text: Who or what will be the Gavrilo Princip that lights the fuse to the Indo-Pakistan powderkeg? | The Curmudgeon's Attic
  Who or what will be the Gavrilo Princip that lights the fuse to the Indo-Pakistan powderkeg?
  Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb student, assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on June 28, 1914. By the end of the year, practically all of Europe and much of the Mediterranean, was embroiled in a conflict, begun around 1870 with the unification of Germany, that wouldn't ultimately be resolved until 1945.
  Of course, Princip was nothing more or less than a catalyst for the inevitable. The several empires of the European continent, cuthroatedly competing amongst each other for dominance, were destined to have diplomatic disputes turn into orgies of death and destruction. Fran Ferdinand's assassination did nothing but provide a reason to do what had all along been inevitable and desired.
  South Asia is brimming with the same instability and competitive fire as was Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would be trite to say Kashmir, on the border between Pakistan and India, is analogous to the Balkans in the late nineteenth century. There are similarities, but history never cleanly repeats; at best, it only rhymes. But Kashmir will likely play a significant role in whatever provocation provides the catalyst for the Indo-Pakistan conflict, begun in 1947 with the partition and continuing until today, to erupt in all-out war.
  The American empire would like nothing more than to see a full-scale conflict on the Indian sub-continent which it can then exploit to its advantage to feed its expansionistic impulses. A recent article on Bloomberg by Pankaj Mishra proclaimed that the US is to blame if India and Pakistan come to nuclear blows. Of course the US would be to blame. A nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan is precisely what would be most advantageous for the expansion of the American empire, so that's precisely what the American empire hopes will happen, and is even now, doing everything it can reasonably get away with to ensure it will happen. Ideally, the conflict would stalemate at a level of death and destruction sufficient to leave both sides so desolate and incapable of defense against third-parties that they will practically plead with America to enter and impose its will. Voila! The sun that didn't set on the British Empire would no longer set on its Americanized version.
  There are other ways that the American empire might continue its Asian expansion, begun in Afghanistan, eastward. Pakistan might do something, or America might conjure an instigation, that justifies in the public mind an American-Pakistan war, which is perhaps a more likely scenario than an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war. I've already explained that the real reason for the Bin Laden raid was to provoke Pakistan so that it would do something to justify America acting on its expansionistic impulses.
  Regardless, the simple truth is that the American empire is relentlessly creeping eastward towards the Indian sub-continent. Empires travel like water flowing downhill, taking the path of least resistance. The empire doesn't care how it expands its reach across south Asia; it just cares that it does, so spreading eastward is what it will do, save the intervention of some greater power (China?) that checks its advance, or some nascent weakness (insolvency?) that causes it to pull back on its own accord.