The most populace tribe in Afghanistan is the Pashtun. They comprise about 40% of the population and inhabit the Northeast part of the country. The Western part of Pakistan is also Pastun. Part of what we are dealing with is the fact that the Pastun don’t respect the border with Pakistan. It was drawn down the ridgeline by Durand in 1890 and represents the truce line in a war between the British and the Afghanis.

The Tajiks are the next most populace tribe and comprise about 25% of the population. They inhabit the Northwest part of Afghanistan and also have their own country to the north, Tajikistan.

The Pastuns have ruled the country for centuries but were ousted from power when the US drove out the Taliban in 2002. In order to accomplish this, the US aligned itself with Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance. The rise of the Tajiks to power in the central government does not sit well with the Pastuns. They do not trust the government partly because it is dominated by Tajiks.

Then there is the matter of corruption. The Afghan government is corrupt from Karzai down to villiage policemen. The Afghani people are upset and angry about this. They don’t see the US exerting much effort to clean up the corruption.

There is a lot of talk about building up the Afghan army in order to stabalize the country and allow us to withdraw. The Afghan army is a joke. Afghanis can make more money working for the Taliban than they can in the Afghan army. Soldiers in the army regularly desert taking weapons, equipment and supplies with them. Many of them cannot read or write. Unfortunately for us, the Pastuns will reject Tajik soldiers in Pastun lands and the Pastuns will be disinclined to join the army because they see it as being aligned with the US occupiers. 

Obviously, we cannot stabalize Afghanistan unless Pakistan cooperates. We have been able to throw our weight around in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their small populations; about 25 million for Iraq and about 15 million for Afghanistan. But we still have not been able to completely dominate and stabilze either. Pakistan is another matter entirely. They have a population of about 220 million or about 2/3 the size of the US population.  If 1% of Pakistanis are violent and hostile to the US, that is 2.2 million potential enemies.

Pakistan becoming increasingly upset by what they see as the interference of the US in their affairs. The recently announced Pakistan aid package of 1.5 billion for each of the next 5 years comes with some big strings attached. One of the most problematical is our attempt to regulate how they promote officers in the army. The US army is contolled by the civilian government and not influential in civilian affairs. Unlike our army, the Pakistani army is very powerful in their civil society. The upper echelons of the army live in their own subdivisions, the army has extensive investments in business and land and the army has ruled Pakistan on and off since its founding. Any arrangements we make with Pakistan will have to have the approval of the Pakistani army.

When Pakistan was founded, the British drew a line down the middle of the Punjab tribal lands. The Muslim Punjabis moved west and the Hindu Punjabis move east when Pakistan was split off from India. The Pakistani army has used angry Muslim Punjabis for their proxies in causing border clashes with India. They have poured money and weapons into Pakistani Punjabi terrorist groups. Now some of the Punjabi terrorists are working with the Taliban.

In the south of Pakistan, the Baluchi territories are the site of more ethnic strife and suppression. The Baluchis would like to be independent. Now the Taliban are commanding their fight from the southern city of Quetta which is in Baluchistan. So there is a coalition of Pashtun Taliban, Baluchi revolutionaries and Punjabi terrorists carrying out attacks in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the army is divided with respect to who they are willing to fight and who they support. The Pakistani people are scared of India, upset with their government, pushed around by their army, worried about terrorists and mad at the US.

We cannot win in Afghanistan because we cannot deal with the problem of Pakistan and we can’t break even. If we withdraw from Afghanistan, there will be bloodshed and suffering. If we stay, there will be bloodshed and corruption. Sort of like that old story about riding a tiger. Can’t stay on and can’t get off. We are addicted to television and movies where problems are solved in an hour or two. There is no happy ending here. We seem to be faced with trying to select the lesser of more than two evils. If we can even figure out what that is.

There are new nations in some areas where humanity has lived in cities for thousands of years. A lot of these are in the news lately.

Iraq is home to the ruins of ancient cities such as Babylon and Sumer but it has only existed as a nation since the British drew the boundaries after WWI. India and Pakistan also hold many ancient ruins but it was the British again who drew their boundaries very recently.

