Afghanistan-Pakistan Border - The National Self Obliterates Children, Affirming the Illusion of a Line in the Dirt

Event Baseline: Pakistan conducted airstrikes on border provinces in Afghanistan. Afghan officials report that 13 people, including 11 children, were killed.

The division between 'Afghanistan' and 'Pakistan' is a construct of thought, a historical accident reinforced by flags and rituals. But the identification with this abstraction is so total that the death of 11 children is accepted as a necessary cost of defending the tribal boundary. The pilots who released the bombs were acting from a program that says 'defend the nation', blinding them to the simple fact that they are destroying the bodies of other humans on the other side of an invisible line.

This is the tyranny of belief. The national 'self' requires constant reinforcement through violent demonstrations of its supremacy. The airstrikes serve no strategic purpose other than to assert the reality of the Pakistani state against the Afghan state. The children's mangled bodies are merely a message in the semiotics of power. The leaders who ordered this, and the soldiers who executed it, are caught in the dream that their own survival depends on the degradation of the other.

The tragedy is that these two nations share the same psychological space. Their conflict is a projection of an internal division, a war between two illusory selves that do not actually exist as unified entities. If there were even a flicker of proprioception of thought, the sheer absurdity of killing children for a border would collapse the entire operation. The system is in total error, and it will continue to generate these atrocities until the core illusion of the separate national self is seen through.