Okay, I think I'm starting to get some idea of why someone might find this interesting. While I knew that Pakistan and Bangladesh had split up up at some point,

Okay, I think I'm starting to get some idea of why someone might find this interesting. While I knew that Pakistan and Bangladesh had split up up at some point, I didn't know the year offhand, or the details of why. Without that knowledge, this article reads very oddly. Really, though, it still seems weird to me. Would there still be an article about this if it wasn't numbered 1971? I assume that's just a sequential identifier, followed swiftly by Cable 1972, Cable 1973, etc. If the two correspondents were very significant figures in their respective branches, the article doesn't make that clear. It reads like just two mid-level officers in high command shooting the shit. And was the possible future breakup of this weird geographically-separated country really that unthinkable to all but a few visionaries back then? Of course it easy for me to say this now, but that seems like the obvious eventual outcome of such a bizarre setup. Surely people would talk about the possibility all the time. Like imagine if next year the bottom falls out of the unicorn valuations completely and there's another dot-com crash. And then somebody discovers that Hacker News comment with id=2020, written all the way back in 2007, predicted that the tech bubble would burst sometime in the future. That's not really much of a coincidence because: a) There had to be a comment number 2020, and b) People on hn talk about tech bubbles popping all the time. If anything, the enormous time horizon between the prediction and the fulfillment would make it _less_ impressive. If someone tried to pass that off as having some deeper significance, you'd think they were crazy. To be clear, I'm not trying to assert that Cable 1971 is historically meaningless. Just that it comes off that way without a whole bunch of additional context that the Wikipedia summary does not provide in even a cursory way.