Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
But geography in this case is subject to different interpretations. From another perspect-
ive, Pakistan makes impressive geographic sense as a civilizational intermediary and con-
duit of trade routes connecting the subcontinent with Central Asia, the heart of the Indo-
Islamic world; because André Wink's concept of the Indo-Muslim
Al-Hind
is hard to define
in terms of modern borders, one may ask, why is Pakistan any more artificial than India?
After all, Lahore in Pakistan was as much a mother lode of Mughal rule as Delhi in India.
The real geographic heart of the northern subcontinental plain is the Punjab, and that is split
between the two countries, making neither whole from any historical or geographical view.
Just as northern India grows out of the demographic core of the Ganges, Pakistan, it could
be argued, grows out of that other vital demographic core, the Indus and its tributaries. In
Aitzaz Ahsan's
The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan
. A member of the late Benazir
Bhutto's Sindh-based Pakistan People's Party, Ahsan asserts that the “critical dividing line”
throughout history within the subcontinent is the “Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient”: running
southwest from Gurdaspur in eastern Punjab to Kathiawar in Gujarat on the Arabian Sea, a
line that approximates the present India-Pakistan border.
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But here is the conundrum. During the relatively brief periods in history when the areas
of India and Pakistan were united—the Mauryan, Mughal, and British—there was no issue
about who dominated the trade routes into Central Asia (Afghanistan and beyond). During
the rest of history, there was also no problem, because whereas empires like the Kushana,
Ghaznavid, and Delhi Sultanate did not control the eastern Ganges, they did control both
the Indus
and
the western Ganges, so that Delhi and Lahore were under the rule of one
polity, even as Central Asia was also under their control—so, again, no conflict. Today's
political geography is historically unique, however: an Indus valley state and a powerful
Gangetic state both fighting for control of an independent Central Asian near-abroad.
Because the Indus and its tributaries, with Punjab at the heart, is the demographic core
of the Indus-to-Oxus region, encompassing today's Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is not in-
appropriate from a historical or geographical sense that, for example, Pakistan's Inter-Ser-
vices Intelligence Directorate (ISI), dominated by Punjabis, has a strong hand in the terror-
ist and smuggling operations of the Haqqani Network, which, in turn, operates throughout
Indus-to-Oxus. ISI is most interested in controlling the south and east of Afghanistan; that
would leave the area north of the Hindu Kush to affect a merger of sorts with the Oxus
and trans-Oxus region of southern Uzbekistan and southern Tajikistan—a revival of ancient
Bactria. Truly, the early-twenty-first-century map could look like an ancient one.
As for Afghanistan itself—so central, as we have seen, to India's geopolitical fortunes over
the course of history—let us consider it for a moment. It is a country with a life expectancy
of forty-four years, with a literacy rate of 28 percent (and far lower than that for women),
