The news arrives with the sickening familiarity of a colonial-era telegram: Pakistan launches air strikes on Afghan soil, and Whitehall wrings its hands in feigned surprise. Britain urges restraint, as if the British Empire had not spent a century drawing lines in the sand and then complaining when border tribesmen walked across them. This is not a crisis of the moment.
It is the inevitable consequence of a region still bleeding from the botched surgery of decolonisation and the subsequent meddling of superpowers. To understand the present farce, one must look to the recurring tragedy of the Durand Line, the Frankenstein’s monster of the 1893 boundary that Pakistan insists is a border and Afghanistan has never recognised. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state with an identity crisis that would make a Freudian patient blush, now lashes out at its neighbour under the pretext of hunting terrorists.
But who, pray, is the terrorist? The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which Islamabad accuses of operating from Afghan sanctuaries, is a baleful creation of the very intelligence agencies that now bomb its camps. It is a familiar story: the monster turns on its maker, and the maker demands the neighbour pay the price.
Britain’s call for restraint is a ritual incantation, empty as a Viceroy’s promise. London, having left the region in a state of deliberate chaos at Partition, now assumes the posture of the wise elder. It is a role for which it has no moral standing.
Yet the risk of regional war is real. Pakistan’s military, tethered to a narrative of perpetual victimhood and a fetish for ‘strategic depth’, seems willing to gamble with fire. Afghanistan’s Taliban government, meanwhile, is a rump state with delusions of Islamic emirate glory, now forced to confront its own inability to control its territory.
India, that sleeping giant in the east, watches with predatory interest. And China, the region’s new hegemon, wants nothing more than stability for its Belt and Road corridors. The tragedy is that no one in this drama is innocent.
Pakistan has long treated Afghanistan as a strategic plaything, using militant proxies to undermine Kabul. Afghanistan, for its part, has never fully accepted the Durand Line, a grievance that festers like an unhealed wound. Britain, the original cartographer of this disaster, now has the audacity to appear surprised.
The parallels to the 19th-century ‘Great Game’ are too obvious to ignore, but they are also too troubling to dismiss. Then, as now, the region was a chessboard for larger powers. Then, as now, the pawns included tribes and villages and families who would be bombed into extinction.
The difference is that today the players have nukes and drones. There is a decadence in this crisis, a sense that history has become a Groundhog Day of violence, with each generation convinced it is fighting a final war. But there is no final war.
There is only the next iteration, the next air strike, the next call for restraint. Intellectual decadence lies in believing we can outthink history. We cannot.
The only honest response is to admit that the region is damned by its past and its geography, and that Britain’s advice, however well-meaning, is the bleating of a retired imperialist who has long since pawned his swords. Afghanistan and Pakistan will continue their dance of death, because neither can afford to stop. And Britain will continue to urge restraint, because that is what former empires do: they pretend they have a lesson to teach, when in fact they have only a mess to inherit.
The risk of regional war is high. But it has always been high. The only question is whether the West has the fortitude to face the truth, or whether it will content itself with press releases and ‘deep concern’.
Given the track record, I suspect the latter.
