by Parag Khanna
The only way to provide economic lifelines is through shared governance and by building infrastructure. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development is focusing on channeling foreign direct investment into cross-border transportation, agriculture, electricity, and manufacturing, while the Pan-Africa Infrastructure Development Fund finances dams, highways, and airports in western and sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, the East African nations of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have teamed up to appeal for foreign investment through a common board. Virgin Nigeria and Kenya’s Flamingo Airlines are starting to build regional airline networks. Bringing in professional partners and demanding private-sector partners is perhaps the only way to noticeably improve the efficiency of these infrastructure projects while decreasing corruption. Furthermore, just about every sub-Saharan African border should be turned into a trans-boundary conservation park jointly managed by sustainable tourism agencies and tax authorities. Their collective motto should be “make safari, not war.” Africa will achieve a broad renaissance only if its many micro-economies fuse into just a few.
Facts on the Ground: The Middle East
The artificial confines of the state have always been uncomfortable for Arabs, who once presided over mighty caliphates that fostered prosperous relations among the great cities of Cairo, Baghdad, and others. The post-Ottoman Arab world has suffered particular cartographic trauma ever since the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, in which the British and French divided up Arabic-speaking nations. European powers backed monarchies and dictatorships across the Persian Gulf and Levant and midwifed the creation of Israel in 1948. America then took over Europe’s role, pushing a two-track policy of protecting Israel and the flow of oil. Egypt became an anchor of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, but the lack of progress since the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement sank Egypt’s credibility. The Arab world does not need a dominant hub to regain its unity. It needs a remapping of Palestine, stability in Iraq, and a rehabilitation of the Ottoman infrastructure that once made the region a proud global passageway.
When territorial disputes are left unresolved, children grow up in the shadow of barricades and barbed-wire fences and are raised on venomous myths about their neighbors. Many of Egypt’s youth now want to reverse the 1979 deal they were never involved in, and they call for suspending ties and cutting off gas exports to Israel. Syrian and Israeli youth bicker on Facebook over the status of the Golan Heights. Which generation will actually put an end to escalating cycles of resentment and violence? One diplomatic axiom holds that the “triumph is in the timing.” But when will the timing be right? In democratic Israel, leaders avoid moving too quickly toward peace for fear of being labeled sellouts. It won’t contemplate allowing any formula on the right of return until all Palestinian survivors of 1948 have died. In autocratic Arab countries, anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiments are crucial to political legitimacy. If we’re waiting on Arab democracy for this to change, then the Arab-Israeli conflict may indeed go on forever.
From Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” to this past decade’s “road map,” no conflict has been awarded more Nobel Peace Prizes for the lack of peace, nor has the word “durable” been used more often to describe a “settlement” that is anything but settled. The 2001 Taba talks were the closest to a comprehensive settlement, but the elections of U.S. president George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon in Israel put that process on ice. Western policy since then has been an incoherent mess. The “Quartet” group was meant to marry the “power of the U.S., money of the EU, and legitimacy of the UN,” but for most of the past decade has barely managed to conceal its internal differences. The United States backs Israel and provides assistance to Palestinians, but not as much as the European Union, which has a trade accord with Israel despite numerous European corporate boycotts. Russia has crucial demographic and economic stakes in Israel and thus pursues its own course while courting Hamas leaders to snub the United States. The theatrics of diplomacy create the illusion of progress through measures meant to generate momentum like in a stock market rally: In the waning days of the Bush administration, a UN Security Council resolution simply re-re-re-re-re-affirming the importance of the Mideast peace process was considered a breakthrough. But when the gap between what diplomats say and what nations or groups do becomes too vast, diplomacy loses all credibility; it becomes nothing more than an exercise in professional self-preservation.
After about a half-dozen Arab-Israeli wars, multiple intifadas, innumerable suicide bombings in cafés and buses, the construction of a massive barrier-wall encasing much of the West Bank, assassinations of Hamas leaders, kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, and the invasion of Gaza, support for an independent Palestinian state has grown worldwide and even within Israel itself. If the new yardstick is the creation of a formally independent and internationally recognized Palestinian state, then words and deeds on all sides should be judged by whether they promote or hinder it.
There is nothing wrong with the sentiment of the 1970s “land for peace” proposals. They are simple, sensible, and measurable—and they hold the only way out of the deadlock over who will recognize whom. Israel would withdraw all but a few settlements from the West Bank, allow some right of return for refugees that is arbitrated by a joint council, and give Palestinians full access to East Jerusalem and the right to hang a flag there even as Ramallah remains Palestine’s administrative center. All this would be backed by a simultaneous mutual recognition among Arab states, Israel, and a Palestinian state. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for this new state to be demilitarized, a demand Arabs reject—but one that points to the likelihood that an independent Palestinian state could seek the sovereign assistance of Egypt and Jordan to guarantee the security of Gaza and the West Bank and develop professional security forces to replace the armed Hamas leadership. Saudi Arabia and other Arab states and foreign investors might then more confidently invest in Palestinian infrastructure, particularly an “arc” of road and rail links connecting the West Bank and Gaza, where a commercial port could boost Palestinian trade. Independence without infrastructure is futile.
