TW: Klein continues to crank out good stuff on Pak/Af or more aptly relative to the emerging term, Pashtunistan. As in any war it is essential to understand why your opponent is fighting. In Pak/Af are we fighting Al-Qaeda? nationalists? criminals? tribalists? religious zealots? The answer, of course, is some combination of all of the above. We can accommodate in some form with all of them but for Al-Qaeda unfortunately segregating one from the other is next to impossible.The map above displays the challenge of trying to explicitly accommodate Pashtun nationalism beyond strict limits. Neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan would appreciate losing half their current geography to a new entity. Not to mention opening that can of worms would set of India as similar nationalist sentiment would emerge on their western frontier (and probably on Iran's eastern frontier as well). This is merely another example of those lines created during the colonial era between about 1880 and 1925 based almost exclusively on European politics, which are now coming back to bite the world in the ass.
From Joe Klein at Time:
"...the Taliban's strategic advantage is plain: they don't have to worry about the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Indeed, they have a different map than we do.
Our map divides Afghanistan and Pakistan along the Durand Line, the imaginary boundary imposed by Sir Mortimer Durand in 1893. But neither the Afghans nor the Pashtuns accept that. The Afghans believe that the Durand line--which follows geographic markers, like rivers and the mountain lines, rather than tribal realities--was a 100-year fix that expired in 1993...The real Pashtunistan includes the Pakistani North West Frontier province and tribal areas plus much of Afghanistan's south and east, including the cities of Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar.
The Taliban are, in effect, the Pashtun Liberation Army. They don't see the same border that we--or the Pakistanis--do. Their motivation is, in part, religious, but very largely nationalist--and traditionally xenophobic. They don't like outsiders, whether they are Americans, Punjabis (who control the Pakistan military) or Tajiks (Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). They have made common cause with the "Arabs"--Al Qaeda--because of religious affinity and the existence of common enemies (namely us).
I have not yet heard one credible account of how the U.S. addresses this problem. But I imagine that a plausible solution would ultimately involve the following: We recognize the Pashtun reality, in some form, and the Pashtuns, in turn, decouple themselves from, and kick out, Al Qaeda. That seems quite impossible, of course, given the alternative reality we've inherited from the British--Afghan and Pakistani statehood along a ridiculous and untenable line. The only way this situation is resolved, however, is if some way can be found to make those competing realities mesh."
No comments:
Post a Comment