So the news arrives from the Khyber Pass: Pakistan, that troubled nuclear-armed scion of the Raj, has launched air strikes into Afghanistan. The government in Kabul speaks of 46 dead, mostly women and children. The British Foreign Office, ever the anxious sentinel, warns of a 'regional domino effect.' Dominic Raab's successor utters the rote pieties about restraint and civilian casualties. But what we are really watching is the slow, grinding collapse of the Westphalian order in South Asia, a process that echoes the disintegration of frontiers in the late Roman Empire.
Consider the historical parallels. When the Roman frontier on the Danube began to fray, the Empire did not simply withdraw. It lashed out, launching punitive expeditions against the Marcomanni and the Quadi, only to see the violence metastasise. Today, Pakistan's actions follow the same logic. The Taliban government in Kabul harbours the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the very group that has waged a bloody insurgency against Islamabad for years. Pakistan's patience has run out. It now treats Afghan soil as a legitimate battlespace, a precedent that will haunt every capital from Delhi to London.
The 'domino effect' is real but misunderstood. It is not that war will spread like a chain reaction of falling tiles. Rather, we will see a proliferation of unilateral action, a rejection of the polite fictions of international law. If Pakistan can bomb Afghanistan, why can Turkey not bomb Syria? Why can Iran not strike Balochistan? The Victorian-era 'Great Game' was at least conducted by gentlemen who observed certain rules. Today, we have a free-for-all, a Hobbesian war of all against all, dressed up in the rhetoric of counterterrorism.
And what of the intellectual decadence that surrounds this? Our chattering classes will wring their hands and demand 'dialogue' and 'de-escalation.' They will cite the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter, as if these parchment barriers have ever stopped a determined state. The reality is that Pakistan is acting out of a desperate, existential logic. The TTP has killed thousands of Pakistanis. The Afghan Taliban, despite promises to the contrary, refuses to rein them in. What would the pundits have Pakistan do? Nothing? Absurd.
The British warning is typical of our era: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We no longer have the power to enforce our will, only the pretension to moralise. Our Empire is long gone, and we are left with the hollow rhetoric of 'rules-based order' while the real powers—Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India—pursue their own brutal realpolitik.
One cannot help but think of the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who described the barbarian incursions of the 4th century with a mixture of horror and resignation. We are living through a similar age. The borders are bleeding. The centre cannot hold. And the next domino to fall will not be a country, but the very idea that the nation state can contain the chaos.
Pakistan's air strikes are not a mistake. They are a symptom. And the patient is the modern international system, now in its terminal decline.