Clarifying territorial boundaries is not the path to higher walls, but to better neighbors. The deeper internationalization of the region—even the gradual restoration of an Ottoman-like, borderless coexistence—proceeds after each has achieved respected sovereignty, not before. The opening of the Shebaa Farms and Golan Heights as regional tourist centers and vineyards, for example, would reassure no one until the fundamental security dilemma is overcome. The road to Jerusalem runs through Jerusalem—and it needs to have signs in Hebrew and Arabic.
The deeper regionalism that can genuinely settle the Middle East also requires a resolution to Kurdistan. The post–World War I Versailles Treaty recognized the rights of the Kurds to statehood, but today the Kurds recount a saying for the centuries of empty promises of self-rule they have endured: “My one hand is empty and in the other there is nothing.”
Sometimes one country has to die for another to be born. A century after Versailles, with neither Saddam’s brutality nor the American military holding Iraq together anymore, Iraq’s low-level intra-Arab civil war is giving the Kurds their chance to fulfill the promise of post-Ottoman statehood. The country is slowly moving from perpetually unstable Lebanon-ization to more permanently divided Balkanization. The Kurdistan variant of “land for peace” is being called “oil for soil”: Kurdistan could defer its total claim over the oil-rich and Kurdish populated Kirkuk in exchange for security guarantees and the right to substantial profits. Another option is to cede Kirkuk to Kurdistan—but since Kurdistan is landlocked, it would have to share revenues fairly with Baghdad, lest the rump Iraqi government spike taxes on Kurdistan for exporting through its territory (which Kurdistan’s other neighbors, including Syria and Turkey, could do as well). Through such territorial compromises, the Mideast may graduate from mutually assured destruction to mutual assurances—and use its armies to guard pipelines instead of borders.
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br /> Arabs want to restore the glory they enjoyed during the European Middle Ages, and they actually have the wealth to do so. But even more pointless territorial disputes stand in the way of regional integration. Iran and the United Arab Emirates continue to dispute three tiny Persian Gulf islands, while Saudi Arabia has disputed borders with all its Gulf neighbors. Despite being overwhelmingly larger than all of them, it has nonetheless taken land from them and raised customs duties at the borders, hampering the very useful movement toward a Gulf currency union. It should instead focus on financing the proposed high-speed rail link connecting all the Gulf Arab states from Kuwait through Saudi Arabia all the way to Oman. Even grander plans to restore the fabled Hejaz railway from Istanbul via Damascus to Medina—which also had a branch to Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea—won’t get traction until territorial spats are solved. Colonialism is no longer an excuse: They have only themselves to blame.
Facts on the Ground: South-Central Asia
The largest military occupation in the world is neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan but in Kashmir, where more than twice the maximum number of troops serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan combined (over six hundred thousand) is deployed in what so many poets and travelers have ironically referred to as a Himalayan paradise. The 1947 Partition of India and creation of Pakistan was one of the bloodiest national births in history, with more than one million people killed during the Hindu-Muslim population exchange. Over the decades since, India has ignored UN resolutions calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir, while Pakistani-backed terrorist groups and three cross-border wars have justified India’s intransigence. But today neither India nor Pakistan can afford the status quo in Kashmir given how damaging and costly it is to both sides—and most of all to Kashmiris. Since 1990 alone, more than fifty thousand people have been killed in Kashmir violence, far greater than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One major weekly Indian magazine in Delhi recently proclaimed on its cover: “Do we need Kashmir?”
India and Pakistan have consistently pursued secret negotiations over Kashmir, and in recent years even publicly claimed to be close to an agreement that would more liberally open the Kashmir border on both sides—as briefly happened after the devastating earthquake of 2005, when the border was opened to deliver relief to Pakistan’s side, known as Azad Kashmir. But the ouster of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 by the Pakistan-based Islamist militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba emptied that reserve of goodwill. With Pakistan in turmoil, however, India has the crucial window not to seize Kashmir, but rather to draw down its troops, a move that would allow Pakistan to refocus its military—two-thirds of which sits on India’s border—on the country’s Afghan border, where it is needed most. This is what India also needs most: to shift its approach to Kashmir the way China has recently won over Taiwan—by buying its loyalty. Indian leaders cannot countenance independence for Kashmir (which Kashmiris themselves are uncertain about), but they can fulfill decades-old pledges for economic rehabilitation and genuine autonomous self-governance. This would be even more feasible if both India and Pakistan would declare the so-called Line of Control the official border before pursuing more goodwill missions across it. Opening official borders in the long term means more than unofficial ones in the short term.
