[From the surface, all that is visible are the funnels, the massive, carefully sculpted wind catchers that continue to bring fresh, albeit cold, air to the three-hundred-kilometer maze below. Few of the quarter million people who once inhabited this hand-carved marvel of engineering have remained. Some stay to encourage the small but growing tourist trade. Some are here as custodians, living on the pension that goes with UNESCO’s renewed World Heritage Program. Some, like Ahmed Farahnakian, formerly Major Farahnakian of the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps Air Force, have nowhere else to go.]

That’s a pretty nice opening.

This chapter’s pretty simple. The idea is, India and Pakistan were at each other’s throats and had nukes, so they also worked really hard to keep the peace. Meanwhile, Iran and Pakistan weren’t on terrible terms, so when things heated up, they didn’t have the mechanisms in place to work things out and end up nuking each other.

The infection hadn’t hit us as hard as some other countries. Our land was very mountainous. Transportation was difficult. Our population was relatively small; given the size of our country and when you consider that many of our cities could be easily isolated by a proportionately large military, it is not difficult to see how optimistic our leadership was.

Also, all the guns they have. I’m not sure if they actually have more guns than we do or what, but certainly there seem to be more in actual use and fewer that are ridiculous showpieces.

But, just like the problem everywhere, you really can’t defend against billions of zombies. Waves of refugees are coming from Pakistan into Iran.

The majority of refugees came from India, just passing through Pakistan in an attempt to reach someplace safe. Those in Islamabad were quite willing to let them go. Better to pass the problem along to another nation than have to deal with it themselves.

This is where it starts to break down. We know what the flow of refugees does from an earlier chapter – if a trip is several days, some people will die the start of it. Then people start getting infected at that point and then die further in. Then those new zombies infect people even closer in, and soon there’s zombies all the way to your destination.

If the refugees are mostly uninfected, you might be able to just shove them across your border at speed, but there’s no way the next country would end up with more zombies as a result, and if the problem is solely extra people and not infected, just shove them on to the next country and call it a day.

Perhaps if we could have combined our forces, coordinated a joint operation at some appropriately defensible location. I know the plans were on the table. Pakistan’s south central mountains: the Pab, the Kirthar, the Central Brahui range. We could have stopped any number of refugees, or living dead.

I find it hard to believe it’s that simple. The fact is, in the event of this sort of disaster, you have two different places you want troops. One’s the borders, but the other is your own cities. A joint operation would be really hard to negociate, because both sides would want to keep troops back in case it doesn’t work and they’re attacked by sudden zombie in their backyard. If Iran was desperate enough to commit most of their troops, there’s a good chance Pakistan would try to make them do all of it.

But it’s moot because apparently Pakistan gets all mad at the idea of foreign troops. So they just go and blow up a bridge to seal up the traffic, and it works great to cut the flow in half.

and prayed with all my might that the Pakistanis wouldn’t retaliate.
Of course my prayers went unanswered. Three hours later their garrison at Qila Safed shot up our border station. I know now that our president and Ayatollah were willing to stand down. We’d gotten what we wanted, they’d gotten their revenge.

But the Pakistani embassy all suicided and destroyed their stuff so they can’t communicate now. Which sucks, but given that doesn’t do anything to force Iran to attack again. they could just rely on the most traditional of methods, seeing if more shots are fired. Apparently Iran is more into insane conspiracy theories:

We didn’t know how to contact the Pakistani leadership. We didn’t even know if there was any leadership left.

To recap: The embassay says they refuse to allow soldiers to help hold the border. Iran therefore blows up a bridge. Pakistan then shoots up a border station in obvious retaliation. Therefore, who knows if there’s any Pakistani leadership left????????? let’s start shooting wildly back.

(Also, apparently no one else has radios or phones.)

The basic idea of this one is honestly clever – people usually take precautions against the obvious dangers, so it makes sense that the disasters that’d come would be the unforeseen. But like so much else, timing kills it.

If the outbreak had just happened and everyone had no idea what was going on, countries blaming each other and doing stupid shit makes sense. But our setup here is everyone’s grasped the basic zombie concept and even know where the infection is coming from. WWZ’s pandemic zombies are easier to track than most real pandemics, and as the news currently illustrates, we’re pretty good at that already. Here, the zombies spilled out from China into the surrounding Asian countries into India into Pakistan. The Iranian government knows exactly what the problem is down to the numbers. If Pakistan decides now is the time to start shooting up the Iranian border, fuck them, pull your guys back to the cities you said you were massing your military to protect anyway. You don’t even need to worry about Pakistan grabbing a chunk of your border because if they try to do anything stupid like that, it’s just wasting bullets and ensuring their country falls.

Now, if zombies had just started popping up suddenly, freaking out and blaming your neighbors could concievably be such a mess, confusion turning to anger, anger turning on our neighbors. Every hour the conflict
escalated. Border clashes, air strikes. It happened so fast, just three days of conventional warfare, neither
side having any clear objective, just panicked rage. and then nuking because you don’t know where the infection’s coming from but maybe it’s Pakistan and you need to sterilize it.

Also, because I guess Muslims can’t handle bombs the way us white people did, they immediately drop ALL THE BOMBS on each other and now there’s radiation clouds everywhere, because everyone knows Muslim countries are crazycakes and would totally miss the fact if they drop ALL THE BOMBS on people right next to them they’ll get hit by fallout too.

Our interviewee goes on a bit about how unbeliveable it is two countries that were so friendly triggered nukings, and not how unbelievable it is any modern country no matter how provoked would drop ALL THE BOMBS on the country RIGHT NEXT TO THEM.

This chapter doesn’t even work ignoring all other chapters, because the flaws are in the chapter itself – he points out they had examined the situation in their country and set up a plan using the terrain and the zombies’ weaknesses, he explains exactly what the Pakistan problem was, there’s even all these numbers about precisely how many refugees were coming and what proportion were infected and what paths they were using to travel. You can’t go from that to two countries having a hysterial slapfight that ends with a bazooka to the face. People will do some very stupid things, but they do it when they’re in a situation where they don’t know what’s going on and/or don’t have any idea what the solution is. Here, they understand both just fine. Not only that, but both their countries are currently filling up with zombies so they have other stuff to do. Yet somehow, they have the time and energy to blow each other up instead.