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CNN Saturday Morning News

Interview With Jack Shroder

Aired October 20, 2001 - 08:42   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: As the U.S. attacks Afghanistan from the air and now from the ground, it's useful to take a step back and take a closer look at the actual lay of the land. The region is a complex maze of ethnic and geopolitical relationships that have evolved over hundreds of years.

CNN's Joie Chen takes a closer look at this.

JOIE CHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: With us this hour, Professor Jack Shroder, geology and geography professor from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has traveled extensively in Afghanistan and has helped to map out that terrain that you've heard something about.

Professor, we always hear about there just being one pass, the Khyber Pass, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But really there are many ways out.

JACK SHRODER, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA: Exactly. The Duran line that was drawn by the British originally runs all along this area. The higher parts have high passes and the lower parts have many, many hundreds of low passes. So the border is really a sieve.

And that Duran line doesn't really exist on the ground. People walk back and forth quite easily across a lot of that. In the upper parts, the higher passes, are hard to get over in the wintertime, but you -- this has been a gun smuggling route and a people smuggling route for centuries.

CHEN: And right now it becomes particularly important how porous that border is because of what reason?

SHRODER: Well, in fact, Osama bin Laden could walk into Pakistan and probably nobody would notice. It's an extremely porous border. Guns have been going back and forth. People have been going back and forth and there are hundreds of different places to do it and it's not controlled by anybody. The only control is right here on the Khyber Pass. But you can see all these little places that I'm marking, those are all other passes, four wheel drive tracks, walking trails. There are just hundreds of these places to go across.

CHEN: When you say that they are passes, they might not be passes in the conventional sense -- if you could mark some of those for us again. SHRODER: Well, this one is a low pass. Khyber is actually a low pass, as well. That one's a little higher right there. This one's a little higher here. Some are high, some are low. The further north you go, the higher they are and the snowier they are. The further southwest you go the lower and drier they are. It's a desert and it's hard to get across unless you have water, but it certainly can be done.

CHEN: When you talk about these passes, I mean are they passes in the sense that there's a roadway, there's a gate, there's...

SHRODER: Well, this is, the Khyber Pass is paved. This one is dirt. That one is dirt. That one is dirt. And some of them barely exist. The dirt is really nothing more than a trail.

CHEN: We have emphasized, of course, this area near the Khyber Pass. But there are other parts of Afghanistan as well, if we could look at some of the other images that you have.

SHRODER: Yes, this is the extreme southwestern Afghanistan in Baluchistan that you can see here on the screen. This is the border of Afghanistan right here and you can see this area is all sand dunes. That's not a good place to walk. You can see a trail coming across here, but you could equally well drive a jeep across any one of these places or walk if you had water, and you wouldn't have any problems getting across.

CHEN: Other images that we have here, one of an area...

SHRODER: Well, this is the northern part of Afghanistan and this is the Amu Darya River. North is the old central Asian Soviet republics; south, Mazir-e Sharif; Konduz over here, and other areas like that. This border is a water border and has been crossed by people swimming. They cross on horseback sometimes. There are a few ferries across and so on. But that's a very bad border. The Soviets considered that, the Russians considered that a very bad place for a border. They really wanted the border through the Hindu Kush, the top of the mountains, and that, in fact, might come to pass some time in the future because this is a different ethnic group than the south.

CHEN: There is also, you have, I think, a map of migration within the region.

SHRODER: Yes. And here it is. The Duran line again, the one that was drawn by the British a long time ago, that goes up through here like this. That line only exists as a line on a map because this is the Pashtun tribal territory, what they would like to call Pashtunistan. They'd like their own country divided from Pakistan over here and Afghanistan over here. And as you can see by the arrows on here, the Pashtuns, that's summer pasture for the Pashtuns and then they go back here in the wintertime.

So they've crossed that border with impunity for centuries.

CHEN: You have mentioned the Pashtuns. Those are the dominant minority group within Afghanistan, where there are so many minority groups.

SHRODER: That's the dominant minority group and is the basis for Taliban. The Pashtuns are extremely war like, very hearty people. They are actually a fun people to be with. But they, right now, are dominated by Taliban, which is another story altogether. But yes, the Pashtuns are now trying to control Kabul, the Pashtun control of Kabul, and that doesn't go down with the many, many other ethnic groups of the Northern Alliance and the Hazaras in the central part of the country. They are, the Hazaras are Shiites and the others are Sunnis, as are the Pashtuns.

But these different ethnic groups and these different sects of Islam often go to war with each other. And so Taliban being this Pashtun dominant group controlling Kabul is a big problem to these other ethnic groups.

CHEN: The final word on this, and I guess it'll have to be a quick one, is this. If you are a military planner, an intelligence planner looking at all these things, it is a multitude of things. It's not just the ethnic groups, it's the geography, it's the geology, in fact, for all of this.

SHRODER: Yes, it is. And, in fact, the problem with crossing back and forth across the border is that the Pakistani military is actually outside the Pashtun edge just as whoever comes in from the north is going to have a problem going into that part of Pashtunistan, too. The Pashtuns are very warlike and very difficult to deal with.

CHEN: We appreciate your insight.

Professor Jack Shroder of the University of Nebraska at Omaha with us in the studio today. Thank you.

SHRODER: Thank you very much.

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