The latest news from the subcontinent is a grim reminder that history, far from ending, is merely repeating itself with increasingly tedious violence. Pakistan’s air strikes on Afghan territory, ostensibly targeting militant hideouts, have predictably triggered a chorus of international dismay, with Her Majesty’s Government issuing a prim call for restraint. One cannot help but roll one’s eyes at the sheer predictability of it all.
The borderlands of the Durand Line have been a cauldron of chaos since the days of the Raj, and the current imbroglio is merely the latest act in a centuries-old tragedy. The Pakistani establishment, obsessed with strategic depth in Afghanistan, is playing a game that assumes the rules of the eighteenth century still apply. But the world has changed, or at least it ought to have.
The notion that you can bomb your way to stability in the Hindu Kush is as intellectually bankrupt as the idea that the British Empire could pacify the same region with Maxim guns. What we are witnessing is not strategy but a kind of neurotic reflex, a twitching of national muscle memory that cannot adapt to a multipolar world where drones and diplomacy must coexist. The call for restraint from London is well-meaning but ultimately toothless, a diplomatic nicety that will be ignored in the dust and noise of realpolitik.
The real issue here is the profound intellectual decadence of our elites, who cannot conceive of a solution beyond the kinetic. They reach for the bomb because they have run out of ideas. And so the cycle continues: air strikes, condemnations, more air strikes.
A perpetual motion machine of futility. If there is a lesson from the fall of Rome, it is that empires decline when they forget how to think. Pakistan, Afghanistan, and indeed the Western powers that wring their hands are all suffering from this same malady: a poverty of imagination in foreign policy.
Until we recover the art of statecraft, we will be doomed to relive the same bloody farce on the Durand Line.
