This inner core, for Mackinder, was the ultimate unstable region. And yet, writing in an age before oil pipelines and ballistic missiles, he saw this region as inherently volatile, geographically speaking, but also somewhat of a secondary concern. T he Indian subcontinent is one such shatter zone.
It is defined on its landward sides by the hard geographic borders of the Himalayas to the north, the Burmese jungle to the east, and the somewhat softer border of the Indus River to the west. Indeed, the border going westward comes in three stages: the Indus; the unruly crags and canyons that push upward to the shaved wastes of Central Asia, home to the Pashtun tribes; and, finally, the granite, snow-mantled massifs of the Hindu Kush, transecting Afghanistan itself.
You see this acutely as you walk up to and around any of these land borders, the weakest of which, in my experience, are the official ones—a mere collection of tables where cranky bureaucrats inspect your luggage. Especially in the west, the only border that lives up to the name is the Hindu Kush, making me think that in our own lifetimes the whole semblance of order in Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan could unravel, and return, in effect, to vague elements of greater India.
In Nepal, the government barely controls the countryside where 85 percent of its people live. Driving throughout this region, it appears in many ways indistinguishable from the Ganges plain. If the Maoists now ruling Nepal cannot increase state capacity, the state itself could dissolve.
The same holds true for Bangladesh. Even more so than Nepal, it has no geographic defense to marshal as a state. The view from my window during a recent bus journey was of the same ruler-flat, aquatic landscape of paddy fields and scrub on both sides of the line with India. The border posts are disorganized, ramshackle affairs. This artificial blotch of territory on the Indian subcontinent could metamorphose yet again, amid the gale forces of regional politics, Muslim extremism, and nature itself.
Like Pakistan, no Bangladeshi government, military or civilian, has ever functioned even remotely well. Millions of Bangladeshi refugees have already crossed the border into India illegally. With million people—a population larger than Russia—crammed together at sea level, Bangladesh is vulnerable to the slightest climatic variation, never mind the changes caused by global warming. Simply because of its geography, tens of millions of people in Bangladesh could be inundated with salt water, necessitating the mother of all humanitarian relief efforts.
In the process, the state itself could collapse. Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together.
All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally.
In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan. The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism.
Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan.
Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U. A nother shatter zone is the Arabian Peninsula.
The vast tract of land controlled by the Saudi royal family is synonymous with Arabia in the way that India is synonymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by massive waterless tracts.
Though India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on loyalty to an extended family. Where Saudi Arabia is truly vulnerable, and where the shatter zone of Arabia is most acute, is in highly populous Yemen to the south.
Because the Turks and the British never really controlled Yemen, they did not leave behind the strong bureaucratic institutions that other former colonies inherited. When I traveled the Saudi-Yemen border some years back, it was crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible.
Mud-brick battlements hid the encampments of these rebellious sheikhs, some with their own artillery. Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two. And geography, not ideas, has everything to do with it. T he Fertile Crescent, wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau, constitutes another shatter zone. The countries of this region—Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—are vague geographic expressions that had little meaning before the 20th century.
When the official lines on the map are removed, we find a crude finger-painting of Sunni and Shiite clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the governing authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely exist. The one in Syria is tyrannical and fundamentally unstable; the one in Jordan is rational but under quiet siege. Indeed, the Levant is characterized by tired authoritarian regimes and ineffective democracies. Of all the geographically illogical states in the Fertile Crescent, none is more so than Iraq.
But for all the recent focus on Iraq, geography and history tell us that Syria might be at the real heart of future turbulence in the Arab world. Book by Jai Sen. Pielke, Jr.
Christine Fair. Guy Peters. Paine's Garage: and the Murder of John F. Kennedy Book by Thomas Mallon. The Russians bumrushed into Grozny. Got creamed. A few years later they settled for a siege with a methodical clearing advance. A year later we bumrushed into Fallujah, and then withdrew, and then conducted a lengthy siege and methodical clearing advance. The lesson being, the enemy and other environmental factors will determine which TACTIC lets not call these strategies will work best.
Even all our spiffy futurey drones will have to clear every building and overcome static defenses in buildings. The resource applied doesn't change the nature of war or the tactics to be used.
If my memory serves me right, I believe the tactic of "walking through walls" was used by the US Army during the Battle of Monterrey years ago on September 23, Unable to advance down the streets because of being ambushed from the buildings lining the roads the "regulars" began using the tactic of going through the walls of the buildings to "flank" the defenders. The tactic was shown to them by the Texas volunteer units, who picked it up during the War of Texas Independence and leaned it from?????
One of our biggest problems is we haven't dedicated any type of unit or organization to study, train, and become our urban warfare experts. In a "perfect army" we would have years ago assigned a division headquarters and 3 or 4 BCTs plus supporting BDEs to focus on urban warfare, along with buying some mid-sized city in the rust belt to become the "Urban Warfare Center of Excellence. Just a historical point to the IDF tactics in Nablus.
This method of city fighting was dubbed "mouse-holing" by the 2nd Canadian Brigade during the Battle of Ortona in During this action two battalions of the battle hardened German 1st Parachute Regiment were order to hold the strategic port town at all costs. Their well constructed machinegun and AT defensive made movements via streets costly and ineffective.
In order to regain the iniative and clear the town the Canadian force consisting of elements of the Seaforth Highlanders and Loyal Edmonton Regiment used explosives and PIAT AT weapons to create safe movement lanes to bypass the german positions and attack from the flanks.
The leadership IDF has traditionally proven excellent at learning from and adapting tactics from many sources. I would be surprised if the Nablus "walking through walls" wasn't inspired by Ortona's "Mouse-holing" whther the IDF realized the history or not. Are we politically prepared to fight in such terrain, wherever it is?
I doubt it, even more so when the military think hard and advise politicians. You need to be ruthless, as a number of times contemporary history shows.
Hue in , Ramadi and other Iraqi cities. How does the American public define the worthiness of a mission? It likely has little to do with political and military leadership assurances that a mission is important and worthy of sacrifice.
From Viet Nam to Iraq and Afghanistan American military and political leadership assertions of the importance of missions has been received by the public with declining faith and greater skepticism.
This is largely because the public has not been able to translate the expenditure of blood and money with any worthwhile commensurate gain for the United States. The greatest challenges aren't identifird in this brief piece: force size particularly occupation force size and logistics.
For example, taking into consideration Tehran's greater metropolitan area, the population is 14 million.
Any ground invasion route would be long and extended, and the mega city's northern extremity reaches toward a 15, ft prominence in the form of Mt. Both Stalingrad successfully defended and Berlin unsuccessfully defended were not megacities, were accessed contigously by land through a common border, and did not feature an elevation terrain advantageous to the defender.
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