Around 1846, a war between the British and Sikh resulted in the consolidation of 22 small states into the State of Jammu and Kashmir. After partition in 1947, Pakistan and India both brought pressure on the State of Jammu and Kashmir to accept being merged with one of the two. Several wars were fought over the Kashmir with the first taking place right after partion and ending with a truce in 1948. The “Line of Control” became the border between the area controlled by Pakistan and the area controlled by India. The Kashmir has continued to be a bone of contention between the two countries down to the present.

The North Western border of Pakistan is the “Durand Line” which was drawn by the British in 1893 as a truce line in a stalemated war with Afghanistan. It divides the territory of the Pushtuns. The tribal people living in that area do not recognize the legitimacy of that border. This is in the headline regularly as fighters pass back and forth across the Durand Line in a batter with Afghan and US forces.

Pakistan was severed from the British India colony in 1949. The “Radcliffe Line” was drawn to separate new Muslim and Hindu countries when the British granted the former colony independence.  The Radcliffe Line runs down the middle of the Punjab territories. Millions of people of Muslim faith moved to Western Punjabe in Muslim Pakistan and millions of people of the Hindu faith move to East Punjab in Indai.

South East Pakistan is the territory of the Sindh people. The ancient Indus valley sites of Moenhodaro and Harappa flourish between 2500 BC and 1500 BC and are hailed as “one of the most developed urban civilizations of the ancient world.

South West Pakistan contains part of the tribal lands of the Balochistanis. They also live in South Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan. Like the Kurds, they are a people divided by arbitray borders who desire a homeland and peace. The Pakistan central government has committed many atrocities againt these people with little attention of the Western media. The Iranians have also treated them harshly.

Pakistan is a patch work quilt of  peoples who do not care for  each other and who do not get along. They are divided by ancient hatreds and disputes. And they are connected to their ethnic brothers across arbitrary borders recently drawn by colonial powers and recent wars. This is a recipe for strife.

There are new rivalries as well. Karachi is a port on the coast of the tradional land of the Sindhis. People who came from the Eastern Punjab in what is now India are clashing with Pushtuns who have come down from the NW Tribal territories. I am sure the native Sindh in Karachi appreciate these recent arrivals murdering each other.

There are stories floating around that the US intends to redraw many boundaries in the Middle East including Pakistan.

“The US State Department has rejected suggestions that Washington is planning to redraft the boundaries of the greater Middle East, including Pakistan, along ethnic and religious lines.

The purported plan appeared recently in the US Armed Forces Journal along with two maps showing the new boundaries.

The article, by Ralph Peters, was the work of an individual and did not reflect the views of the US government, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.”

The articles suggests that the NW tribal territories be shifted to Afghanistan and that Balochistan region of S Pakistan be combined with other Balochistani regions in Afghanistan and Iran to create a Balochistani autonomous homeland. This would leave Pakistan much diminished with just the Western Punjab and the Sindh regions.

I agree in priciple with the author of the article  that:

“International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.”

“Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. “

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.
Peters’ Article

Discussion of Peters’ Article

Peter’s article is definitely is food for thought but would be very difficult to implement. But without the changes that he discusses, further bloodshed and suffering are inevitable.

There is a story from the Bible about Samson who was chained to pillars in the palace of his enemies after being robbed of his legendary strength. When his strength returned, he pulled the temple down killing himself and his tormenters.

When the Jews rebelled against the Romans in 70 AD, Rome destroyed Jerusalem, crushed the Jewish resistance and pursued the remanants to the mesa of Masada. There the Romans lay siege for months until they were able to build a ramp up the side of the mesa. When they finally breached the defenses on top of the mesa, they found that all of the rebels had committed suicide rather than be captured. A rallying cry for the Israeli army is “Never Again” which refers to what happened at Masada.

I am sure that every new US president receives a visit from an Israeli official who says something like “You can support us or leave to our fate but if they come for us and all hope is gone, we will turn the Middle East into a radioactive wasteland until the end of time.”

Since it is generally accepted that Israel has about 200 nulcear bombs and the planes to deliver them, the new president can only reply, “What do you want?”

The idea that Jesus served as the scapegoat for the whole human race is the center piece of Christianity. What did this mean to the Jewish people of the 1st century?

