Another day, another aerial bombardment in the tribal badlands that straddle the Durand Line. Pakistani airstrikes have reportedly killed 28 Afghan civilians, prompting the usual ritual of diplomatic outrage. The Foreign Office in Kabul demands UN accountability. One can almost hear the murmured platitudes from Geneva, the solemn statements from Brussels, the weary nods from Washington. The tragedy is not merely the 28 dead souls. It is the grotesque parody of international order that follows.
We have seen this before. It is the same script that played out in the Balkans, in Iraq, in Libya. A great power or its proxy rains down death from the sky, and then the charade of accountability begins. The victims are counted, the condemnations are issued, and the cycle continues. The problem is not that Pakistan violates Afghan sovereignty. It is that we pretend sovereignty has any meaning left in these hinterlands of the new Great Game.
The Victorians understood the frontier. They knew that the border between British India and Afghanistan was a fiction maintained by bayonets and bribes. Today, we use drones and airstrikes. The technology has changed, but the logic remains the same. The Pashtun tribes care little for the cartographic niceties of a line drawn by a British civil servant in 1893. They cross it for trade, for refuge, for war. And when the modern state responds with bombs, it is not the Taliban who die. It is the farmers, the children, the elderly.
The demand for UN accountability is a farce. The United Nations is a talking shop for the very powers that profit from this disorder. It cannot hold Pakistan accountable because Pakistan is a necessary agent in the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. It cannot hold the United States accountable because America is the architect of the whole mess. So the bodies pile up, and the statements are drafted, and the world moves on.
I am reminded of the Roman Empire on its deathbed. The barbarians were at the gates, but the Senate still debated the finer points of maritime law. We have become a civilisation of lawyers and bureaucrats, incapable of the brutal honesty that characterised our forebears. The British Raj did not pretend its actions were humanitarian. It conquered, it punished, it collected taxes. Today, we bomb and then we mourn. It is a decadence that would make Gibbon weep.
The real lesson here is not about Pakistan or Afghanistan. It is about the hollowing out of the nation state. When borders mean nothing, when sovereignty is conditional on the whims of great powers, then violence becomes the only currency that matters. The 28 dead Afghans are not the victims of a rogue airstrike. They are the victims of a world order that has lost its moral compass and its political will.
So what is to be done? Nothing, probably. The cycle will continue. Pakistan will deny responsibility, the UN will issue a report, and the West will tut-tut from a safe distance. And then the next airstrike will come. Because that is what happens when you build your foreign policy on a foundation of lies and hypocrisy. The only thing that will stop the bombs is a return to honesty. Admit that the frontier is a war zone. Admit that the state is a fiction. Admit that we are all, in the end, barbarians.
