Redrawing the map of Afghanistan, Iran & Pakistan

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

ccun.org, December 6, 2008

 
The Global Trends 2025 report says the future of Pakistan is a wildcard in considering the trajectory of neighboring Afghanistan. The release of the study last week coincided with a report in the New York Times that a redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites, showing their country truncated. The New York story was about a New Middle East map published in 2006 by the US Air Force Journal along with an article of retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters titled: How a better Middle East would look? 
 
Peter says that Pakistan is an unnatural state and a natural Pakistan should lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi. Hence it would lose the Pathan territory of North West Frontier Province that will join their Afghan brethren. Pakistan would also lose its Baluch territory to the so-called Greater Baluchistan to be created by merging with the Iranian province of Baluchistan. (1)
 
The Global Trends 2025 report by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, has similar postulation. “If  Pakistan is unable to hold together until 2025, a broader coalescence of Pashtun tribes is likely to emerge and act together to erase the Durand Line,  maximizing Pashtun space at the expense of Punjabis in Pakistan and Tajiks and others in Afghanistan.” (Pak-Afghan border is called Durand Line.) (2)
 
Lieutenant-Colonel Peters and Thomas Fingar are perhaps revealing and putting forward what Washington D.C. and its strategic planners have anticipated for South Asia and the Middle East.
 
To borrow Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya the redrawn and restructured Middle East has been causally allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. (3)
 
It can be argued that redrawing the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Plateau and South Asia are part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda in the region.
 
Constructive chaos is the modus operandi to gradually achieve the objective. Constructive chaos is newly coined political jargon used to justify present upheaval for future benefit. This “constructive chaos” -- which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region -- is being used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.
 
Within this perspective, as Marwan Bishara says, Washington would already have achieved a strategic "success" while sowing "constructive chaos" in the region, stirring up the regimes, groups and competing ethnicities in arms against each other. The cynical desire to carry the war to the enemy consists, in fact, of destroying, dividing and reigning. Central governments are weakened by tensions and wars, undermining the sovereignty of states and paving the way to new more effective actors. (4)
 
The rapidly deteriorating situation in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – in the wake of frequent US missile attacks and Pakistan military’s operations against the militants – is eroding the writ of the central government. Not surprisingly, the US missile attacks are fomenting anti-US sentiments while Pakistan army operations are seen as army killing its own people at the behest of America. There is a general consensus among the masses as well as Pakistan’s political leadership (with the exception of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party that came into power with the US blessings) that the militancy should be resolved peacefully through negotiations.
 
Tellingly, FATA region, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, was peaceful before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It is not astonishing that the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, was bluntly asked by a group of parliamentarians meeting with him at the resident of US ambassador in Islamabad: ‘Why did you Americans come to Afghanistan when it was so peaceful, before you got there?’ 
 
The concluding paragraph of the New York story gives a deep insight into the thinking of most of the people in Pakistan: “Indeed, among ordinary Pakistanis, many still regard Al Qaeda more positively than the United States, polls find. Talk shows here often include arguments that the suicide bombings in Pakistan are payback for the Pakistani Army fighting an American war. Some commentators suggest that the United States is actually financing the Taliban. The point is to tie down the Pakistani Army, they say, leaving the way open for the Americans to grab Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Recently, in the officer’s mess in Bajaur, the northern tribal region where the Pakistani Army is tied down fighting the militants, one officer offered his own theory: Osama Bin Laden did not exist, he told a visiting journalist. Rather, he was a creation of the Americans, who needed an excuse to invade Afghanistan and encroach on Pakistan.” (5)

References:

1. How a better Middle East would look? By Lt. Col. Ralph Peters - Armed Forces Journal - June 2006

2. Global Trends 2025 by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis – November 21, 2008
 
3. Plans for Redrawing the Middle East By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya – Global Research, November 18, 2006
 
4. From asymmetric wars to "constructive chaos" By Marwan Bishara – Cubanow.net – December 18, 2006
 
5. Ringed by Foes, Pakistanis Fear the U.S., Too – New York Times - November 23, 2008
 
 Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com  E Mail: asghazali@gmail.com