[LINK] "Welcome, Talibanistan?"

[rfmcdonald]

Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs considers if the survival of the Taliban, and the collapse of state authority in much of Pakistan and Afghanistan, means a new country is set to form.

In 2001, a U.S.-led coalition threw the Taliban out of Kabul, their removal from power the price they paid for the sanctuary they had provided to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But in the decade and a half since, the military might of the West has been unable to eradicate the Islamist movement from the land it had supposedly liberated.

Now the ISAF task force has wound down, and the Taliban are still around, their estimated 60,000 fighters largely in control of the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan — the government of which they also fight.

Although it is unlikely that they will defeat either government (at least any time soon), their presence on both sides of the so-called Durand Line that is the official Af-Pak border, has in places rendered it as meaningless as the Syrian-Iraqi border straddled by Islamic State.

However, most cartographers still obligingly trace the Durand Line across any new map of the area. So it is a bit of a shock to see this map, which overlays the official map with the actual situation on the ground.

But maybe this is what the official cartography for the region will look like, some years hence. Assuming the state structures currently holding sway from Kabul and Islamabad don't disintegrate, nor manage to regain control over the border area, a logical accommodation could be to recognize the writ of the Taliban over the area where they rule the roost. Et voila, Talibanistan, nestled between a reduced Afghanistan and Pakistan. Born out of a bloody revolution, just like France. Although its slogan is unlikely to be liberté, égalité, fraternité.