http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8041364.stm

- This could very will prove the success or collapse of the Pakistani state.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8046577.stm

- An extremely good cartographic representation as to why this campaign is important for more than just the survival of Pakistan.

Interesting. push them west then southwest back into Bajur and the FATA's. that would be a very nice set up to taking the Kybur pass and the highway back into non-nutcase pakistan and cutting the Taliban areas in two.

If only there was an experianced and highly capable military near by building up it's troop strength who could lend a hand when the time comes to cut the Taleban in two.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8046577.stm

- An extremely good cartographic representation as to why this campaign is important for more than just the survival of Pakistan.


Nice piece. It will take a concerted effort to eliminate the Taliban and AQ from their comfort zones. The moral question is whether or not the governments involved are willing to take the necessary actions with so many civilians in the theater of operations.

The problem with the NW Frontier is that it ignores history. The entire area of Pakistan that gets called "northwest frontier" is due to England forging a treaty with Afghanistan called the Durand Line. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/afghan_paki_border_rel88.jpg
The blue area inside the current border of Pakistan is Afghanistan's traditional borders.

No Afghan government, including the one that allegedly siged the treaty has recognized it as legitimate. The government that allegedly signed it claimed that the signatures were forged. The British presented a signed document with the person of King Abdul Rahman Khan in 1893 referring to the borders between Afghanistan and British India. This document was in English and the person of Abdul Rahman Khan did not understand the English language, therefore leads the suspicious nature of forgery and or false documentation. The Dari or Pashto translation of this document or agreement has never been signed by Amir Abdul Rahman Khan, suggesting that he nullified this agreement. But the following researchers have provided arguments to the contrary that this document was signed and has expired. in either scenario, the Durand line does not exist today and the agreement was nullified the day it was written. Source (http://afghanland.com/history/durrand.html)

Balochistan is currently engaged in an armed struggle for independance from Pakistan. The Karachi government has been suppressing this uprising for years. At one time in the previous White House administration, money and arms were supplied to Balochi separatists in order to destabilize Iran - as the Balochi tribes straddle the border between Iran and Pakistan. Other than a few token terrorist actions in SE Iran, the Balochi separatists learned that Pakistan was a much softer target and those weapons and money ended up getting used to destabilize Pakistan.
http://www.theatlantic.com/images/issues/200905/pakistan-map.jpg
The greenish area is where significant amounts of Balochi people live.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/kaplan-pakistan

China is helping to build a large port facility in Gwadar. And to do so, they're throwing out all the locals, even stealing the land from the people that live there.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6469725.stm
http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/india-alarmed-as-chinese-built-gwadar-port-of-pakistan-becomes-operational/
http://gmcmissing.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/radicalised-balochi-culture-in-the-wake-of-conflict/
http://balochrise.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4024
http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2004/12/challenges-to-baloch-resistance.html
In June 2008, The Herald, a respected Karachi-based investigative magazine, published a cover story, “The Great Land Robbery,” alleging that the Gwadar project had “led to one of the biggest land scams in Pakistan’s history.” The magazine detailed a system in which revenue clerks had been bribed by elites to register land in their names; the land was then resold at rock-bottom prices to developers from Karachi, Lahore, and other major cities for residential and industrial schemes. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land were said to have been illegally allotted to civilian and military bureaucrats living elsewhere. In this way, the poor and uneducated Baluch population had been shut out of Gwadar’s future prosperity. And so, Gwadar became a lightning rod for Baluch hatred of Punjabi-ruled Pakistan. Indeed, Gwadar’s very promise as an Indian Ocean–Central Asian hub threatened to sunder the country. Source (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/kaplan-pakistan)

My point in all this? Pakistan is a fucked up place. There are 2 separate independance movements going on: we're pretending that one doesn't exist and that the other one is a bunch of al qeda terrorists. A closer analogy about the NW territories would be Northern Ireland or South Ossetia - where the official government won't let the people rejoin their historical territory, because the government wants the land.

*rubs hands together* this is my area of history!!

'The problem with the NW Frontier is that it ignores history. The entire area of Pakistan that gets called "northwest frontier" is due to England forging a treaty with Afghanistan called the Durand Line.'

