development of railways crisscrossing the Eurasian landmass, control of the “Heartland” of Eurasia would ultimately lead one of the great powers to dominate the Afro-Eurasian “World-Island,” that is, the Eastern Hemisphere. Mackinder’s idea was somewhat vague; the Heartland might have been interpreted to lie anywhere from Eastern Europe to Iran to Central Asia itself. His great insight was not so much identifying the interior of Eurasia as the geographical “pivot” of history, but observing that the fight between Russia and Germany for control over the Eurasian interior had not been settled by World War I, and that their titanic struggle would go on—which it did, culminating in a second world war. Because both Russia and Germany had different regimes in the Second World War than in the First, Mackinder’s clairvoyance suggested that geography, indeed, could be a determining factor above and beyond the world of men.
To assess twenty-first-century Central Asia, which of course is part of the Greater Middle East, we need to put Mackinder’s worldview together with the “Rimland” thesis of the early- and mid-twentieth-century Dutch-American geopolitician Nicholas J. Spykman. The two are usually seen in opposition to each other: Mackinder identified the key to world power as the Eurasian interior; Spykman identified it as Eurasia’s navigable Rimland. The forty-four-year-long Cold War had both Mackinderesque and Spykmanesque qualities: the contested spaces—the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, South Asia, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and so on—all were located more or less on the southern Rimland of Eurasia, from the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean (as opposed to the northern coastline in Russia, which is ice-blocked much of the year). America’s containment strategy was about keeping the Soviet Union, the great Heartland power, from advancing into the southern Rimland. The Soviets saw this as encirclement, and their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, which began more than four decades of war there, was partly motivated by a desire to advance south toward the Indian Ocean, in order to break this encirclement. To be sure, Afghanistan constitutes a Heartland territory only three hundred miles from the Indian Ocean Rimland. Still, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan notwithstanding, much of this remained in the realm of abstract theorizing throughout the Cold War. But as we shall see, because of the advancement of transportation technology, Afghanistan’s geopolitical potential is about to mature and become increasingly obvious. Indeed, Afghanistan’s very ungovernability does not detract from its being a crossroads of trade and empire.
Much of this was lost on recent American administrations. In fact, the last consciously geopolitically minded American presidency was that of George H. W. Bush, since the Cold War, as an extension of World War II—as well as a worldwide competition between great military powers—concentrated the minds of many presidents of the era. In the post–Cold War period, ideals, values, and “global” issues have distracted attention from the geopolitical chessboard. But, consciously or not, and however incompetent its withdrawal was in 2021, the Biden administration was in fact operating geopolitically when it came to Afghanistan, after a fashion at least. And its playbook was that of Nicholas Spykman. Let me explain.
America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, designed to counter China, has been very Spykmanesque, as it concentrates on the southern, navigable Rimland of Eurasia. That is, it concentrates on building up forces and relationships along the Eurasian coastline from Japan south to Australia and then westward across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf—the grand southern sweep of Eurasia’s maritime border. By withdrawing from Afghanistan without sufficiently enunciating a diplomatic and security strategy for the heartland region of Central Asia, the Biden team chose the Rimland over the Heartland. However, the Rimland and the Heartland are about to fuse in the coming years. And much may depend on what happens in Afghanistan.
