frontières sans frontières

In last Sunday's New York Times, Scott Shane describes The War in Pashtunistan. The Pashtun people have occupied a broad area that spans the Afghan and Pakistani borders, a unity that predates the borders drawn by the British in 1893. Most of the Taliban are Pashtun and move within Pashtunistan as they need to. The American soldiers often find their pursuit of the bad guys halted because our troops have GPS units that can tell them where the border is located and our rules of engagement respect national borders.

The idea is simple once you think about it for a minute. While history is full of examples of conquering nations redrawing the national boundaries of those whom they (temporarily) control, natural ethnic 'nations' persist for generations, centuries, and millenia.
It gets really bad in some places, such as the lands known variously as Israel and Palestine or the many-named Congo regions or the Balkans. Groups who have occupied the lands for hundreds and even thousands of years contend with other groups who have been there for as long or as longer.
Yugoslavia was held together by Tito's force of will. When he died, the regional reverted to its Balkan nature.
Sometimes, nations get desperate to secure their borders. The BBC has a story about a wall that Egypt is build to keep people from Gaza from crossing the border. Walls are nothing new (Great Wall of China). This one on the Egypt-Gaza border is special, though. It's 18m deep, made of bomb-proof metal, and intended to prevent Gazans from tunneling into Egypt to acquire food, guns, and other essentials.
The arctic peoples, Saami in northern Europe, Inuit, Athabascan, and Aleuts in northern America, Yakuts and dozens more in Russia, by necessity of their nomadic lives, cannot afford to be too careful about national boundaries, a notion that often is problematic for their more southern governments.
Also in the Sunday Times, James Bradley recounts Teddy Roosevelt's role in the war between Japan and Russia in the early 20th century. Although Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in settling the war, the settlement may have set the stages for Japanese expansionism in the succeeding decades, resulting in the attack on Pearl Harbor and all that followed. Roosevelt brokered a deal that effectively erased Korea as an independent nation, giving control to Japan, and establishing Japan as Asia's natural leader.
An essential part of war, diplomacy, and pretty much everything else in life is understanding what's most important to the other guy. We easily fall in the thinking-trap that what motivates us also motivates other people. We assume that murderers are deterred by the threat of capital punishment. We assume that all groups aspire to be democratic republics, respecters of borders, human rights, and the power of the Christmas message.

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The other may have a completely different world view. We might disagree, even to the point of believing that the other is beyond redemption, but, if we ignore how the other sees the world, we do so at our great peril.