Prisoners of Geography Read online

  Given its land mass Turkey is not often thought of as a sea power, but it borders three seas and its control of these waters has always made it a force to be reckoned with; it is also a trade and transportation bridge linking Europe with the Middle East, the Caucasus and on up to the Central Asian countries, with which it shares history and, in some regions, ethnic ties.

  Turkey is determined to be at the crossroads of history even if the traffic can at times be hazardous. The webpage of the Turkish Foreign Ministry emphasises this in the section ‘Synopsis of Foreign Policy’: ‘The Afro-Eurasian geography where Turkey is situated at the epicentre is an area where such opportunities and risks interact in the most intensive way.’ It also says: ‘Turkey is determined to become a full member of the European Union as part of its bicentennial effort to reach the highest level of contemporary civilisation.’

  That looks unlikely in the short to medium term. Until a few years ago Turkey was held up as an example of how a Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, could embrace democracy. That example has taken a few knocks recently with the ongoing Kurdish problem, the difficulties facing some of the tiny Christian communities and the tacit support for Islamist groups in their fight against the Syrian government. President Erdoğan’s remarks on Jews, race and gender equality, taken with the creeping Islamisation of Turkey, have set alarm bells ringing. However, compared with the majority of Arab states Turkey is far more developed and recognisable as a democracy. Erdoğan may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.

  Because the Arab states have not experienced a similar opening-up and have suffered from colonialism, they were not ready to turn the Arab uprisings (the wave of protests that started in 2010) into a real Arab Spring. Instead they soured into perpetual rioting and civil war.

  The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the ‘Green Revolution’, describing the young students of north Tehran as the ‘Youth of Iran’, thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.

  In 1989 in Eastern Europe there was one form of totalitarianism: Communism. In the majority of people’s minds there was only one direction in which to go: towards democracy, which was thriving on the other side of the Iron Curtain. East and West shared a historical memory of periods of democracy and civil society. The Arab world of 2011 enjoyed none of those things and faced in many different directions. There were, and are, the directions of democracy, liberal democracy (which differs from the former), nationalism, the cult of the strong leader and the direction in which many people had been facing all along – Islam in its various guises, including Islamism.

  In the Middle East power does indeed flow from the barrel of a gun. Some good citizens of Misrata in Libya may want to develop a liberal democratic party, some might even want to campaign for gay rights; but their choice will be limited if the local de facto power shoots liberal democrats and gays. Iraq is a case in point: a democracy in name only, far from liberal, and a place where people are routinely murdered for being homosexual.

  The second phase of the Arab uprising is well into its stride. This is the complex internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links and guns are currently far more powerful forces than ‘Western’ ideals of equality, freedom of expression and universal suffrage. The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds of which the average Westerner knows so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes. We are aware of our own prejudices, which are legion, but often seem to turn a blind eye to those in the Middle East.

  The routine expression of hatred for others is so common in the Arab world that it barely draws comment other than from the region’s often Western-educated liberal minority who have limited access to the platform of mass media. Anti-Semitic cartoons which echo the Nazi Der Stürmer propaganda newspaper are common. Week in, week out, shock-jock imams are given space on prime-time TV shows.

  Western apologists for this sort of behaviour are sometimes hamstrung by a fear of being described as one of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalists’. They betray their own liberal values by denying their universality. Others, in their naivety, say that these incitements to murder are not widespread and must be seen in the context of the Arabic language, which can be given to flights of rhetoric. This signals their lack of understanding of the ‘Arab street’, the role of the mainstream Arab media and a refusal to understand that when people who are full of hatred say something, they mean it.

  When Hosni Mubarak was ousted as President of Egypt it was indeed people power that toppled him, but what the outside world failed to see was that the military had been waiting for years for an opportunity to be rid of him and his son Gamal, and that the theatre of the street provided the cover they needed. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood called its supporters out that there was enough cover. There were only three institutions in Egypt: Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the military and the Brotherhood. The latter two destroyed the former, the Brotherhood then won an election, began turning Egypt into an Islamist state, and paid the price by itself being overthrown by the real power in the land – the military.

  The Islamists remain the second power, albeit now underground. When the anti-Mubarak demonstrations were at their height the gatherings in Cairo attracted several hundred thousand people. After Mubarak’s fall, when the radical Muslim Brotherhood preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi returned from exile in Qatar, at least a million people came out to greet him, but few in the Western media called this the ‘voice of the people’. The liberals never had a chance. Nor do they now. This is not because the people of the region are radical; it is because if you are hungry and frightened, and you are offered either bread and security or the concept of democracy, the choice is not difficult.

  In impoverished societies with few accountable institutions, power rests with gangs disguised as ‘militia’ and ‘political parties’. While they fight for power, sometimes cheered on by naive Western sympathisers, many innocent people die. It looks as if it will be that way in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and possibly other countries for years to come.

  The Americans are keen to scale down their political and military investment in the region due to a reduction in their energy import requirements; if they do withdraw then China, and to a lesser extent India, may have to get involved in equal proportion to the US loss of interest. The Chinese are already major players in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. That scenario is on a global level and will be determined in the chancelleries of the capitals of the great powers. On the ground the game will be played with people’s imaginations, wants, hopes and needs, and with their lives.

