Famously attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, by General Douglas MacArthur and at the start of the movie, Blackhawk Down, it was actually coined in the 20th century by the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana.

====================

So even as we remembered ANZAC day here another war was cooking up on the other side of the world between two nuclear-armed nations, India and Pakistan.

Community Notes to the rescue on X. Even so, the real story is bad enough:

Military tensions are rising between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan after Islamic terrorists massacred 26 people in the Indian province of Kashmir. “The country has closed its main border crossing with Pakistan, expelled its military diplomats and suspended a landmark water-sharing treaty.
….
On Tuesday, terrorists gunned down 25 Indians and a Nepalese citizen at a popular holiday destination in the northern Indian region of Kashmir. The gunmen separated Hindus and Christians from Muslims before shooting them at point-blank range. The attackers were seen filming their horrific murders.

In other words the usual Islamic Jihadist shit, which has been seen many times before:

In September 2013, at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, Muslims murdered people who couldn’t answer questions about Islam. In June 2014, Muslims murdered people who could not pass an Islam quiz. In November 2014, Muslims murdered 28 non-Muslims who couldn’t recite Qur’an verses. In April 2015, Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar” stormed Garissa University College, and only shot those who couldn’t recite Qur’an.

In this case the group has ties to Pakistan, including almost certainly to its shadowy and infamous security group, the ISI (Inter Service intelligence), which has been playing these arms-length, plausible-deniability games for a long time between Islamic terrorists and other nations:

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which also perpetrated the 2008 Mumbai attack, has training camps near the Indian and Afghan borders. Besides receiving support from Pakistani authorities, the terrorist group also has close operational ties with Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, reports say.

There are also reports of connections to Hamas, which would hardly be a surprise.

So where could this end? Nuclear war? Doubtful, for the same reasons that held the USSR and USA in check during the Cold War. You just cannot win a nuclear war, as some of the architects of the Manhattan Project foresaw eighty years ago.

But the two nations have fought four fairly deadly conventional wars before, the worst being the original one in 1947-48 as Pakistan separated from India in the wake of the departure of the British from their long-held colony. A sign of geo-political change over the decades is that as recently as the 1971 war, the USA was backing Pakistan, with advisors like famous test and WWII combat pilot Chuck Yeager, acting as advisors to the Pakistani air force (and in Yeager’s case, rumoured to have done more than just “advise”) as they flew their American jet fighters against Indian MIGS. India’s stance was famously “non-aligned” during the Cold War but they bought their weapons from the USSR, hence the USA supplied Pakistan.

There was also always a stronger connection between the Pakistan and British military than in the case of India (although in the 1971 war the Indian Air Force flew the famous Hawker Hunter jet fighter while the Pakistan Air Force flew Canberra bombers); the rejection of colonialism was not as strong in Pakistan and they feared their huge neighbour. The traces of British military influence show up to this day in the Pakistan military.

But nowadays relations between the USA and India are very warm – while those with Pakistan have cooled to icy levels, especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the pursuit of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan when Osama Bin Laden escaped and was then found and killed years later in Pakistan. The connections between the ISI and these groups was a constant source of friction with America. But even before then the US had cancelled a sale of F-16’s in the 1990’s (which New Zealand almost benefited from) due to the development of a nuclear weapons program, which came to fruition with underground tests in 1998 of not just one atomic weapon but five at the same time (and they were boosted, significantly increasing their power). As America has drifted away the Chinese have snuggled closer, they also having long-standing frictions (and small wars) with India.

Perhaps the most important change now is that the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is very different to most of his predecessors, bringing to the fight his own brand of religious fanaticism, in this case Hinduism. Where previous Indian leaders tried, in both word and deed, to tie together India’s own religious and ethnic factions (about 15% of Indians are Muslim) and to tamp down the hatreds, Modi’s rise to power has been based on Hindu triumphalism and supremacy, which has frightened not just Muslims but Christians and even other Hindus in the country.

Given the staggering death toll from Hindu-Muslim clashes during the 1947-48 partition (that article points out that the two groups had strongly co-mingled for centuries before this), estimated at somewhere between one and two million, given the brutality of the religious hatred between them…

Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

… and the intensity of it that exists to this day, it’s entirely possible that mutually assured destruction is what both religious groups desire if one cannot prevail and death awaits.