Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

“The Great Land Robbery,”

Sindhis, for example, had been independent, ruled by their own local dynasties in the land they called Sindhu Desh.

future Baluch-Sindh confederation quietly supported by India. The two regions are complementary, with Baluchistan holding the natural resources and Sindh the industrial base.

government tactics have grown more brutal, Baluch warriors have congealed into an authentic national movement, as a new and better-armed generation—emergent from a literate Baluch middle class in the capital of Quetta and elsewhere, and financed by Baluch compatriots in the Persian Gulf—have to a significant degree surmounted the age-old Baluch nemesis of feuding tribes, which outsiders like the Punjabis in the Pakistani military had been able to play against one another.

Without a tradition like Lahore, and with significant inter-ethnic violence between Sindhis and mohajirs (Muslim immigrants from India), and between Pushtuns and Baluch, the future of this Arabian Sea port seemed open to two healing, dynamic forces: those of radical Islamic orthodoxy and of soulless materialism, the offerings, respectively, of Saudi Arabia and of Dubai.

Karachi as the capital of an independent or at least an autonomous Sindh, conceived of both Pakistan and India as not the last words in human political organization for the Subcontinent.

Sindh had been part of Bombay Presidency, a province of British India until 1936, when it became a province in its own right tied to New Delhi. Sindh joined Pakistan less because it was Muslim than because the new state promised Sindh autonomy, which it never got.

Sindhi nationalists, the Arabian Sea might yet return to its pre-Portuguese medieval past, as a place of regions and principalities, in which Kabul and Karachi were as united with Lahore and Delhi as Delhi was with Bangalore and the rest of south India. And in this firmament, aided by globalization, as they told me, the Sunnis and Shias of Sindh could deal, respectively, with Saudi Arabia and Iran without the intercession of Islamabad. As unforgiving

positive terms about India, which he and the others saw as their ally against the very state in which they felt themselves to be prisoners. Indeed, they all spoke to me about the need for an open border with the neighboring Indian state of Gujarat, India’s most economically dynamic region, with a quarter of that country’s investment. Gujarat’s very proximity and strength made them aware of their own failure.

“Pakistan is itself a breach of contract,” he told me. He reiterated the whole history of the state from the minority Baluch and Sindhi point of view, paying particular attention to the secession of Bangladesh in 1971 and the inspiration the Bengalis there have given to the dreams of other minorities. One more coup in

Pakistan, Qureshi said, and there would be civil war in Baluchistan and Sindh.

long as you believed that Sindh was a cohesive and definable entity that could be neatly severed from Pakistan. But it couldn’t, for Sindhis were a minority in Karachi itself. After partition, millions of Muslim Indians (mohajirs) had fled here and formed their own political groupings. Then there were the Pushtun, Punjabi, Hindu, and other minorities. As past violence showed, Sindhis might get their way here only through urban warfare. And that was to say nothing of the Sunni-Shia split within the Sindhi community itself, which had also periodically led to violence. Because of the vicissitudes of migration over recent decades, at least in Karachi Sindh had become something of an abstraction (as had the concept of Baluchistan in Quetta, because of the influx of Pushtuns).

Sindh, as well as Baluchistan, could gain autonomy in a far more loosely controlled and democratic future Pakistan. But Pakistan as it currently existed, I felt, would not go so quietly into history. And the Mughal and medieval principalities of the past were only vague comparisons for what might come about, mainly because of the mixing of populations in the urban areas. Future decades would have to witness political structures of extreme subtlety.

“The Indian Subcontinent has produced only one liberal, secular politician, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. [Mohandas] Gandhi was just a British agent from South Africa, a reactionary with a sweet tongue. Ever since Jinnah, though, we’ve been ruled by these gangsters who serve the Punjabis—the stooges of America. You know why the Indus is so low—because the Punjabis are stealing our water upstream. Sindh is the only ancient and legitimate state in Pakistan.”

the military was periodically obligated to clean house, which it pointedly failed to do, as it had emerged in its own right into a corrupt state-within-a-state, identified in the popular mind with one ethnic group, the Punjabis,

The Indus signals the western edge of the Subcontinent, from where its political unity was frequently breached by invaders coming out of the plateau and deserts of Afghanistan, Iran, and Baluchistan. It is thus a lesson in the feebleness of borders.

Kushan dynasty,

The nineteenth-century traveler and linguist Richard Francis Burton, after a five-year sojourn in Sindh, wrote that the line of ports along the Makran coast, stretching to Iran, would make it possible to “easily collect the whole trade of Central Asia,” with Bombay “as the point to which all these widely-diverging rays would tend.”

India has more to lose from extremist Islam than arguably any other country in the world.

The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbours, its reserve of military strength … all these are assets of precious value. On the West, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on the north-east … it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam [Thailand].

India, like the United States, inhabits its own geographical sphere, in India’s case between the Himalayas and the wide Indian Ocean, and thus is in a position of both dominance and detachment.

“India is perhaps China’s most realistic strategic adversary.”

“bridging power”—that is, something between America and China, between a global power and a regional power, between hard power and soft power, between the emerging power of its economy and navy and the poverty of many of its people and its weak borders.28 Indian cultural influence has always been more widespread and profound than conventional calculations of power would suggest.

sea power as far away as Mozambique and Indonesia, provided the inhabitants of these awesome government buildings with a sense of modesty that the British, with all of their realpolitik, lacked. Thus, the Indians might occupy this magnificent perch at the confluence of Central Asia and the Hindu plain longer and ultimately more fruitfully than did their predecessors.

The real art of statesmanship was to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy.

Just as America is evolving into a new kind of two-ocean navy—the Pacific and the Indian oceans, rather than the Pacific and the Atlantic—China, as we shall see in a later chapter, may also be evolving into a two-ocean navy—the Pacific and the Indian ocean, too. The Indian Ocean joined to the western Pacific would truly be at the strategic heart of the world.

Bangladesh shows, the future is not strictly about rising sea levels. It is about the interrelationship between them and political phenomena such as religious extremism and the deficiencies of democracy.

Muslim Bangladeshis are pro-American—the upshot of historical dislike of former colonial Britain, frequent intimidation by nearby India and China, and lingering hostility toward Pakistan stemming from the 1971 liberation war.

Functioning institutions—rather than mere elections—are critical, particularly in complex societies, for the faster a society progresses, the more and different institutions it will require.

Jama’atul Mujahideen

for in Europe war had already become a science, whereas in places like India it was still sport.

Political Order in Changing Societies,

Nicholas J. Spykman notes that throughout history states have engaged in “circumferential and transmarine expansion” to gain control of adjacent seas:

James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan

Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, “Command of the Sea with Chinese Characteristics,”

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Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins, “Beijing’s Energy Security Strategy: The Significance of a Chine...