More Thoughts on Middle Eastern Borders

A few days ago, I posted my thoughts about this excellent article, which discusses the issue of Middle Eastern borders. As I've been doing some research to follow on from my dissertation, I remembered a recent graphic I'd seen in another article, and looked it up to share: "How 5 Countries Could Become 14"; the article is titled "Imagining a Remapped Middle East". The second article is sort of ridiculous for a number of reasons.

There's sort of a prevailing view, generally attributed to President Woodrow Wilson, that the solution to international conflicts is often to carve terrain up into independent states handed off primarily to independent ethnic groups. This is often pejoratively called "Balkanization", inspired by the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia into a sort of adversarial neighborhood of smaller, independent states. As a United States Senator, Vice President Biden even advocated for a "soft partition" - de facto independence - for Iraq's three major population groups. That original article points out some of the big problems with that concept, one of which is stated as follows:

"At best, creating more countries would have just meant more borders to fight over, while fewer large countries would have turned regular wars into civil ones."

To be fair, the New York Times article/graphic is attempting to report on what the author thinks might happen in the foreseeable future, rather than advocating for it. Even so, author Robin Wright (who's associated with the United States Institute of Peace and the Wilson Center - what did I say earlier about President Wilson's philosophy?) doesn't appear to have quite the grasp of history or politics that Nick Danforth (author of the first article) does. While I'd be tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt by presuming that she wasn't involved in the actual composition of the graphic, she unfortunately uses the phrases "Sunnistan" and "Shiitestan", which suggests that the graphic's use of the terms "Wahhabistan" and "Alawitestan" were also inspired by the author. Beyond the obvious problems with this idea that Nick Danforth discussed in that first article, the use of the "-stan" suffix. There's a reason why the only region in the quasi-Arab world whose name ends in "-stan" is "Kurdistan": because "-stan" is Indo-Persian, not Arabic, hence the countries of "Greater Persia" (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, et. al.) carrying that suffix. The fact that Ms. Wright uses this term betrays an ignorance of the region about which she's writing.

The whole thing reminds me of a challenge I had while working in the Middle East. In mid-February 2011, a marginalized portion of Kuwait's population began holding sporadic demonstrations in several locations in and around Kuwait City, and I was responsible for briefing my organization's leaders on these protests. This required me to educate them on the fact that there was, in fact, a difference between a "bidun/بدون‎", meaning "without nationality" - these were the folks who were protesting - and a "bedouin/بَدَوِي", meaning "nomad/wanderer". I found that despite having only recently arrived in the reason, I was very nearly the only person in the entire organization - some of these folks having been there for years who knew that there was a distinction.

The fact that more than a decade after 9/11, more than two decades after the Gulf War, more than three decades after the Islamic Revolution, the majority of military leaders and commentators on international affairs remain this clueless about fairly basic aspects of Middle Eastern affairs is pretty upsetting. It's unfortunate that an article this misinformed was actually published in the New York Times, which is meant to be America's journal of record.

Perhaps even more disconcerting is that this Wilsonian concept of partition and Balkanization is still considered a viable solution to international challenges. It's one of the reasons why I'm so skeptical about the prospect of Scotland becoming an independent state, as I've discussed elsewhere. This isn't to say that unification and integration are panaceas for those same challenges, but where integration is possible, it has tended to produce better results than the alternative. Some examples of this have been the Korean Peninsula, Yemen, and South Sudan, where fragmentation has produced adverse results; and Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Germany, where unification has produced positive results. (I personally think that there's a case to be made for taking pieces of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan to make an independent Balochistan and an independent Pashtunistan, but that's another discussion entirely.) Whenever possible, even when it's challenging, national and international risks tend to be better managed by working in concert than by working independently.