The Pashtun territory straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan presents an even greater headache to south-central Asia’s political geography. Straddled between the Indus River and Hindu Kush mountains, the Pashtun region is not a barrier between the more “natural” states of Afghanistan and Pakistan—the former created as a buffer and the latter in haste—rather, it is the cultural bridge between Persian and Indian civilizations. In the 1960s and ’70s, Pakistan’s urban class would cruise on scenic drives for shopping and picnic lunches from Pakistan’s Peshawar to Jalalabad in Afghanistan. But the Soviet invasion, the rise of the anti-Soviet mujahideen, the Afghan refugee crisis, and overpopulation have changed all that. In the past three decades, Pakistan’s population has nearly tripled to 170 million people. Peshawar today is a place from which even Pashtuns now flee for safety from the Taliban—and some even flee into Afghanistan rather than elsewhere in Pakistan. In 2009, President Zardari declared that his country was “in a fight for our very survival.”
It says a lot that the institution that Pakistan (and the United States) relies on most to fight the Taliban is the antiquated, British-colonial-created Frontier Corps. Since 9/11, American policy has declared its priority to be Afghanistan, then Pakistan, and now hyphenates them. But the trouble with defining the “Af-Pak” situation according to existing borders is that it eludes the real problem. Pakistan has two arbitrary borders containing it—the Radcliffe Line as its Indian border and the Durand Line as its Afghan border. The latter divides the Pashtun people across both countries. While Afghanistan is majority Pashtun, there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s largest city and commercial hub of Karachi is also its largest Pashtun city. Even by 2009–10, there was still waffling about whether Afghanistan or Pakistan is America’s “main focus”—but in Pashtunistan they bleed together indistinguishably.
The Pashtun way of life has perennially mocked this border, and the Taliban’s exploitation of it has equally embarrassed Western policy. Both the anti-Soviet mujahideen and the Taliban were homegrown in the madrassas and refugee camps of Pakistan’s tribal areas and pushed into Afghanistan. After 9/11, America’s invasion pushed the Taliban—and al-Qaeda—back over the “border.” Each drone attack in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas has dispersed both Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership deeper into Pakistan, particularly into the restive province of Baluchistan. To contain them would require a pincer move coordinated and timed from both sides; instead American policy has treated the area like a balloon: squeezing on one side simply to inflate on the other.
But Pakistan has enough problems already. Afghanistan is a broken country, but not breaking apart. Pakistan, meanwhile, has actual separatist movements. Decades of alternating civilian and military misrule have led to a situation of mutual hostility among Pakistan’s Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns, and Baluchis—and a parallel mutual hostility among the military, Islamist groups, and civilian elites. In the absence of any delivery of development or justice, the Taliban and various Islamist militant groups and charities became important social service providers, not just in the border areas but also in Karachi and even deep in the Punjabi heartland. The Pakistani military’s renewed operations have created another refugee crisis, which is fertile ground for recruitment by Islamist militias. Pakistanis today often say that this is “not their war,” but it has become a war over their country. Many of them now think of the “real” Pakistan as that of Sind and Punjab—provinces east of the Indus River—rather than Pukhtunkhwa and Baluchistan, which lay west of it.
If Pakistanis themselves have given up hope of taming the frontier, why do we still treat the countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan as if they are superior to the Pashtun people? And even if Pakistan’s many factions—the army, Inter-Services Intelligence, political parties, judges, tribal maliks, and Islamist movements—come together in a new national consensus, what can they actually offer to the alienated and assaulted Pashtuns of the frontier? Solidifying the Durand Line is a historically and geologically futile mission, and foreign occupation—including that by the Pakistani state—is largely unwelcome: NATO and Pakistani forces are battling far more local Pashtun nationalist movements than any unified Taliban, and bribing them will only harden their sense of independence.
But Pashtunistan does not have to devolve into another Somalia. Rather than suppress Pashtun autonomy, Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s state-building projects should do the exact opposite. Active support for the revival of Pashtun self-governance is the only local antidote to a resurgent and radical Taliban. Pashtun tribes have been negotiating with outsiders for centuries: Talking with them is, if anything, more important than talking with the corrup
t capitals of Kabul and Islamabad. A Pashtunistan legislature representing districts on both sides of the Durand Line could be created, and the Taliban, like the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, could be compelled to accept politics over jihad. Like Kurdistan and Kashmir, Pashtunistan may not become a sovereign country, but clearer autonomy carries clearer responsibilities for self-policing. The Pashtuns are a more honorable people to trust with their own security than the governments who claim to speak in their name.
Pashtunistan and Baluchistan are, like Kurdistan, potentially vital transit corridors for new oil-slicked Silk Roads. Rather than no-man’s-land no-go zones, they can be bridges for the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India and Iran-Pakistan-India natural gas pipelines. Putting the resources of an energy-rich region in the service of its energy-starved people is the best way to ensure economic development and cross-border cooperation. Pipelines are the lines on the map that central Asia needs the most.
There are still dozens of nations in need of states—many should have them. An impatient generation that has known only political suppression and legal limbo doesn’t want to live in statelessness forever. Suppressing the fundamental desires of people isn’t a strong or bold strategy but rather a weak and timid one. Peace agreements require concessions on both sides, and territory is the most meaningful concession that can be made. Talk of “containing spillover” is hardly an ambitious conflict-resolution strategy. A shock-therapy approach of fixing fairer borders and empowering regional organizations to manage them will bring stability much more quickly.
