So here we are again. Pakistan, that restless nuclear-armed state, has launched deadly air strikes into Afghanistan. The Taliban government in Kabul is incandescent with rage.
Downing Street has issued the standard warning of regional spill-over. And the world yawns. But we should not yawn.
We should see this for what it is: another chapter in the long, bloody history of great powers flailing at the Pashtun tribesmen. Pakistan’s generals, for all their talk of counter-terrorism, are playing a game their colonial predecessors played, and lost. The British Empire tried to pacify the frontier with Maxim guns and political agents.
They failed. The Soviet Union tried with helicopter gunships and Spetsnaz. They failed.
America tried with drones and special forces. They failed. And now Pakistan, a state with a fractured economy and a population half under the age of 25, thinks it can succeed where empires crumbled.
It is the hubris of the late-imperial mind, the belief that superior firepower can compensate for a lack of political imagination. The UK warns of regional war. But the region is already a warzone.
The real question is whether Pakistan’s generals understand that every bomb they drop in Afghanistan is a recruitment poster for the next insurgency. The Pashtun have long memories. They remember the British.
They remember the Soviets. And they will remember the Pakistan Air Force’s sorties of 2025. We are watching not a counter-terrorism operation, but a slow-motion repeat of the Great Game, with the same players, the same mistakes, and the same tragic end.