The scapegoat was a Jewish tradition where they symbolically put the sins of the community on a young and innocent goat or lamb. Then they sacrificed the animal and offered the blood to Yahweh to wash away their sins. The story told in the Christian bible is that Jesus voluntarily went to the cross in sacrifice so his blood would atone for our sins.

In the early part of the 4th century CE, Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria promoted the idea that Jesus was human and was inhabited by the spirit of God. The spirit of God left him as he hung on the cross and he died as a man to atone for our sins. One of the things that Jesus is reported to have said on the cross is “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” which is Aramaic for “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” This makes sense in the context of the scapegoat.

Arianism

His chief opponent was Athanasius, also a churchman of Alexandria. Athanasius argued that Arius was reducing Jesus to a demigod and reintroducing polytheism. The debate got quite heated and caused turbulence in the Roman Empire.

The Roman emperor Constantine finally convened a conclave at Nicea in 323 CE to have the church fathers decide which doctrine would become official canon of the church. The Athanasius faction won the argument and Jesus was declared to be God (without getting into the whole trinity discussion.)

But to claim that Jesus WAS God as Athanasius did makes no sense in the context of the scapegoat tradition. If Jesus was just a mask that God was wearing, then he did not suffer and die on the cross because God cannot die. It also makes no sense that he would say what he is reported as having said. How can you sacrifice God to himself? And how would killing God atone for the sins of Man?

Constantine ordered Euisibus who had published a list of books he thought should be included in the Christian bible to have 50 bibles drafted, bound in fine leather and distributed to the major Christian churches throughout the empire. These bibles became the official canon of the early church and enshrined the doctrine of Athanasius who was made the Bishop of Alexandria. Arius and his followers were declared heretics and banished.

I understand that faith is emphasized over evidence and logic in religion. But I agree with Gopi Krishna who said that a man’s religion should not outrage his reason.

Batteries in Ancient Baghdad

Jars with copper cylinders and corroded iron rods were discovered in 1936 near Baghdad, Iraq in ruins over 1750 years old. When they were rebuilt and filled with wine, they generated a voltage.

Museums contain copper vessels with a thin coating of silver that appears to have been electroplated. The batteries could have accomplished this.

There are old Egyptian papyri that show a man stepping into a pool with fish that generated a weak electrical current which relieved pain. The batteries may have been used produce pain relief similar to the fish.

Baghdad batteries

Computers in Ancient Greece

About 100 years ago, a few coral encrusted lumps were brought up by sponge divers from a 1st century BC ship wreck in near Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. X-rays revealed that one of the lumps contained 32 gears.

When a detail examination was performed and the function of the geared mechanism simulated, it turned out to be a clever astronomical calculator that could display the phase of the moon and the position of the sun in the Zodiac. It may also have displayed the motion of the planets. It was far beyond the technical abilities that the makers were thought to have possessed.

Kythera

Moving Blocks in Ancient Lebanon

There is a Roman temple at Baalbek, Lebanon that was built on the ruins of a far older structure of colossal stone blocks. These blocks were 14’ by 14’ by 68’ and may weigh up to 2,000 tons. Given all of our modern technology, it would be extremely difficult for us to move that piece of rock today. We have no idea of who carved them or how they moved them from the quarry to the temple location.

Baalbek Stones

Ancient Optics

There is plenty of evidence in museums that indicates many previous civilizations knew about the optical properties of glass lenses. There are ancient writings that have been very hard to translate because the archeologists refused to believe that older cultures which worked glass thousands of years ago could never have noticed how light passing thru glass can magnify the appearance of objects. Ancient records of planets and moon were written before modern astronomy that could only have been known through the use of telescopes. Tiny engravings were done that would have required magnification. Mention is made of devices that must have been primitive glasses to correct vision defects.

Telescopes

Steam Engines in Ancient Egypt

Hero of Alexandria created a crude steam turbine around 130 B.C. It was used to open temple doors. However, the ancients had plenty of slave labor so such devices never became serious energy sources. He also invented a water organ, a wind powered organ, a fire engine and a coin-operated device.

