As I observed in this post on Obama’s Pivot to the East, structure is important. Structure contains the culture of any movement of energy and culture doubles by multiply eight. Twice the structure containing culture represent 8 times the power of the movement the culture represents.
The structure in this tweet looks like a one-legged balance beam laying on the knife edge that is the Persian Gulf, held-up on the “heavy end” by the leg of Pakistan, the foundation of the Arabian Sea, with the muscle being South Asia (the home of the larges population of Muslims?). It is not so much a doubling of the population in any specific area, but the static forces on the structure itself.
As the Caliphate “finds” its way, its only advantage (as if the West will be able to take advantage of the position of the Caliphate) will be in its ability to take a little heat, cause by the weight of Geopolitics on the Geo-spacial areas of the world, off the that Geo-strategic area east of Afghanistan.
Structural-wise, it is the most contested area of the world largely supported by a leg, which, if not weak, whose force is made static by nuclear weapons.
Maybe balance is enough and the West has no real command of the situation, only some control over where it is postioned and who controls the Caliphate.