The news reaches us from the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan: Taliban fighters have struck at Pakistani positions, and Whitehall, in a state of high dudgeon, has urged restraint. Restraint, they say, as if the players in this game were sensible Victorians in a dispute over a gazebo. Let us be clear about what we are witnessing.
This is not a border skirmish. This is a slow motion car crash involving two unstable states, one of which possesses a nuclear arsenal large enough to turn the Indus Valley into a parking lot. The Taliban, emboldened by their victory in Kabul, now press eastward.
Pakistan, rattled by a collapsing economy and a frayed military morale, sees the spectre of a two front war: against India in the east, against the Taliban in the west. And the British government, which spent two decades trying to pacify this very region, now offers little more than a diplomatic sounding board. Rome, one recalls, had its own border troubles with Parthia.
But Rome did not have to worry about atomic weapons in the hands of a feverish potentate. The real question is not whether the Taliban can take a few Pakistani border posts. They can.
The question is whether General Bajwa or his successor, facing a humiliating reverse, will be tempted to reach for the ultimate instrument of desperation. Nuclear powers do not lose conventional wars gracefully. They escalate.
And the world, distracted by the Ukraine and the Middle East, is not paying attention to the Hindu Kush. But it should be. For history is not merely a sequence of events; it is a pattern.
And the pattern here is that of a powder keg. One spark, one miscalculation, one general with a finger on a trigger, and the twenty first century will have its Sarajevo. The West urges restraint.
They might as well urge the tide not to come in. The forces here are not rational. They are ideological, wounded, and desperate.
And that is what makes them so very dangerous.
