Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan Read Free Book Online

material culture makes it a cauldron of the Greater Middle East.
    A few minutes from the Shah Jahan Mosque is the necropolis on Makli Hill: tombs from the Samma, Arghun, Tarkhan, and Mughal periods, made of sandstone and glazed bricks. These, too, were dynasties with both Turkic and Mongol blood. And yet the tombs remind one of so many similar buildings in India, demonstrating that what we think of as Indian is itself a mélange of Near Eastern cultures. * Everywhere there are brick plinths, rectangular pillars, imposing ramparts, and cracked bulbous domes. The buckling, glazed brick is peeled away in layers, like old mascara, with faint touches of milky blue. These lonely monuments appear to soar into the clouds, each occupying its own little hill. Some, with their intricate fretwork, have an almost Byzantine stateliness. Others bear the proportions and complexity of the pharaonic buildings at Karnak. All stand in majestic separation from one another amid a destitute wasteland, with garbage everywhere, like at so many historical and cultural sites in Pakistan. It is as though in the last sixty years—unlike during the dynastic centuries recounted by these tombs—there has been no state here; nothing but marauders.
    The Indus turned north and I followed, through a pasty landscape smothered in dust that had been, in turn, created by the cracked mud, and which made everything appear to move in slow motion. Here was a truly antique riverine civilization: fields of wheat and rice, bananas and mango trees, and extensive date palm jungles, all sectioned by canals. There were the ubiquitous black and primordial water buffaloes, partly submerged in the mud; heartbreakingly frail donkeys pulling the most immense carts of wood, as nearby dromedaries hauled carts of bricks. Vast, seasonal encampments of Gypsies from Baluchistan and southern Punjab lined the road. They had come for the date palm harvest to make syrup and oils and other date by-products. Layered in mud, they looked no poorer than everyone else. The rice fields bore various translucent shades of lime and green, and women in garish and shimmering saris moved in statuesque formation along the embankments. Yet the scene as a whole was robbed of color because of the ashen skies that rarely culminated in rain.
    The farther north I traveled away from the Arabian Sea, the hotter and more windless it became. The temperature hovered above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The homes and rest houses I entered all had air conditioners that didn’t work because of “load-shedding.” Shops and cars were plastered with photographs of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Sindh was the stronghold of the two slain former prime ministers: the daughter killed by an assassin’s bomb and bullet in 2007; the father hung in 1979 by army dictator Zia ul-Haq. Yet these images did not necessarily denote loyalty: Many reportedly displayed the photographs and stickers out of fear that their property would be destroyed if they didn’t. The photographs were insurance against rioters, I was told.
    I reached Khairpur at night. There was nothing to the east of here except the Thar Desert that traverses the border with India. Before partition Khairpur had a large Hindu population. I discovered that the Muslims here had retained the Hindu custom of touching the foot of an elder upon greeting. It was a small gesture that added much to the sense of civilization in this crowded little city. I found the people at all levels warm and intimate, even though the heat was dense and heavy like water, and the hand of the state apparently absent except as an indifferent force of nature. There were tribal and clan feuds in the region, culminating in back-and-forth revenge killings in which the belligerents were armed with assault rifles, even as running water was a rarity. The reasons for thesetroubles were many, but the ultimate cause was the absence of development. I thought back to Gwadar, existing as a traditional culture in