  Sykes–Picot is breaking; putting it back together, even in a different shape, will be a long and bloody affair.

  CHAPTER 7

  INDIA AND PAKISTAN

  ‘India is not a nation, nor a country. It is a subcontinent of nationalities.’

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah

  INDIA AND PAKISTAN CAN AGREE ON ONE THING: NEITHER wants the other one around. This is somewhat problematic given that they share a 1,900-mile long border. Each country fairly bristles with antagonism and nuclear weapons, so how they manage this unwanted relationship is a matter of life and death on a scale of tens of millions.

  India has a population approaching 1.3 billion people, while Pakistan’s is 182 million. Impoverished, volatile and splintering, Pakistan appears to define itself by its opposition to India, while India, despite obsessing about Pakistan, defines itself in many ways, including that of being an emerging world power with a growing economy and an expanding middle cl
ass. From this vantage point it looks across at Pakistan and sees how it outperforms it on almost all economic and democratic indicators.

  They have fought four major wars and many skirmishes. Emotions run hot. An oft-quoted remark by a Pakistani officer that Pakistan would make India bleed by a thousand cuts was addressed in late 2014 by military analyst Dr Amarjit Singh writing in the Indian Defence Review: ‘Whatever others may believe, my opinion is simply that it is better for India to brave a costly nuclear attack by Pakistan, and get it over with even at the cost of tens of millions of deaths, than suffer ignominy and pain day in and day out through a thousand cuts and wasted energy in unrealized potential.’ That may not reflect official government policy, but it is an indication of the depth of feeling at many levels in both societies. Modern Pakistan and India were born in fire; next time the fire could kill them.

  The two are tied together within the geography of the Indian subcontinent, which creates a natural frame. The Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea are respectively to the south-east, south, and south-west, the Hindu Kush to the north-west, and the Himalayas to the north. Moving clockwise, the plateau of the Baluchistan Desert climbs steadily before becoming the mountains of the North West Frontier, which rise even higher to become the Hindu Kush. A right turn east connects to the Karakoram Range, which then leads to the Himalayas. They sweep right along the border with China all the way to Burma. From there, as India curves around Bangladesh, the terrain descends south to the Bay of Bengal.

  The interior of the frame contains what are modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. The latter two are impoverished landlocked nations dominated by their giant neighbours, China and India. Bangladesh’s problem is not that it lacks access to the sea, but that the sea has too much access to Bangladesh: flooding from the waters of the Bay of Bengal constantly afflicts the low-lying territory. Its other geographical problem is that it is almost entirely surrounded by India, because the 2,545-mile long frontier, agreed in 1974, wrapped India around Bangladesh, leaving it only a short border with Burma as an alternative land route to the outside world.

  Bangladesh is volatile, and contains Islamist militants which trouble India; but none of these three smaller countries within the subcontinent can ever rise to threaten its undisputed master. Nor would Pakistan be considered a threat to India had it not mastered the technology of developing nuclear weapons in the decades following the partition of the region in 1947.

  The area within our frame, despite being relatively flat, has always been too large and diverse to have strong central rule. Even the British colonial overlords, with their famed bureaucracy and connecting rail system, allowed regional autonomy and indeed used it to play local leaders off against each other. The linguistic and cultural diversity is partially due to the differences in climate – for example, the freezing north of the Himalayas in contrast to the jungles of the south – but it is also because of the subcontinent’s rivers and religions.

  Various civilisations have grown up along these rivers, such as the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Indus. To this day the population centres are dotted along their banks, and the regions, so different from each other – for example the Punjab, with its Sikh majority, and the Tamil speakers of Tamil Nadu – are based on these geographical divides.

  Different powers have invaded the subcontinent over the centuries, but none have ever truly conquered it. Even now New Delhi does not truly control India and, as we shall see, to an even greater extent Islamabad does not control Pakistan. The Muslims had the greatest success in uniting the subcontinent under one leadership, but even Islam never overcame the linguistic, religious and cultural differences.

  The first Muslim invasion was as early as the eighth century CE, when the Arabs of the Umayyad Caliphate made it as far as the Punjab in what is now Pakistan. From then until the eighteenth century various foreign invasions brought Islam to the subcontinent; however, east of the Indus River Valley a majority of the Hindu population resisted conversion, thus sowing the seeds for the eventual partition of India.

  The British came, and went, and when they went the centre could not hold, and things fell apart. In truth, there was no real centre: the region has always been divided by the ancient disparities of the languages of the Punjab and Gujarat, the mountains and the deserts, and Islam and Hinduism. By 1947 the forces of post-colonial nationalism and religious separatism broke the subcontinent into two, and later three, major pieces: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The British, exhausted by two world wars, and aware that the days of empire were coming to a close, did not cover themselves in glory in the manner of their leaving.

