Prisoners of Geography

by Tim Marshall

  • The Taliban campaign continues to hasten the fracturing of Pakistan until it becomes a failed state.

  • The Americans lose interest, the pressure on Islamabad relents and the government compromises with the Taliban. The situation returns to normal, with the North West Frontier left alone but Pakistan continuing to push its agenda in Afghanistan.

  Of these scenarios, the least likely is the first. No foreign force has ever defeated the tribes of the North West Frontier, and a Pakistani army containing Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and Kashmiris (and some Pashtun) is considered a foreign force once it moves into the tribal areas.

  Scenario two is possible but, after being deaf to years of wake-up calls, the Taliban’s 2014 massacre of 132 schoolchildren in Peshawar does seem to have jolted enough of the Pakistani establishment to make it realise that the movement it helped to create might now destroy it.

  This makes scenario three the most likely. The Americans have limited interest in Afghanistan so long as the Taliban quietly promise not to host an international jihadist group again. The Pakistanis will maintain enough links with the Afghan Talibs to ensure that governments in Kabul will listen to Islamabad and not cosy up to India, and once the pressure is off they can do a deal with the Pakistani Taliban.

  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 honouring guests, thus refusing to give them up when the Americans came calling. In the event, after a decade and half of fighting, the situation remains so bad that the US government has had to reverse policy and keep thousands more troops than it had planned in Afghanistan.

  As for India, it can multi-task – indeed it has to, given that it has more to think about than only Pakistan, even if it is the number one foreign policy priority for New Delhi. Having a hostile nuclear-armed state next door is bound to focus the mind, but India also has to concentrate on managing 1.3 billion people whilst 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 one another along what the CIA World Factbook lists as 1,652 miles of border.

  There are issues which cause friction, chief among them Tibet, the highest region on earth. 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.

  India’s response to the Chinese annexation of Tibet was to give a home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement in Dharamshala in the state of Himachal Pradesh. This is a long-term insurance policy, paid for by India but without the expectation that it will ever be cashed in. As things stand Tibetan independence looks impossible; but if the impossible were to occur, even in several decades’ time, India would be in a position to remind a Tibetan government who their friends were during the years of exile.

  The Chinese understand that this scenario is extremely unlikely, but remain irritated by Dharamshala. Their response is seen in Nepal, where Beijing ensures it has influence with the Maoist movement there.

  India does not want to see a Maoist-dominated Nepal ultimately controlled by China, but knows that Beijing’s money and trade is buying influence there. China may care little for Maoism these days, but it cares enough about Tibet to signal to India that it too can afford the payments on a long-term insurance policy. Any ‘interference’ in Tibet can be met with ‘interference’ in Nepal. The more India has to concentrate on the smaller states in its neighbourhood, the less it can concentrate on China.

  Another issue between them is the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as ‘South Tibet’. As China’s confidence grows, so does the amount of territory there it says is Chinese. Until recently China only claimed the Tawang area in the extreme west of the state. However, in the early 2000s Beijing decided that all of Arunachal Pradesh was Chinese, which was news to the Indians who have exercised sovereignty over it since 1955. The Chinese claim is partly geographical and partly psychological. Arunachal Pradesh borders China, Bhutan and Burma, making it strategically useful, but the issue is also valuable to China as a reminder to Tibet that independence is a non-starter.

  That is a message India also has to send periodically to several of its own regions. There are numerous separatist movements, some more active than others, some dormant, but none that look set to achieve their aims. For example, the Sikh movement to create a state for Sikhs out of part of both Indian and Pakistani Punjab has for the moment gone quiet, but 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 per cent of the population are Baptist; however, the prospect of the Nagaland National Council achieving its aims is as remote as the land it seeks to control, and that looks to be true of all of the separatist movements.

  Despite these, and other, groups seeking independence, a Sikh population of 21 million people and a Muslim minority of perhaps 170 million, India retains a strong sense of itself and unity within diversity. This will help as it emerges further onto the world stage.

  The world has so marvelled at China’s stunning rise to power that its neighbour is often overlooked, but 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 9,000 miles of internal navigable waterways, reliable water supplies and huge areas of arable land, is a major coal producer and has useful quantities of oil and gas, even if it will always be an importer of all three, and its subsidisation 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.