Egyptian Steam Engines

What is easily seen in the historical record if one pays attention begs the question of what other great technological capabilities the ancients had that we have lost knowledge of.

It seems to me that if we have an experience of something, even if we don’t remember it, it still leaves a residue that makes it easier for us to respond to and to believe something that resonates with the original experience. I was thinking about the Garden of Eden the other day and how it serves as a metaphor for a loss of something very important. I began to list the different experiences in the individual and the species that could contribute to a sense of “Things used to be better”. Here are some items from that list in roughly chronological order.

There was the development of language and awareness of self as separate from the other animals. This was a conceptual fall that accompanied the bigger and more sophisticated brains developed by our ancestors. A real loss of innocence.

Along with the development of language, we became aware of our own mortality and could anticipate our own death. The impact on the individual and on the group must have been enormous, another loss of innocence.

There was a massive volcanic eruption about 70,000 years ago. The climate changed in Africa, the original home of humanity. One of the results was the exodus of some humans from Africa into the wider world.

From about 70,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago, there was a warm spell between ice ages. Then the ice returned. But the memory of the warm and lush landscape was persevered in myths and legends.

When the hunter gatherers became farmers, they must have missed the casual nomadic life and preserved the memory in myths and legends. This may be the Garden that we were banished from.

When villages became cities, life was more interesting but much more complex. In the tribal villages, everyone worked together for survival. There was an intimacy and immediacy that disappeared when cities were born. Now people could not personally know everyone in the village, they had to rely on stereo types. No longer would feedback from friends and family guide behavior, there now had to be laws and enforcers. Villagers moving into the city would remember the simplicity and intimacy of the village life with nostalgia.

Archeology of the Middle East records some of first walled cities, weapons, evidence of slavery and other unsavory aspects of the ancient world. There is also evidence of repeated and severe climate change. It is not too difficult to see that when the rain fall dropped and the sun burned the earth, times got tough. And you built walls, forged weapons and killed or subjugated others to survive. The image of the flaming sword at the gates of Eden may have been a memory of the merciless sun that accompanied the drought. Of course, the survivors would lament the passing of the rain and the verdant landscape of yesterday.

Many civilizations have risen and fallen. Those who survived the collapse of a civilization would pass stories of the sophisticated and rich society that was gone to those born after the collapse. These stories would continue to be passed down from generation to generation as part of a nearly universal myth of the vanished Golden Age.

Before birth, life is good. Everything is provided and there are no demands for effort. The womb is flooded with endorphins. Somewhere at the base of our experience of self is the imprint of that wonderful time before expulsion from paradise into this world.

After childhood, when we have to work to survive, we remember the carefree days of youth.

As time passes, we tend to remember the positive events in our lives and to forget the negative events. This results in seeing the past as “better” than the present.

And as we get older, our senses fade and the world becomes less intense. We mellow emotionally. We recall the intensity and positive experiences of old. We mourn the loss of our own personal “Golden Age”.

So there are many reasons both for our species and ourselves to feel that “Things used to be better”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar

International Banking:

As the Templars spread their fortresses across Europe and the Holy lands, they offered commercial services to travelers. A pilgrim could deposit gold at a Templar stronghold in England and be issued a receipt, encrypted in a special Templar code. As the pilgrim traveled to the Holy Lands, they could stop at Templar installations on the way and withdraw portions of their deposit by presenting the receipt. This system was a forerunner of our modern international banking system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Knights_Templar#Bankers

Shroud of Turin:

The Shroud of Turin is a famous cloth with the image of a man imprinted in some mysterious fashion. Some say it is the burial shroud of Jesus himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_turin

A group of researchers came up with a fascinating theory about the Shroud. They covered people in paint and rolled them in cloth to try to duplicate the image. They found that the best position for creating the image was of a man in a bed with his back and knees propped up. They point out the lactic acid can stain cloth and that lactic acid is given off in sweat when a person is under extreme stress. Jacque de Molay, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar was captured and tortured in the Templar headquarters in Paris. The Templars used burial shrouds in their rituals and he could have been wrapped in one after the torture while he was being nursed back to health so he could stand trial. His lieutenant’s family had nursed him after he was tortured and they moved to Turin years later. They could have kept the cloth and discovered the image imprinted by lactic acid. The Shroud first appeared in Turin about that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin#Alternate_14th_century_origins

