National borders

Borders are a European invention, a line drawn in the sand. Mostly they don't give much substance to linguistic and national reason. Nomads abhor them, as to them, borders don't exist. Who can say exactly where the border between Mali and Algeria is, deep in the Sahara? Perhaps only the Taureg knows, deriving a satisfaction when moving his flock from one nation to another with no one around for hundreds of square miles.
European drawn borders are the source or fuel or many current conflicts. A great example is Iraq, a creation of those wonderful fuckersup of everything, the Brits. After WW I ended, the Ottoman empire was broken up. The League of Nations created the concept of mandates, whereby "enlightened" European nations would kind of guide a backward primitive nation towards statehood. A rather ethnocentric excercise, considering the high state of medieval Islamic culture.(Major cities, like Baghdad had running water at a time when the English were throwing their feces out the window in the street). Anyway, they had to give Lebanon and Syria to the French, so they created Iraq out of thin air. The name existed, two Iraqs, actually, Iraq Ajami which included western Iran, and Iraq Arabi, where the Arabic language was dominant. Although Baghdad served for years as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, its culture was very much influence by Persia. So when the Brits drew lines in the sand after 1918, they included in their Iraq, 3 very different areas,each having the qualifications for statehood. A Shia,and Iranian inluenced south(the main Shia holy places are in the south of Iraq. A Sunni central area and desert in the west and a Kurdish north. (Kurds are not Semites, but Indo Iranian people) A recipe for disaster for sure. As King they appointed Faisal ibn Hussein ibn Ali al Hashimi, one of the sons of the Sharif of Mecca.( The another son, Abdullah became King of another British creation, TransJordan) Then of course Palestine, which Arabs always considered part of Syria. They promised it to the The Sharif o Mecca and his sons, and also, in the Balfour Declaration, to Chaim Weitzman and his Zionists. In the end, they kept it for themselves, greatly pissing off both Arabs and Jews and starting the ball rolling for the current Middle Eastern crisis.
In the 19th century, in order to secure India from Russian expansion in Central Asia, the Brits began to mess with the inner affairs of Afghanistan. They fought three wars up there against the tribesmen of Afghanistan and, as always, started drawing lines. They took away the Khyber pass and Peshawar from the Afghan kingdom and made it part of India, they peeled off the Muslim section of Kashmir from Afghan control, again to be part of India. Much of what today is Pakistan is made up of territories taken from the Afghanis. So, the Northwest Frontier provinces(NWFP) that now provide sanctuary for bin Laden and Al Qaida, are technically considered part of Afghanistan and inhabited by Pashtun tribes. Pashtuns are majority tribe of Afghanistan and have always provided the rulers. No wonder Osama feels at home up in those hills. The Islamabad government of Pakistan has little or no control up there, and even though they take American monies and arms, have little desire to antagonize these tribes. So its another border dispute we have gotten drawn into, that affords no real solution. All our presence does up there is piss off the inhabitants and, judging from the experience of the British(3 Afghan wars) and the Soviets( the 70's) its a losing propostion. When will we ever learn.