  For thousands of years the regions of what are now modern-day China and India could ignore each other because of their terrain. 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 one another.

  Twenty-five years ago India embarked on a ‘look east’ policy, partially as a block to what it could see would be the imminent rise of China. It has ‘taken care of business’ by dramatically increasing trade with China (mostly imports) while simultaneously forging strategic relationships in what China regards as its own backyard.

  India has strengthened its ties with Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand, but more importantly it is working with Vietnam and Japan to check China’s increasing domination of the South China Sea.

  In this it has a new ally, albeit one it keeps at arm’s length – the United States. For decades India was suspicious that the Americans were the new British, but with a different accent and more money. In the twenty-first century a more confident India, in an increasingly multipolar world, has found reason to co-operate with the USA. When President Obama attended the 2015 Indian Republic Day military parade, New Delhi took care to show off its shiny new US-supplied C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster transport aircr
aft as well as its Russian-supplied tanks. The two giant democracies are slowly moving closer together.

  India has a large, well-equipped modern navy which includes an aircraft carrier, but it will not be able to compete with the massive Blue Water navy which China is planning. Instead India is aligning itself with other interested parties so they can together at least shadow, if not dominate, the Chinese navy as it sails the China seas, through the Strait of Malacca, past the Bay of Bengal and around the tip of India into the Arabian Sea towards the friendly port China has built at Gwadar in Pakistan.

  With India, it always comes back to Pakistan, and with Pakistan, to India.

  CHAPTER 8

  KOREA AND JAPAN

  ‘I . . . began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong-il being the “Oh Dear Leader”, but it died on my lips.’

  Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

  HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA? YOU DON’T, you just manage it – after all, there’s a lot of other stuff going on around the world which needs immediate attention.

  The whole of the region from Malaysia up to the Russian port of Vladivostok eyes the North/South Korea problem nervously. All the neighbours 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. The Americans don’t really want to fight for the South Koreans, but nor can they afford to be seen to be giving up on a friend. The Japanese, with their long history of involvement in the Korean Peninsula, must be seen to tread lightly, knowing that whatever happens will probably involve them.

  The solution is compromise, but there is limited appetite for that in South Korea, and none at all displayed by the leadership of the North. The way forward is not at all clear; it seems as if it is always just out of sight over the horizon.

  For several years the USA and Cuba danced quietly around each other, dropping hints that they would like to tango without tangling, leading to the breakthrough in re-establishing diplomatic relations in July 2015. North Korea, on the other hand, glares at any requests from would-be suitors to take the floor, occasionally pulling faces.

  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. The USA, anxious that a military withdrawal would send out the wrong signal and embolden North Korean adventurism, continues to station almost 30,000 troops in South Korea, and the South, with mixed feelings about risking its prosperity, continues to do little to advance reunification.

  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. If North Korea implodes, it might well also explode, projecting instability across the borders in the form of war, terrorism and/or a flood of refugees, and so the actors are stuck. And so the solution is left to the next generation of leaders, and then the next one.

  If world leaders even speak openly about preparing for the day when North Korea collapses, they risk hastening that day; and as no one has planned for it – best keep quiet. Catch-22.

  North Korea continues to play the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect. Its foreign policy consists, essentially, of being suspicious of everyone except the Chinese, and even Beijing is not to be fully trusted despite supplying 84.12 per cent of North Korea’s imports and buying 84.48 per cent of its exports, according to 2014 figures by the Observatory of Economic Complexity. North Korea puts a lot of effort into playing all outsiders off against each other, including the Chinese, in order to block a united front against it.

  To its captive population it says it is a strong, munificent, magnificent state standing up against all the odds and against the evil foreigners, calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It has a unique political philosophy of ‘Juche’, which blends fierce nationalism with Communism and national self-reliance.

  In reality, it is the least democratic state in the world: it is not run for the people and it is not a republic. It is a dynasty shared by one family and one party. It also ticks every box in the dictatorship test: arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption and a litany of horrors on a scale without parallel in the twenty-first century. Satellite images and witness testimony suggest that at least 150,000 political prisoners are held in giant work and ‘re-education’ camps. North Korea is a stain on the world’s conscience, and yet few people know the full scale of the horrors taking place there.

