Who Will Control the ‘World Island’?

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In a seminal article, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History', published in 1904, the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the prominent theoreticians of geopolitics, wrote that a country that gained control over the Eurasian heartland - what he referred to as the "pivot area" - would eventually gain hegemony over the entire globe.

Mackinder succinctly summarized his theory thus: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world."

At the time, the vast and strategically important central regions of Asia were governed by the Russians in the north and the British further south.

The British had gained control over much of India by the end of the 18th century, and extinguished Muslim rule altogether when in 1857 they eliminated the Mughal Empire, which for more than three centuries had dominated most of the subcontinent.

Meanwhile, the Russian Empire had expanded into the Muslim regions of central Asia, inhabited mainly by Turkic peoples, in the mid-19th century.

Fabled centres of Islamic culture such as Samarkand and Tashkent fell to the Russians as the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanates of Khiva and Kokand came under Russian suzerainty.

The British, fearful of Russian expansionism and seeking to protect their Indian empire, fought three wars in Afghanistan. The first war, from 1839 to 1842, led to a massive defeat of the British forces by Afghan warriors and a retreat back to India.

The Russians continued their advances in central Asia, prompting a second Anglo-Afghan war from 1878 to 1880, in which Britain gained assurances that the Russians would not be allowed to bring Afghanistan under its control. In 1887 Russia and Great Britain delineated the northern border of Afghanistan.

The final war, in 1919, settled the border between Afghanistan and British India. The British propped up Afghanistan as a buffer state, and the country, with no sense of national consciousness, would retain this role for decades.

But everything began to change after the Second World War.

By 1947, British India was no more, divided between the two new states of India, predominantly Hindu, and Muslim Pakistan, which bordered Afghanistan to its northwest.

Russia, meanwhile, had become a Communist state after the First World War and the new Soviet Union reorganized its central Asian holdings into five ethnically-based socialist republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the last three bordering Afghanistan.

By the late 1970s, though, Moscow's control over its central Asian republics was weakening, as local peoples became more assertive. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, increasing political turmoil led to concerns that a Soviet-friendly regime might collapse, prompting a Soviet invasion of that country in 1979.

It proved to be a disastrous decision. After a decade and more than 15,000 soldiers killed, the Soviets retreated, leaving Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban. Soon afterwards, the Soviet Union itself fell apart, giving birth to five new sovereign Muslim states in central Asia in 1991.

The United States became the latest major power to get involved in the region's politics. Afghanistan, which had become a haven and source of support for al-Qaida under the protection of the Taliban, was invaded by American and other NATO forces following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But after a decade of war, the American public is weary of the blood and treasure that has been spent in Afghanistan, with seemingly little effect. It's doubtful that U.S. forces will remain in the country for much longer.

And Afghanistan will probably devolve into civil war, as it did after 1989, with the Taliban again gaining control of the Pashtun-majority regions of the country.

Three great powers — the Americans, British, and Russians — will have abandoned central Asia. Might some other major state, such as China or India, move into the vacuum? Mackinder's question — who will control the Eurasian heartland? — for the moment remains unanswered.