Why do old white men have a fetish for drawing and redrawing the maps of countries in which they do not live?

Perhaps — and I’m being facetious and ironic — it stems from their radicalization as youths when they play boardgames, such as Risk, and are indoctrinated with a sense of God-like mastery and dreams of world domination.

Outside of South Asia, I think of the proposals by Les Gelb and Peter Galbraith to carve up Iraq into three separate states (ignoring the country’s fairly developed sense of nationalism).  Then there’s Ralph Peters’ haphazard redrawing of the greater Middle East.  The kicker from his article: “Ethnic cleansing works.” Fortunately, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, which no one of consequence reads.

As for Pakistan, good old Selig Harrison — as he has for the past 30 years — has come out today with his biannual op-ed arguing for redrawing Pakistan’s provincial boundaries and rewriting its constitution.

After all, he has a great vantage point for understanding Pakistan’s demographic and power politics.  He speaks none of the local languages, last reported from the region about half a century ago, and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland (a wealthy DC suburb).

My guess is that he has trouble finding Pashtuns at Harris Teeter (a local yuppie supermarket).  And I’m sorry, but holding monthly meetings with predominantly Afghan Pashtun organizations that receive funding from right-wing Indian Americans (some of whom belong to radical Hindutva organizations) do not count as interaction with Pakistani Pashtuns.  Besides, diaspora organizations are a poor reflection of the population back home.  They are usually more strident and well-off, lacking the pragmatism of those on the ground.

So what pearls of wisdom has Harrison given us this time?  He writes:

For centuries, Pashtuns living in the mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan have fought to keep out invading Punjabi plainsmen.

Wrong.  It’s actually the opposite.  The Pashtuns have, over the centuries, invaded the plains of Punjab.   Even little children in South Asia know this.  How does this joker still get published?

Historically, the plains of northern India and Delhi were raided by outsiders, especially tribesmen from predominantly Pashtun areas in what’s now Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The traffic of violence has been into the Punjabi plains, not out from it.  The anomaly, of course, was the empire of Ranjit Singh, which reached Peshawar.  And the supposedly-Punjabi dominated Pakistani state has actually promoted a culture (e.g. textbooks and naming of missiles) that reveres these Pashtun invaders.

Anyway, it’s obvious that those who occupy heights have an ability (and perhaps even a material need in premodern society) to descend from the mountains into the fertile plains.  This occurred, for example, centuries ago, as Pashtun Yousufzai tribesmen migrated into areas such as Swat and supplanted the local Gujjar population.  [Should we call for Gujjar self-determination now?]

But what Harrison is trying to do is take the present day disproportionate influence of Punjabis and falsely give it a broader historical basis.

Harrison goes on:

Historically, the Pashtuns were politically unified before the British Raj. The Pashtun kings who founded Afghanistan ruled over 40,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan, an area containing more than half of the Pashtun population, until British forces defeated them in 1847, pushed up to the Khyber Pass and imposed a disputed boundary, the Durand Line, that Afghanistan has never accepted. Over Pashtun nationalist protests, the British gave these conquered areas to the new, Punjabi-dominated government of Pakistan created in the 1947 partition of India.

Who cares?  That was 162 years ago.  Back then, James Polk was president, blacks were still enslaved in the U.S., Mexico and the U.S. were at war over Texas (America’s FATA), Germany had not been founded, the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine, and there was also a nominal Mughal Emperor in Delhi.

If one goes that far back into history, then it becomes a battle of who gets to restore their historic pan-ethnic empire.  Why not restore the ‘Punjabi’ empire of Ranjit Singh, who controlled Peshawar till the British conquered in the mid-19th century?

The central issue is how much the past matters to the locals, not Selig Harrison of Chevy Chase, MD.  While Pashtuns, especially those who belong to tribes split along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, have a sense of common identity, there is little indication of a push for a greater Pakhtunkhwa.

There are several million Pakistani Pashtuns in the southern port city of Karachi.  If Pashtuns were so tied to territory, they wouldn’t move.  If they saw themselves as the victims of Punjabi domination, they would not constitute the second largest ethnic group in the army, and they would not choose to live in non-Pashtun cities such as Karachi and Lahore.

Harrison then ventures into cartography:

The United States should support Pashtun demands to merge the NWFP and FATA, followed by the consolidation of those areas and Pashtun enclaves in Baluchistan and the Punjab into a single unified “Pashtunkhwa” province that enjoys the autonomy envisaged in the inoperative 1973 Pakistan constitution.

Where to start?

One, the idea of merging FATA into the NWFP is not a bad idea.  But it comes with its share of risks.  It could further sideline tribal leaders and strengthen the Taliban.

The local maliks are against integrating FATA into the NWFP.  Why?  Because they lose out.  Pashtun nationalists support a merger — mainly because they (specifically the Awami National Party) stand to gain.  But resolving the problems in FATA requires working with the local maliks.  And so any change in FATA’s constitutional status would have to meaningfully integrate them into the new setup.  The ANP stands to gain from an NWFP-FATA merger.  But it is not the sole spokesman for Pashtuns.

Two, merging Pashtun areas in Balochistan and Punjab does nothing to contain the Taliban spread.  Regardless, the ANP is calling for the two things: renaming the NWFP Pakhtunkhwa and merging NWFP and FATA.  Despite heading the NWFP government and being part of the center coalition, the ANP hasn’t called for shifting Pashtun areas in other provinces into the NWFP.  If they are not doing it, then there is no reason for Selig Harrison.  He need not be more Catholic than the pope.  Pakistan has a free media and functioning parliament in which these issues can be discussed.

Three, many of these Pashtun areas are mixed.  They contain Baloch, Seraikis, Punjabis, and Hindko speakers.  Areas such as Mianwali are inhabited by Punjabized Pashtuns, such as the Niazis.  There is also a sizable presence of non-Pashtuns in the NWFP, namely the Hindko speakers in Peshawar and the Hazara Division.  It’s convenient for Harrison to leave all these people out.  And what happened to Harrison’s Baloch fetish?   Will the Baloch be happy with losing Quetta and many districts to the NWFP?  And if population is what matters, what do you do with Karachi, which is effectively the largest Pashtun city?  Continuing with the same logic, why not give Hindko-speakers their own province?

Yes, provincial autonomy must be advanced in Pakistan  The concurrent list should be eliminated.  The National Finance Commission’s award distribution should be more equitable.  But provincial autonomy is not a panacea.  There are also intra-provincial issues and divisions that serve as a roadblock for good governance.  For example, the Karachi city government has issues with the Sindh provincial government.  Anyway, provincial autonomy by itself will simply make corruption more evenly distributed.

Rather than remaking the map of Pakistan, Harrison should look closer to home.  Why doesn’t predominantly black Washington, DC have statehood?  Why doesn’t it have representation in the U.S. Congress?  Don’t African Americans of Anacostia and those pushed out along the Green Line by gentrification deserve a little ‘provincial autonomy’ of their own?

Compare Selig Harrison’s Chevy Chase, Maryland (92.4% White, 0.9% Black, Median Household Income $205,783, Mean Home Value $1,222,239) to Anacostia, thirteen miles away in Washington, DC (92% Black, 5% White, Average Household Income $29,745, Average Home Value $189,900, 62 Homicides in 2005).

If Harrison is so concerned about issues of political representation and socio-economic justice, there’s nothing stopping him from moving to Anacostia and advocating on behalf of the locals there.