  News stories about purged members of the elite being executed with an anti-aircraft gun or fed to a pack of starving dogs have never been confirmed. However, true or not, there is little doubt about the litany of horrors perpetrated by the dictatorship upon the people. Total state control has resulted in beatings, torture, prison camps and extrajudicial murder.

  Such is the self-imposed isolation of the country, and the state’s almost total control of knowledge, that we can only guess at what the people may feel about their country, system and leaders and whether they support the regime. Analysing what is going on politically, and why, is akin to looking through an opaque window whilst wearing sunglasses. A former ambassador to Pyongyang once told me: ‘It’s like you are on one side of the glass, and you try to prise it open, but there’s nothing to get a grip on to peer inside.’

  The founding story of Korea is that it was created in 2333 BCE by heavenly design. The Lord of Heaven sent his son Hwanung down to earth, where he descended to the Paektu (Baekdu) Mountain and married a woman who used to be a bear, and their son Dangun went on to engage in an early example of nation-building.

  The earliest recorded version of this creation legend dates from the thirteenth century. It may in some ways explain why a Communist state has a leadership that is passed down through one family and given divine status. For example, Kim Jong-il was described by the Pyongyang propaganda machine as ‘Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have’, ‘Guiding Sun Ray’, ‘Shining Star of Paektu Mountain’, ‘World Leader of the twenty-first century’ and ‘Great Man who descended from heaven’, as well as ‘Eternal Bosom of Hot Love’. His father had very similar titles, as does his son.

  How does the general population feel about such statements? Even the experts are left guessing. When you look at footage of the mass hysteria of North Koreans mourning Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011, it’s interesting to note that after the first few rows of sobbing, shrieking people the level of grief appears to diminish. Is this because those at the front know the camera is on them and thus for their own safety they must do what is required? Or have the Party faithful been put at the front? Or are they ordinary people who are genuinely grief-stricken, a North Korean magnification of the sort of emotional outbursts we saw in the UK after the death of Princess Diana?

  Nevertheless, the DPRK is still pulling off the crazy-dangerous, weak-dangerous act. It’s quite a trick, and its roots lie partially in Korea’s location and history, trapped as it is between the giants of China and Japan.

  The name ‘The Hermit Kingdom’ was earned by Korea in the eighteenth century after it attempted to isolate itself following centuries of being a target for domination, occupation and plunder, or occasionally simply a route on the way to somewhere else. If you come from the north, then once you are over the Yalu River there are few major natural defensive lines all the way down to the sea, and if you can land from the sea the reverse is true. The Mongols came and went, as did the C
hinese Ming dynasty, the Manchurians and the Japanese several times. So for a while the country preferred not to engage with the outside world, cutting many of its trade links in the hope that it would be left alone.

  It was not successful. In the twentieth century the Japanese were back, annexing the whole country in 1910, and later set about destroying its culture. The Korean language was banned, as was the teaching of Korean history, and worship at Shinto shrines became compulsory. The decades of repression have left a legacy which even today impacts on relations between Japan and both the Korean states.

  The defeat of Japan in 1945 left Korea divided along the 38th parallel. North of it was a Communist regime overseen first by the Soviets and later by Communist China, south of the line was a pro-American dictatorship called the Republic of Korea (ROK). This was the very beginning of the Cold War era when every inch of land was contested, with each side looking to establish influence or control around the world, unwilling to let the other maintain a sole presence.

  The choice of the 38th parallel as the line of division was unfortunate in many ways and, according to the American historian Don Oberdorfer, arbitrary. He says that Washington was so focused on the Japanese surrender on 10 August 1945 that it had no real strategy for Korea. With Soviet troops on the move in the north of the peninsula and the White House convening an all-night emergency meeting, two junior officers, armed only with a National Geographic map, chose the 38th parallel as a place to suggest to the Soviets they halt, on the grounds that it was halfway down the country. One of those officers was Dean Rusk, who would go on to be Secretary of State under President Truman during the Korean War.

  No Koreans were present, nor any Korea experts. If they had been they could have told President Truman and his then Secretary of State James Francis Byrnes that the line was the same one as the Russians and Japanese had discussed for spheres of influence half a century earlier, following the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–5. Moscow, not knowing that the Americans were making up policy on the hoof, could be forgiven for thinking this was the USA’s de facto recognition of that suggestion and therefore acceptance of division and a Communist north. The deal was done, the nation divided and the die cast.