So the sabres rattle once more along the Durand Line. Pakistan, in a fit of pique or perhaps desperation, has launched air strikes inside Afghanistan. The official line, as always, is that these are ‘precision counterterrorism operations’. But let us not mince words: this is an act of war against a sovereign state, however threadbare that sovereignty may be.
We are told that the targets were Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) hideouts. Never mind that the TTP and the Afghan Taliban are fraternal twins, separated only by a border that exists largely on maps. The Afghan Taliban, now the de facto government in Kabul, cannot be seen to tolerate such violations of their airspace without response. And so we have the makings of a full-blown crisis.
The parallels with the late Roman Empire are too delicious to ignore. There, too, the centre could no longer control its peripheries. Frontier provinces would launch punitive expeditions against barbarian neighbours without central approval, dragging the whole empire into costly wars. Today, Islamabad acts unilaterally, knowing full well that the international community has neither the stomach nor the leverage to intervene. The United States, still smarting from its own Afghan debacle, will tut-tut and perhaps impose symbolic sanctions. China will call for restraint while quietly arming both sides.
But the deeper question is one of national identity. Pakistan was carved out as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, but its raison d’être has always been haunted by the ghost of Afghanistan. The Pashtun question, the Kashmir dispute, the spectre of a ‘greater Pakhtunistan’ these are the unresolved tensions that fester beneath the surface. Every air strike, every border skirmish, is a reminder that the nation-state system imposed on this region by the British is a brittle facade.
Intellectually, we have been here before. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 triggered a chain of events that led to the rise of global jihadism. The American invasion in 2001 did the same. Now Pakistan, a nuclear-armed power, is bombing its neighbour. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer, sadly, is everything. This is not a temporary flare-up. This is the symptom of a deeper malady: the slow rot of state authority, the failure of diplomacy, and the seductive allure of military solutions. We are witnessing the decadence of the modern nation-state, where borders are both sacrosanct and meaningless. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that the ‘Great Game’ required subtlety. We, it seems, have forgotten that lesson.
One can only hope that cooler heads prevail before this powder keg ignites a regional war. But hope, as the Romans learned, is not a strategy.
