The islamic earthquake

The U.S.–Soviet confrontation spanned the periphery of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, there were three sections to this border. There was the European section, running from Norway to the German–Czech frontier. There was the Asian section, running from the Aleutians through Japan and into China. And there was the third section, running from northern Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. When the Soviet Union collapsed, this last section was the most heavily affected. Yugoslavia collapsed first, but the earthqua k e

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chaos eventually ran the entire length of the sector and engulfed even countries not adjacent to the front line.

The region from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan and Pakistan had largely been locked into place during the Cold War.There was isolated movement, such as when Iran moved from being pro-American to being both anti

Soviet and anti-American, or when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, or the Iran–Iraq war. But in a strange way, the region was stabilized by the Cold War. No matter how many internal conflicts there were, they never grew into full-blown, cross-border crises.

With the Soviets gone, the region destabilized dramatically. This is primarily a Muslim region—one of three major Muslim regions in the world. There is North Africa, there is the Muslim region in Southeast Asia, and then there is this vast, multinational, highly divergent region that runs from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, and south into the Arabian Peninsula (see map, page 36). This is certainly not a single region in many senses, but we are treating it as such because it was the southern front of the Soviet encirclement.

It’s important to remember that the demarcation line of the Cold War ran straight through this Muslim region. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan were all predominantly Muslim republics that were part of the Soviet Union. There were Muslim parts of the Russian Federation as well, such as Chechnya. This entire region is historically unstable. Traversing the region are the great trade and invasion routes used by conquerors from Alexander the Great to the British. The region has always been a geopolitical flash point, but the end of the Cold War truly ignited a powder keg. When the Soviet Union fell, its six Muslim republics suddenly became independent. Arab countries to the south either lost their patron (Iraq and Syria) or lost their enemy (the Saudis and other Gulf states). India lost its patron, and Pakistan suddenly felt liberated from the Indian threat—at least temporarily. The en- tire system of international relations was thrown up in the air. What little was solid dissolved. The Soviets withdrew from the Caucasus and Central Asia in 1992. Like a tide receding, this revealed nations that hadn’t been free for a century or more, that had no tradition of self- government and, in some cases, no func- tioning economy. At the same time, American interest in the region de- clined. After Operation Desert Storm in 1991, American focus on places like Afghanistan seemed useless. The Cold War was over. There was no longer a strategic threat to American interests, and the region was free to evolve on its own. 36the next 100 years Pacific cean OIndian Ocean Atlantic Ocean Islamic World—Modern 37 e a rthqu a k e

A detailed description of how the region, and Afghanistan in particular, destabilized is not critical here, any more than a blow by blow of what happened in Yugoslavia would be illuminating. It can be summarized as follows: From the late seventies until the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States helped create forces in Afghanistan that could resist the Soviet Union— and these forces turned on the United States once the Soviet Union collapsed. Trained in the covert arts, knowledgeable about the processes of U.S. intelligence, these men mounted an operation against the United States that involved many stages and culminated on September 11, 2001. The United States responded by surging into the region, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and quickly the entire region came apart.

As had been the case with the Soviet Union after World War II, the United States used the jihadists for its own ends and then had to cope with the monster it had created. But that was the lesser problem. The more dangerous dilemma was that the collapse of the Soviet Union disrupted the system of relationships that kept the region in some sort of order. With or without al Qaeda, the Muslim entities within the former Soviet Union and to its south were going to become unstable, and as in Yugoslavia, that instability was going to draw in the only global power, the United States, one way or another. It was a perfect storm. From the Austrian border to the Hindu Kush, the region shuddered and the United States moved to bring it under control, with mixed results, to say the least.

There is another aspect of this that is noteworthy, especially in light of the demographic trends we will discuss in the next chapter. There was tre mendous internal unrest in the Muslim world. The resistance of Islamic traditionalists to shifts in custom, particularly concerning the status of women and driven by demographic change, was one of the driving forces behind the region’s instability. The struggle between traditionalists and secularizers upended the region’s societies, and the United States was held responsible for the growing calls for secularization. This seems like an obvious and superficial reading of the situation, but as we will see, it has deeper and broader significance than might be apparent at first glance. Changes in the family structure, resistance to those changes, and September 11 were closely linked.

From the broadest geopolitical perspective, September 11 ended the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next 38 t h e n e x t 1 0 0 yea r s

era: the U.S.–jihadist war. The jihadists could not win, if by winning we mean the re- creation of the Caliphate, an Islamic empire. Divisions in the Islamic world were too powerful to overcome, and the United States was too powerful to simply be defeated. The chaos could never have congealed into a jihadist victory.

This era is actually less a coherent movement than a regional spasm, the result of a force field being removed. Ethnic and religious divisions in the Islamic world mean that even if the United States is expelled from the region, no stable political base will emerge. The Islamic world has been divided and unstable for over a thousand years, and hardly looks to become more united anytime soon. At the same time, even an American defeat in the region would not undermine basic American global power. Like the Vietnam War, it would be merely a transitory event.

At the moment, the U.S.–jihadist conflict appears so powerful and of such overwhelming importance that it is difficult to imagine it simply fading away. Serious people talk about a century of such conflict dominating the world, but under the twenty- year perspective outlined in the early pages of this book, the prospect of a world still transfixed by a U.S.–jihadist war in 2020 is the least likely outcome. In fact, what is happening in the Islamic world ultimately will not matter a great deal. If we assume that the upward trajectory of U.S. power remains intact, then 2020 should find the United States facing very different challenges.