The Middle East 'grew' in the early 00s, for the reasons you probably expect. The Bush administration needed a euphemism for Muslim nations.
> The Greater Middle East, is a geo-political term, introduced in March 2004 in a paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the U.S. administration's preparatory work for the G8 summit of June 2004, denoting a vaguely defined region that includes the Arab world plus Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey.[1] The paper presented a proposal for sweeping change in the way the West deals with the Middle East and North Africa.[2][3] Previously, by Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Greater Middle East had been defined as the MENA region together with Central Asia and the Caucasus.[4]
> The future of this Greater Middle East has sometimes been referred to as the "new Middle East", first so by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in Dubai in June 2006 presented the second-term Bush administration's vision for the region's future. Rice said would be achieved through 'constructive chaos', a phrase she repeated a few weeks later during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the 2006 Lebanon War had broken out; the meaning of this phrase and the Bush administration's vision have been much debated since.[5][6][7] The efforts to achieve this new Middle East are sometimes called "The Great Middle East Project".[8][9]
I had an argument the other day with a guy refering to Morocco as part of the Middle East. It seemed mind-boggling to me you'd put a country West of Portugal in that category. I then discovered it had become common parlance in the US for anything that spoke Arabic or Persian.
So, the Middle East includes Afghanistan now? I swear the borders seem to advance every year.