Geography is Power

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target.

Spykman gave that theoretical logic into a more reasonable and pragmatic form for a new form of American Empire. He realized that for all its insulated impenetrability the heartland was a vast and uninhabitable land with little to no permanent lines of transportation that the British feared about. However, it was instead the powers which surrounded the heartland that could instrumentalize it. Therefore, the areas of concern on the Eurasian world island suddenly expanded from Eastern Europe to the Inner Crescent or the Rimlands. These were the fertile plains of the Indian Subcontinent, the deserts of Arabia, the East Asian lands of China and other East Asian nations, and The European peninsula. “States, cannot escape their geography. However skilled the Foreign Office, and however resourceful the General Staff. A state’s foreign policy must reckon with geographic facts. It can deal with them skillfully or ineptly; it can modify them; but it cannot ignore them. For geography does not argue. It simply is.”

America therefore to sustain its own global empire created various treaty organizations to control the rimlands. NATO, SEATO, CENTO (Baghdad Pact), etc to perpetuate its own influence in the rimland to contain the Soviets during the cold war to reduce their influence over the world island. During that time Pakistan utilized its geography to turn a soviet misadventure into a disaster by creating, sheltering, training, and equipping the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. It became a de-facto frontier state against the Soviets. It repeated the same strategy of renting out its geographical position to great powers during the GWOT. Therefore, it would not be inaccurate to say that Geography has been a core part of Pakistani strategy so much so that the words like “Geostrategy, Geoeconomics and Geopolitics” are a part of common parlance.

Pakistan finds itself in relevance again due to its own geographic placement on the rimlands. It is populated enough to be a player and subservient enough to be valuable to any power on the world island or beyond. If India simply didn’t exist Pakistan would’ve been a very different place, it could’ve looked to the deserts of Arabia as an actual partner nation instead of a “security guard” for the Arabs. It could’ve had an actual relationship with Afghanistan instead of the constant insecurity at its frontiers. It could’ve had an actual foreign policy beyond just holding the threat of nuclear weapons up to western nations for the sake of foreign aid.

India for its own part also wishes to imagine a world where Pakistan wouldn’t have existed. It would’ve freed India to have lines of transportation going directly in Central Asia and Russia some of their closest partners historically. It would also open up so much of Indian capacity which goes into deterring Pakistan and could instead be used to project power out into the Indian Ocean its own playground. India would’ve been free of 2-front scenario that constantly rises in the minds of Indian strategic planners no matter how unlikely it might.

We can see that the Indian Subcontinent today can be home to an actual challenger to the already existing global order unlike during the time of Spykman’s analysis which assumed the subcontinent was too poor to be an actor of its own. However, that requires the subcontinent to have a clear hegemon. India can take that place given enough time to develop its own economy, however the tumultuous nature of the global economy shows clear headwinds against that. In the absence of a clear hegemon the subcontinent will go back to the its original state of being in a balance of powers where outside powers balance against India using Pakistan as a proxy to deter a possible hegemon from emerging. For Pakistan the origins of its significance are its geography due to the absence of any economic prosperity.

A point of leverage which has emerged out of the geography as international law weakens and multi-lateral agreements become tougher to enforce is the Indus Waters Treaty. India’s abeyance of the treaty is contested globally yet there is no consequence for its actions. Many courts may decry the humanity but no nation is willing to punish it for the business its markets represent. Even the Americans and Chinese have largely been silent on this issue making the pitch for its restoration more difficult for the Pakistanis. In a world where every multilateral institution that could ever matter has been humiliated by Trump and actively disregarded its a bit rich to state things such as “There are no exit clauses to the IWT” because even the Treaty of Versailles didn’t have an exit clause in the sense that Germany could remilitarize the Rhine through it. However, great power can rarely ever be bound into certain actions by other powers for long, the IWT persisted beyond its expiry date due to the fact that the Indian capability to build on the Western rivers was rather limited. However, those facts are changing due to the rising nature of India’s economic and industrial capabilities.

Although, I do not expect India to magically develop the capabilities to dam up the Indus for months or something to that effect. The real capabilities we could see coming into effect would be re-directing portions of the Indus into the Eastern Rivers and then damming those rivers up more comprehensively. The total capacity which can be redirect through such an arrangement would be rather limited. It would barely cross the 20% mark on the Indus’ waters. However, in a world where the flows of the Indus are declining every additional capacity of water that India absorbs is an addition to Pakistan’s water scarcity problem.

Finally, Pakistan has worked to stress out any groundwater supplies that may have existed under its lands. It’s cities live in constant water scarcity, many cities like Karachi have declared national security emergency due to water scarcity already. In the coming years we may see a return of geography’s wrath, as large parts of Pakistan become even more uninhabitable for life. As overpopulation in cities means the average person has to sink larger and larger portions of their incomes into simply giving out rents to the “tanker mafia”. The curse of geography is such for Pakistan that the Indus River System is its only replenishing source of water for most of its population. Therefore, Pakistan might threaten the world with a gun to its head for water but in reality the IWT isn’t even the greatest of its water concerns. IWT is just a way for it to shift the blame for its crumbling water infrastructure failing to service the needs of its populations with no sign or possibility of improvement as the state turned rather comprehensively from a “developmental” state to a “hard” state. With budget prioritizing military expenditure over the expenditure for schools, roads, rail, and even water.