Prisoners of Geography

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean,” in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.

Why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine?”

The name Pakistan gives us clues about these divisions; pak means “pure” and stan means “land” in Urdu, so it is the land of the pure, but it is also an acronym. P is for Punjab, A is for Afghania (the Pashtun area by the Afghan border), K for Kashmir, S for Sindh, and T stands for “tan,” as in Baluchistan.

Paradise and Power, the historian Robert Kagan

The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.
The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birthrate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighboring Israel/Palestine.

raq is a prime example of the ensuing conflicts and chaos. The more religious among the Shia never accepted that a Sunni-led government should have control over their holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala, where their martyrs Ali and Hussein are said to be buried. These communal feelings go back centuries; a few decades of being called “Iraqis” was never going to dilute such emotions.

The Sunni Muslims form the majority among Arabs, and indeed among the world’s Muslim population, comprising perhaps 85 percent of the total, although within some of the Arab countries the percentages are less distinct. The name comes from al-Sunna, or “people of tradition.”

The most important division within Islam is almost as old as the religion itself: the split between Sunni and Shia Muslims dates back to 632 CE, when the prophet Muhammad died, leading to a dispute over his succession.

Prior to Sykes-Picot (in its wider sense), there was no state of Syria, no Lebanon, nor were there Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel, or Palestine. Modern maps show the borders and the names of nation states, but they are young and they are fragile.

The term Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century, which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explains the unrest and extremism of today.