India and Pakistan can agree on one thing, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World) — neither wants the other one around:
This is somewhat problematic, given that they share a 1,900-mile-long border. Each country fairly bristles with antagonism and nuclear weapons, so how they manage this unwanted relationship is a matter of life and death on a scale of tens of millions.
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.
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The two are tied together within the geography of the Indian subcontinent, which creates a natural frame. The Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea are respectively to the southeast, south, and southwest, the Hindu Kush to the northwest, and the Himalayas to the north.
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The interior of the frame contains what are modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. The latter two are impoverished landlocked nations dominated by their giant neighbors, China and India. Bangladesh’s problem is not that it lacks access to the sea but that the sea has too much access to Bangladesh: flooding from the waters of the Bay of Bengal constantly afflicts the low-lying territory. Its other geographical problem is that it is almost entirely surrounded by India: the 2,545-mile-long frontier, agreed to in 1974, wrapped India around Bangladesh, leaving it only a short border with Burma as an alternative land route to the outside world.
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The area within our frame, despite being relatively flat, has always been too large and diverse to have strong central rule. Even the British colonial overlords, with their famed bureaucracy and connecting rail system, allowed regional autonomy and indeed used it to play local leaders off against one another. 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.
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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.
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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 the long run, China would like to use Pakistan as a land route for its energy needs. This would allow it to bypass the Strait of Malacca, which as we saw in chapter two is a choke point that could strangle Chinese economic growth.
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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. Because both sides know that Baluchistan is likely to remain volatile, a security force of up to twenty-five thousand men is being formed to protect the zone.
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In effect, Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbor, India.
The first was in 1947, shortly after partition, and was fought over Kashmir, which in 1948 ended up divided along the Line of Control (also known as Asia’s Berlin Wall); however, both India and Pakistan continue to claim sovereignty.
Nearly twenty years later, Pakistan miscalculated the strength of the Indian military because of India’s poor performance in the 1962 India-China war. Tensions between India and China had risen due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, which in turn had led India to give refuge to the Dalai Lama. During this brief conflict the Chinese military showed their superiority and pushed forward almost into the state of Assam near the Indian heartland. The Pakistan military watched with glee, then, overestimating their own prowess, went to war with India in 1965 and lost.
In 1984, Pakistan and India fought skirmishes at an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet on the Siachen Glacier, thought to be the highest battle in history. More fighting broke out in 1985, 1987, and 1995. Pakistan continued to train militants to infiltrate across the Line of Control and another battle broke out over Kashmir in 1999. By then both countries were armed with nuclear weapons, and for several weeks the unspoken threat of an escalation to nuclear war hovered over the conflict before American diplomacy kicked in and the two sides were talked down. They came close to war again in 2001, and gunfire still breaks out sporadically along the border.
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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 ChinesePakistani relationship.
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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.
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Pakistan lacks internal “strategic depth”—somewhere to fall back to in the event of being overrun from the east—from India. 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. It can be done, and both sides have battle plans of how to fight there. The Indian army plan involves blockading the port of Karachi and its fuel storage depots by land and sea, but an easier invasion route is between the south and the north—it lies in the center, in the more hospitable Punjab, and in Punjab is Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. 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.
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The Afghan-Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line. Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the colonial government of India, drew it in 1893 and the then ruler of Afghanistan agreed to it. However, in 1949, the Afghan government “annulled” the agreement, believing it to be an artificial relic of the colonial era. Since then, Pakistan has tried to persuade Afghanistan to change its mind, Afghanistan refuses, and the Pashtuns on each side of the mountains try to carry on as they have for centuries by ignoring the border and maintaining their ancient connections.
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The Pakistan military and the ISI had to turn on the very Taliban leaders they had trained and formed friendships with in the 1990s. The Taliban groups reacted with fury, seizing complete control of several regions in the tribal areas. Musharraf was the target of three failed assassination attempts, his would-be successor, Benazir Bhutto, was murdered, and amid the chaos of bombing campaigns and military offensives, up to fifty thousand Pakistani civilians have been killed.
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The Americans came up with a “hammer and anvil” strategy. They would hammer the Afghan Taliban against the anvil of the Pakistani operation on the other side of the border. The “anvil” in the tribal areas turned out instead to be a sponge that soaked up whatever was thrown at it, including any Afghan Taliban retreating from the American hammer.
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So the Taliban bled the British, bled the Americans, bled NATO, waited NATO out, and after thirteen years NATO went away.
Border between USSR and China in 1969-1991 was 7,500 km long, and even now is 4,209 km (per internetz). Granted, USSR had lots of old tanks to reuse in fortifications. But building of helicopters started pretty much from scratch in reaction to falling out with China.
Gunfire just breaks out on its out. Clearly, ManBearPig is to blame.
There may be some sort of an elephant in that room.