The Great Game Continues

Rudyard Kipling, Britain’s bard of subcontinental colonialism, rhymes in dialect about life and death north of the Khyber.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, 

And the women come out to cut up what remains, 

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains 

And go to your gawd like a soldier.

It seems every great power has to experience an Afghan ‘adventure.’ China’s turn is next.