Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
looms to the northwest of India, just as the great Muslim invasion forces of yore once did.
“Pakistan,” writes George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, “is
the modern-day remnant of Muslim rule over medieval India,” even as Pakistan's south-
west is the subcontinental region first occupied by Arab Muslims invading from Iran and
southern Afghanistan.
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To be sure, Indian decision makers are not anti-Muslim. India is home to 154 million
Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan it-
self. India has had three Muslim presidents. But India is a secular democracy by virtue of
the fact that it has sought to escape from the politics of religion in order to heal the Hindu-
Muslim divide in a predominantly Hindu state. Pakistan, as an Islamic republic, to say
nothing of its radical elements, is in some ways an affront to the very liberal fundamentals
on which India is based.
The fact that India's fear of Pakistan—and vice versa—is existential should not surprise
anyone. Of course, India could defeat Pakistan in a conventional war. But in a nuclear ex-
change, or a war by terrorism, Pakistan could achieve a parity of sorts with India. And it
goes beyond that: since it isn't only Pakistan that encompasses, after a fashion, the threat of
another Mughal onslaught without the Mughals' redeeming cosmopolitanism; it is Afgh-
anistan, too. For as we know, the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan is largely a
mirage, both today and in history. The crags and canyons of Pakistan's North-West Fron-
tier Province (officially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous.
Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. Even at
the official Khyber border post, tens of thousands of ethnic Pushtuns pass through weekly
without showing identity papers, while hundreds of jingle trucks pass daily uninspected.
The lack of procedures attests not only to the same tribes on both sides of the frontier, but
to the tenuous nature of the Afghan and Pakistani states themselves, the ultimate cause of
which is their lack of geographical coherence as the heart of Indo-Islamic and Indo-Per-
sianate continuums through which it is nearly impossible to draw lines. The Achaemenid,
Kushan, Indo-Greek, Ghaznavid, Mughal, and other empires all took in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan as part of their dominions, which either threatened India or also included por-
tions of it. Then there is the Central Asian Timur (Tamerlane) and the Turkmen Nader Shah
the Great, who in 1398 and in 1739 respectively both vanquished Delhi from imperial bases
in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
This is a rich history that few in the West know of, while sections of the Indian elite
know it in their bones. When Indians look at their maps of the subcontinent they see Afgh-
anistan and Pakistan in the northwest, just as they see Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh in
the northeast, as all part of India's immediate sphere of influence, with Iran, the Persian
Gulf, the former Soviet Central Asian republics, and Burma as critical shadow zones. Not
