The Great Game in the 21st Century

J E Pournell of Chaos Manor makes the following introduction (which is to good to pass up)

If you lie flattened on Pakistan's plains
And a P-wave comes by, to mix gravel and brains
Just scroll to Dow's website, for there Seitz explains
Why the Hindu Kush is raining boulders
scroll to near the bottom - I assume Kipling would not mind.


To an excellent article on the Pakistan earthquakes by Russell Seitz in the Opnion Journal

The first and last paragraphs

When Kipling was a cub reporter in Lahore, the area struck by Saturday's earthquake was a blank on the map separating British India from the "Independent Khanates of Chinese Turkistan." Washington scarcely cared if the Victorian Empire needed a weapon of mass destruction called the Maxim gun to deter hotheads along the Northwest Frontier, for it was a long way from anywhere. Now America's concerns are more ecumenical and acute: Pakistan's 1998 bomb test conjoined the world's three great monotheistic religions in a nuclear trinity (to say nothing of the polytheistic Hindus nearby, with their own nuclear saga).


Mountains like the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush will go on rising whether borders or empires stand or fall, and the erosive force of the Indus River will sweep away whatever the angry earth throws down as the tectonic plates continue their collision. Saturday's quake was as powerful as the one that leveled San Francisco, but one of these centuries the rafting together of the Asian and Indus plates will rock the subcontinent with quakes a hundred times stronger, as it has before. It may take a harder shock than Saturday's to persuade the subcontinent's capitals to recognize that, partition notwithstanding, they are in the same tectonic boat. The region's conflicts may seem intractable, but the Earth is ever patient in its diplomacy. The civilizations of South Asia have a half-billion years' grace in which to resolve their age-old differences before the slow tectonic violence that has put fossil seashells atop Everest crumples Ceylon--unserendipitously--into the mountainous seashore of Tibet.

And there is lots of good stuff in between.





ALSO: We should remember the victims of the earthquake in Pakistan in our prayers and remember to contribute the relief effort if you can.