Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1)

by Tim Marshall

Politically, the Arab countries remain suspicious that Erdoğan wants to re-create the Ottoman Empire economically and they resist close ties.

This fierce row was not just about Syria and the Russian jet—it was about Turkey and Russia vying for influence in the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and among the Turkic peoples in countries such as Turkmenistan.

Turkey, which could have benefited from Israeli energy, remains largely reliant on its old foe Russia for its energy

In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus takes you only into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Strait to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean. Given its landmass, 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;

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.

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 average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes.

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 that 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 behavior 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 naïveté, 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.

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 sympathizers, 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 loss of interes...

India and Pakistan can agree on one thing: neither wants the other one around.

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 class.

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 civilizations have grown up along these rivers, such as the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Indus. To this day the population centers are dotted along their banks, and the regions, so different from one another—for example the Punjab, with its Sikh majority, and the Tamil speakers of Tamil Nadu—are based on these geographical divides.

Pakistan is geographically, economically, demographically, and militarily weaker than India. Its national identity is also not as strong.

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. 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 percent of the population, the Sindhs 14 percent, the Pashtuns 13.5 percent, and the Baluchis 4.5 percent. 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.

Baluchistan is of crucial importance: while it may contain only a small minority of Pakistan’s population, without it there is no Pakistan. It comprises almost 45 percent 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 late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on 2,300 acres of land to develop a massive “special economic zone” and an international airport in the port area. The Chinese will build a road from the port to the airport and then onward toward China—all part of a $46 billion investment to create the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor linking China to the Arabian Sea.

The Kashmir issue is partially one of national pride, but it is also strategic. Full control of Kashmir would give India a window into central Asia and a border with Afghanistan. It would also deny Pakistan a border with China and thus diminish the usefulness of a Chinese-Pakistani relationship. The Pakistani government likes to trumpet that its friendship with China is “taller than the mountains and deeper than the oceans.”

If Pakistan had full control of Kashmir it would strengthen Islamabad’s foreign policy options and deny India opportunities. It would also help Pakistan’s water security. The Indus River originates in Himalayan Tibet, but passes through the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir before entering Pakistan and then running the length of the country and emptying into the Arabian Sea at Karachi. The Indus and its tributaries provide water to two-thirds of the country: without it the cotton industry and many other mainstays of Pakistan’s struggling economy would collapse. By a treaty that has been honored through all of their wars, India and Pakistan agreed to share the waters; but both populations are growing at an alarming rate, and global warming could diminish the water flow. Annexing all of Kashmir would secure Pakistan’s water supply. Given the stakes, neither side will let go;

Pakistan lacks internal “strategic depth”—somewhere to fall back to in the event of being overrun from the east—

The Pakistan-India border includes swampland in the south, the Thar Desert, and the mountains of the north; all are extremely difficult territory for an army to cross.

The distance from the Indian border to Islamabad is less than 250 miles, most of it flat ground. In the event of a massive, overwhelming, conventional attack, the Indian army could be in the capital within a few days.

Plan B is to fall back across the Afghan border if necessary, and that requires a sympathetic government in Kabul. Hence, geography has dictated that Pakistan will involve itself in Afghanistan, as will India.

Pakistan had a natural “in” with the Afghan Taliban. Most are Pashtun, the same ethnicity as the majority of the Pakistanis of the North-West Frontier. They have never thought of themselves as two peoples and consider the border between them as a Western invention, which in some ways it is.

the Taliban had nowhere to go—they were Afghans and Pakistanis—and, as they told these new technologically advanced foreign invaders from America and Europe, “You may have the watches—but we have the time.” They would wait out the foreigners no matter what was thrown at them, and in this they would be helped by elements in Pakistan.

at the Foreign Office in London, I had an exchange with the defense secretary, as follows: “Don’t worry, Tim. We’re not going after the Taliban, we’re there to protect people.” “Don’t worry, Secretary of State, the Taliban are going to come after you.”

So the Taliban bled the British, bled the Americans, bled NATO, waited NATO out, and after thirteen years NATO went away.

The Pakistani Taliban is a natural outgrowth of the Afghan version. Both are predominantly Pashtun and neither will accept domination from any non-Pashtun power, be it the British army of the nineteenth century or the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani army of the twenty-first century.

The Pakistani government pretended it ruled the entire country, and the Pashtun of the North-West Frontier pretended they were loyal to the Pakistani state. This relationship worked until September 11, 2001.