- Well, no, not really. Duran's survey and subsequent treaty which demarcated the existing 'no-mans land' between the Afghan kingdom and the British Indian province of the Punjab really altered little, except perhaps to ease tensions between the two powers at a time of heightened Russian intrigue in the Pamirs and on Afghanistan's northern frontier. Durand was an experienced diplomat, and had great experience with the tribal borders. His father was even the engineer that blew up the gates of Ghazni in the First Afghan War. Durand snr was an experienced diplomat and foreign secretary of the Indian Government. He was the actual person that broke the news of the Russian capture of Pandjeh to the Amir himself (but I digress, though for a great narrative of all this, Hopkirk's 'The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia' is a cracking read). Anywho... Your source is incorrect, Abdur Rahman only agreed to a new boundary in 1893, the actual treaty did not take place until 1896. The 'Line' had been *jointly* surveyed for as long as two years and took stock of the actual situation and reality of enforcement when it drew up a boundary. Anywhere south of Peshawar was hardly going to be handed over to the Amir, who could barely control his back-yard. The line was arbitrary, took account of compromises, and of course at the expense of tribal ethnicity, as much imperialism did. But you have to remember two things: the tribes were semi-nomadic, so boundaries meant little, and it was primarily based on where political influence had rooted (Afghan presence outside of Kabul was fragmentary and non-existent south of Peshawar, it would have been naieve and dangerous to assign a large portion of the Pashtu tribes to the Amir, for example, if little could be done to control them). Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, then created the North West Frontier Province in 1902, previously it had not existed. The area was a warring, raiding, loose patchwork of tribal states, a no-mans land. The British created political reality, administered justice, indemnities and, more importantly, conducted military operations, much of which was the sign of sovereignity and power in a land of shifting loyalties and violent raiding.

Previously, Afghanistan had no defined, legal border, and there had not been one for a millenium. The king's of Afghanistan had ancient claims on vast swaths of the area, as far south as Sind (in what is now south Pakistan). The Amir's of Sind (independent cluster of warlords who composed the state of Sind before its annexation in 1843) had never recognised Afghan overlordship, based as it was on fanciful claims from as long ago as 500 years. In Waziristan, the Chitral, Pashtu country and Peshawar, Afghan claims had not been enforced for over a century. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab in the first half of the nineteenth century, had annexed both Peshawar and much of Bannu (Pashtu country) in the 1840s to his own state. This was a legitimate conflict, ended by a mutual peace treaty, which transfered these territories to a state which forms much of present day Pakistan. Let us not forget, that until British arms restored it to her, Afghanistan was not even in control of her own territory, most notably Herat, it what forms today Helmand Province, which was controlled by an independent warlord who remained so through much of the nineteenth century! My point? Afghanistan spent several centuries as a weak and decentralised state, its claims of surrounding territory reaching back to the conquests of Babur and the creation of the Mughal Empire! You cannot blame the Durand Line for fucking Afghan in the arse and creating a mess in Pakistan. It's just modern, post-nationalist bullcrap. A revisionist age of anti-colonial remonstrances, mixed up with poor facts and angry opinions. Most people want an easy way out for the mess of today in blaming European imperialism, and in the case of South-East Asia, the British Empire. Unfortunately, it's not so simple. The British very rarely constructed entirely new systems of power, society or political authority. It was usually an adoptation of native structures, either maniuplated into the colonial system or legitamised and allowed to continue with great autonomy. The same can be said of a colonial, political construction such as the Durand Line. Yes, a British imperial agent executed it, but it was based upon the political realities existing on the tribal north-western territories, built upon the reports and correspondence of several vitally important Agents to the Governor-General operating within the tribal territories, such as Robert Sandeman, who had done for fifteen-twenty years, and knew the culture, customs, and anthropological systems of the Pashtu tribes in the north and the Baluchi states in the south.
This appears to be what's happening in the above post. Afghans/Pakistanis are pissed at a century-old treaty, denies its authenticity and blames British imperialism for trouble in the region. The argument here is based on territorial claims centuries old and never realised, and a political boundary which sometimes deviates at least 15 miles from ethnic realities (!!!) in a land of semi-nomadic tribes! It's a joke, really.

'A closer analogy about the NW territories would be Northern Ireland or South Ossetia - where the official government won't let the people rejoin their historical territory, because the government wants the land.'

- That is, beyond any doubt, a terrible, terrible comparison.

.
the conquests of Babur


At first glance at Halo's post, this caught my eye and I was immediately seeing an elephant in fine clothing and crown leading his armies to battle. :p

What other Babur would I be talking about?! :P