  On 3 June 1947 the announcement was made in the House of Commons: the British would withdraw – India was to be partitioned into the two independent dominions of India and Pakistan. Seventy-three days later, on 15 August, they were all but gone.

  An extraordinary movement of people followed as millions of Muslims fled the new borders of India, heading west to Pakistan, with millions of Hindus and Sikhs coming the other way. Columns of people 30,000-strong were on the roads as whole communities moved. Trains packed full of refugees criss-crossed the subcontinent disgorging people into cities and making the return journey filled with those heading in the other direction.

  It was carnage. Riots broke out across both countries as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others turned on each other in panic and fear. The British government washed its hands and refused pleas from the new Indian and Pakistani leaders for the few troops still in the country to help maintain order. Estimates of the death toll vary, but at least a million people died and 15 million were displaced. The Muslim-majority areas in the west – the Indus Valley region west of the Thar Desert and the Ganges River basin – became West Pakistan while those to the east of Calcutta (now Kolkata) became East Pakistan.

  What did Pakistan get out of this? Much less than India. It inherited India’s most troublesome border, the North West Frontier with Afghanistan, and it was a state split into two non-contiguous regions with little to hold it together as 1,000 miles of Indian territory separated West Pakistan from East Pakistan. Alaska and the rest of the USA have managed the problem of non-contiguous distance without difficulty, but they are culturally, linguistically and economically linked and operating in a stable environment. The only connection between the two parts of Pakistan was Islam. They never really came together, so it was no surprise when they were torn apart; in 1971 East Pakistan rebelled against the dominance of West Pakistan, India intervened and, after much bloodshed, East Pakistan seceded, becoming Bangladesh.

  However, back in 1947, twenty-five years after the end of the Ottoman Empire, Jinnah and the other leaders of the new Pakistan, amid much fanfare and promises of a bright future, claimed they had created a united Muslim homeland.

  Pakistan is geographically, economically, demographically and militarily weaker than India. Its national identity is also not as strong. India, despite its size, cultural diversity, and secessionist movements, has built a solid secular democracy with a unified sense of Indian identity. Pakistan is an Islamic state with a history of dictatorship and populations whose loyalty is often more to their cultural region than to the state.

  Secular democracy has served India well, but the 1947 division did give it a head start. Within the new borders of India was the vast majority of the subcontinent’s industry, most of the taxable income base and the majority of the major cities. For example Calcutta, with its port and banking sector, went to India, thus depriving East Pakistan of this major income provider and connection to the outside world.

  Pakistan received just 17 per cent of the financial reserves which had been controlled by the pre-partition government. It was left with an agricultural base, no money to spend on development, a volatile western frontier and a state divided within itself in multiple ways.

  The name Pakistan gives us clues about these divisions; pak means ‘pure’ and stan means ‘land’ in Urdu, so it is the land
of the pure, but it is also an acronym. The P is for Punjab, A is for Afghania (the Pashtun area by the Afghan border), K for Kashmir, S for Sindh and T stands for ‘tan’, as in Baluchistan.

  From these five distinct regions, each with their own language, one state was formed, but not a nation. Pakistan tries hard to create a sense of unity, but it remains rare for a Punjabi to marry a Baluchi, or a Sindh to marry a Pashtun. The Punjabis comprise 60 per cent of the population, the Sindhs 14 per cent, Pashtuns 13.5 per cent and Baluchis 4.5 per cent. Religious tensions are ever present – not only in the antagonism sometimes shown to the country’s Christian and Hindu minorities, but also between the majority Sunni and the minority Shia Muslims. In Pakistan there are several nations within one state.

  The regions that make up India and Pakistan – many have their own distinct identities and languages.

  The official language is Urdu, which is the mother tongue of the Muslims of India who fled in 1947, most of who settled in the Punjab. This does not endear the language to the rest of the country. The Sindh region has long chafed at what it feels to be Punjabi dominance and many Sindhs think they are treated as second-class citizens. The Pashtuns of the North West Frontier have never accepted the rule of outsiders: parts of the frontier region are named the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but in reality they have never been administered from Islamabad. Kashmir remains divided between Pakistan and India, and although a majority of Kashmiris want independence, the one thing India and Pakistan can agree on is that they cannot have it. Baluchistan also has an independence movement which periodically rises up against the state.

  Baluchistan is of crucial importance: while it may only contain a small minority of Pakistan’s population, without it there is no Pakistan. It comprises almost 45 per cent of the country and holds much of its natural gas and mineral wealth. Another source of income beckons with the proposed overland routes to bring Iranian and Caspian Sea oil up through Pakistan to China. The jewel in this particular crown is the coastal city of Gwadar. Many analysts believe this strategic asset was the Soviet Union’s long-term target when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979: Gwadar would have fulfilled Moscow’s long-held dream of a warm-water port. The Chinese have also been attracted by this jewel and invested billions of dollars in the region. A deep-water port was inaugurated in 2007 and the two countries are now working to link it to China. In the long run, China would like to use Pakistan as a land route for its energy needs. This would allow it to bypass the Strait of Malacca, which as we saw in the chapter on China is a choke point that could strangle Chinese economic growth.