Wednesday, September 06, 2006

C.RajaMohan Comments on Redrawing of the Middle East Boundaries Article

Thinking the Unthinkable: A new map for Middle East and Pakistan!
C Raja Mohan in the Indian Express, 6 September 2006


Available at http://www.indianexpress.com/story/12072.html

As Pakistan raises the decibel level in accusing India of supporting the Baloch insurgency, the idea of a “Free Balochistan” is beginning to gain ground, if only in the American academic circles

A recent article in the US Armed Forces Journal has called for a fundamental restructuring of state boundaries in the Middle East and South West Asia, including Pakistan.


Amidst mounting American troubles in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea of redrawing the map of the so-called Greater Middle East appears to have gained some intellectual traction. In that new map, for now a think tank fantasy, Pakistan will be among the biggest losers.

Outlining a potential new territorial arrangement between the Mediterranean sea and the Indus river, Ralph Peters suggests that “Pakistan’s NW Frontier Tribes would be re-united with their Afghan brethren....Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose its Baloch territories to Free Balochistan. The remaining ‘natural’ Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.”



The U.S. State Department has distanced itself a few days ago from the article by asserting that there was no question of redrawing the maps in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Calling the borders in the region “arbitrary”, Peters, a retired official from the US military intelligence community, says the most “cheated” population groups in the Greater Middle East are the Kurds, the Baloch and the Arab Shia.


Urging the US to “think the unthinkable”, Peters proposes a number of territorial changes and presents them in accompanying maps — reproduced here.


He says Israel will not find security if it does not return to its pre-1967 borders. He proposes the creation of Kurdish state and an Arab Shia state that cut across the present boundaries.


Saudi Arabia, a major loser, will cede control over Mekka and Medina to a kind of super vatican for Muslims. Tehran “would lose a great deal of territory to a unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Balochistan, but would gain the provinces around Heart in today’s Afghanistan...” “What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the West, it would gain in the east” at Pakistan’s expense, says Peters.

1 comment:

... said...

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