Oak Island:

Oak Island is a small island off the south coast of Nova Scotia. In 1795, Donald McGinnis found a tree with a block and tackle tied to it above a circular depression. When he dug under the tree, he found a layer of flagstones a few feet below the surface. They kept digging and discovered layers of logs every 10 feet.  Around 1803, a company excavated down to 90 feet, still finding layers of logs every 10 feet. They also found layers of coconut fiber. Later a drill brought up fragments of wood, coconut fiber, and coins. A written account from 1862 says that they found a carved stone at the 90 foot level that said that there was two million pounds buried forty feet below. Their excavation flooded to the 33 foot level and, unable to bail out the water, they abandoned the dig.

Subsequently, another company used a drill to penetrate further down and brought up pieces of metal and wood in multiple layers. Many different groups tried and failed to dig down to the treasure. It turned out that a clever system of tunnels had been dug so that if anyone sank a shaft, the sea would rush in at the high tide and flood the hole. The treasure of Oak Island remains hidden to this day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island

One theory of the origin of the treasure says that the Sinclair family with historical ties to the Templars, hid the treasure that was smuggled out of France in Scotland and then brought it to Oak Island. They had connections to a hydraulic engineer who could have devised the system of tunnels to flood any attempts to dig out the treasure.

http://www.atlantisrising.com/issue20/20templar.html

     Scholars agree that Plato wrote his own philosophical ideas into his story of Atlantis but argue to this day whether he based the story on actual places and events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis

     In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly published his famous work on Atlantis and launched the modern infatuation with the legend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Donnelly

     Since Donnely, various modern researchers have placed Atlantis all over the world. Some of the more interesting theories are mentioned below.

     If you take the pillars of Hercules to be the Straits of Gilbralter at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, then Atlantis would be out in the Atlantic ocean. This would be an island continent between Europe/Africa and the Americas. The problem with this idea is that the ocean floor in the Atlantic does contain a candidate sunken land mass.

     However, there was an island at entrance to Mediterranean Sea that was inhabited and sank 11,000 years ago at the end of the ice age.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0102_020103wiratlan.html

     When the water bust thru the Bosporus straits into the Black Sea about 7000 years ago, the water level rose and drown early settlements on its shores. The story of this event could have easily made it into the fertile cresent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea

      There was a round island in the Agean Sea east of Greece. It exploded in a huge blast in about 1500 BC. It destroyed the Cretean civilization and the tidal wave and ash swamped the eastern half of Crete. This is a lot closer to the origin of the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thera_eruption

     Helike was a city  on the Sea of Corinth that was a rival of Athens. An earthquake sank it in a single night about 10 years before Plato wrote the Dialog. This is very close in time and space to the origin of the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helike

     There have been claims that parts of Antarctica were ice free and habitable some ten thousand years ago and that Atlantis was located there.

http://www.apollonius.net/atlantis.html

     One group of researchers claim that Atlantis was Cuzco, Peru in the Andes Mountains of South America.

http://farshores.org/amjj0102.htm

     Cuba is the candidate of Andrew Collins. His is the best documented work on Atlantis that I have ever read. He makes a compelling case that Cuba was Atlantis.

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/news/Atlantisfile.htm

     Many different cultures have legends of great floods. The most famous being the great flood of Noah in the bible. This was borrowed from the earlier epic of Gilgamesh from Ancient Summer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh

     Most of the human race lives near sea level near the ocean and/or a major river. Flooding would be a universal experience.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/print/40
     There WAS a world wide flood at the end of the last Ice Age approximately 12,000 years ago.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0317_030317_iceshelf.html

     Sea level rose 66 feet in 200 years. This would have drowned out a lot of coastal low lands where many people lived. It is possible that there was a civilization at the level of Ancient Greeks or Egyptians. Most of the evidence would be under water now.

     I think that Atlantis resonates with the racial memory preserved in legends of the end of the last Ice Age when the ocean rose. Survivors fled to the highlands bringing fragments of their culture and laying the basis for the lost golden age legends that are also common in many ancient cultures.