None of this would have been necessary if the Afghan Taliban, in part created by the Pakistani ISI, had not been stupid enough to host the Arabs of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and then after 9/11 had not fallen back upon the Pashtun culture of honoring guests, thus refusing to give them up when the Americans came calling.

India also has to concentrate on managing 1.3 billion people while simultaneously emerging as a potential world power. Its relationship with China would dominate its foreign policy but for one thing—the Himalayas. Without the world’s tallest mountain range between them, what is a lukewarm relationship would probably be frosty. A glance at the map indicates two huge countries cheek by jowl, but a closer look shows they are walled off from each other along what the CIA’s World Factbook lists as 1,652 miles of border.

As previously discussed, China wanted Tibet, both to prevent India from having it, and—almost as bad in Beijing’s view—to prevent an independent Tibet allowing India to base military forces there, thus giving them the commanding heights.

For example, the Sikh movement to create a state for Sikhs from part of both Indian and Pakistani Punjab has for the moment gone quiet, but it could flare up again. The state of Assam has several competing movements, including the Bodo-speaking peoples, who want a state for themselves, and the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam, who want a separate country created within Assam for Muslims. There is even a movement to create an independent Christian state in Nagaland, where 75 percent of the population is Baptist;

India may yet rival China as an economic powerhouse this century. It is the world’s seventh-largest country, with the second-largest population. It has borders with six countries (seven if you include Afghanistan). It has nine thousand miles of internal navigable waterways, reliable water supplies, and huge areas of arable land; is a major coal producer; has useful quantities of oil and gas, even if it will always be an importer of all three; and its subsidization of fuel and heating costs is a drain on its finances. Despite its natural riches, India has not matched China’s growth, and because China is now moving out into the world, the two countries may bump up against each other—not along their land border, but at sea.

Expansion into each other’s territory through the Himalayas was impossible and, besides, each had more than enough arable land. Now, though, the rise of technology means each requires vast amounts of energy; geography has not bequeathed them such riches, and so both countries have been forced to expand their horizons and venture out into the oceans, and it is there that they have encountered each other.

The whole of the region from Malaysia up to the Russian port of Vladivostok eyes the North/South Korea problem nervously. All the neighbors know it has the potential to blow up in their faces, dragging in other countries and damaging their economies. The Chinese don’t want to fight on behalf of North Korea, but nor do they want a united Korea containing American bases close to their border.

North Korea is a poverty-stricken country of an estimated 25 million people, led by a basket case of a morally corrupt, bankrupt Communist monarchy, and supported by China, partly out of a fear of millions of refugees flooding north across the Yalu River.

All the actors in this East Asian drama know that if they try to force an answer to the question at the wrong time, they risk making things worse. A lot worse. It is not unreasonable to fear that you would end up with two capital cities in smoking ruins, a civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, missiles landing in and around Tokyo, and another Chinese-American military face-off on a divided peninsula in which one side has nuclear weapons.

South Korea’s capital, the megacity of Seoul, lies just thirty-five miles south of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Almost half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul region, which is home to much of its industry and financial centers, and it is all within range of North Korean artillery.

Even if China did not want to intervene during the fighting, it might decide it had to cross the border and secure the North to retain the buffer zone between it and the US forces.

At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded.

The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country that is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or, in European terms, bigger than France or Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 percent is suitable for intensive cultivation.

Japan had few of the natural resources required to become an industrialized nation. It had limited and poor-quality supplies of coal, very little oil, scant quantities of natural gas, limited supplies of rubber, and a shortage of many metals.

It was the thirst for these products, notably iron and oil, that caused Japan to rampage across the far-less developed Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early ’40s.

Eventually the Americans, who by then were supplying most of Japan’s oil needs, gave them an ultimatum—withdrawal or an oil embargo. The Japanese responded with the attack on Pearl Harbor and then swept on across Southeast Asia, taking Burma, Singapore, and the Philippines, among other territory. This was a massive overstretch, not just taking on the United States, but grabbing the very resources, rubber, for example, that the United States required for its own industry.

After the radioactive dust had settled on a complete Japanese surrender, the Americans helped them rebuild, partially as a hedge against Communist China.

China’s expanded Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. When Beijing said that any plane flying through the zone must identity itself or “face defensive measures,” Japan, South Korea, and the United States responded by flying through it without doing so.

Japan and South Korea have plenty to argue about, but will agree that their shared anxiety about China and North Korea will overcome this.

Latin America, particularly its south, is proof that you can bring the Old World’s knowledge and technology to the new, but if geography is against you, then you will have limited success, especially if you get the politics wrong.