Borders
Jonathan Foreman, in the New York Post, says the US should pick up the imperial mantle, and train colonial administrators to keep order in fractious countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But this is the same logic that has left UN peacekeepers beached in places like Kosovo and Bosnia. Anyone ever wonder what all these troublesome countries -- Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the list goes on -- have in common? They shouldn't really be countries at all. Each has territorially distinct minorities, and swings between anarchy and repressive central rule -- and western intervention, when things get sufficiently bad.
So here's an alternative to sending in Western troops to prop up artificial countries. Let's face the fact that they - the Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs, the Kurds and the Iraqi Arabs, the Sunnis and the Shias, the Pushtuns and the Tajiks -- are never going to like eachother, no matter how generous the western aid and how just and committed the peacekeepers. Split these countries up, yes, even if it means the State Department has to change its maps. Divide Afghanistan between its warlords, let Iraq split into a Kurdish north, a Sunni Arab center, and a Shiite south. And so on, unto Saudi Arabia, which has a large Shiite minority located conveniently over the oil fields. Who knows? Maybe new mono-ethnic countries would actually function as responsible states.Afghan endgame [New York Post]
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