Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with only 9 percent of females attending secondary schools, and with only a fifth of the
population enjoying access to potable water. Out of 182 countries, Afghanistan ranks next
to last on the United Nations' Human Development Index. Iraq, on the eve of the U.S. inva-
sion in 2003, was ranked 130, and its literacy rate is a reasonable 74 percent. While in Iraq
urbanization stands at 77 percent, so that reducing violence in Greater Baghdad during the
troop surge of 2007 had a calming effect on the entire country, in Afghanistan urbanization
stands at only 30 percent: meaning that counterinsurgency efforts in one village or region
may have no effect on another.
Whereas Mesopotamia, with large urban clusters over a flat landscape, is conducive to
military occupation forces, Afghanistan is, in terms of geography, barely a country at all.
It is riven by cathedral-like mountain ranges within its territory, which help seal divisions
between Pushtuns and Tajiks and other minorities, even as comparatively little in the way
of natural impediments separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, or Afghanistan from Iran.
Looking at the relief map, and noting that more than half of the world's 42 million Pushtuns
live inside Pakistan, one could conceivably construct a country called Pushtunistan, lying
between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River, thus overlapping the Afghani and
Pakistani states.
Afghanistan only emerged as a country of sorts in the mid-eighteenth century, when
Ahmad Khan, leader of the Abdali contingent in the Persian army of Nader Shah the Great,
carved out a buffer zone between Persia and a crumbling Mughal empire in the Indian Sub-
continent, which was later to evolve into a buffer zone between czarist Russia and Brit-
ish India. Thus the case can be made that with the slow-motion dissolution of the former
Soviet Empire in Central Asia, and the gradual weakening of the Pakistani state, a historic
realignment is now taking place that could see Afghanistan disappear on the political map:
in the future, for example, the Hindu Kush (the real northwestern frontier of the subcontin-
ent) could form a border between Pushtunistan and a Greater Tajikistan. The Taliban, the
upshot of Pushtun nationalism, Islamic fervor, drug money, corrupt warlords, and hatred of
the American occupation, may, in the words of Asian specialist Selig Harrison, merely be
the vehicle for this transition that is too broad and too grand to be in any way deterred by a
foreign military run by impatient civilians back in Washington.
But there is another reality to counter this one: one that eschews such determinism. The
fact that Afghanistan is larger than Iraq with a more dispersed population is basically mean-
ingless, since 65 percent of the country lives within thirty-five miles of the main road sys-
tem, which approximates the old medieval caravan routes, making only 80 out of 342 dis-
tricts key to centralized control. Afghanistan has been governed more or less from the cen-
ter since Ahmad Khan's time: Kabul, if not always a point of authority, was at least a point
of arbitration. Especially between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, Afghanistan exper-
ienced moderate and constructive government under the constitutional monarchy of Zahir
Shah, a descendant of Ahmad Khan. The major cities were united by a highway system
