Afghanistan and Pakistan: The Poisoned Legacy of the Durand Line - Joseph V. Micallef

Historically, Afghanistan has lain astride the invasion route from central Asia into the Indian subcontinent. It was also the shortest route from central Asia to the Indian Ocean. This was the route that the Persian conqueror Darius I took in 516 BC. Alexander the Great followed suit in 326 BC. In turn they were followed by, among others, Muslim armies under Qutaybs ibn Muslim in 705, by Mahmoud Ghazni of the Afghan Ghaznavid Empire in 1001, Muhammad Ghori of the Ghurid Empire in 1175, and the Mongol, Genghis Khan in 1219.

Timur (Tamerlane), during his conquest of northwest India in 1383, took the same route and his descendent Babur, whose grave is in Kabul, also passed through the Khyber Pass on his way to creating the Mogul empire in India in 1526. Ahmad Shah Durrani of the Afghan Durrani Empire followed suit when he attempted to conquer the Punjab in 1748. The last invasion of Afghanistan from central Asia was the Soviet one in 1979. The invasion route ran both ways. The Sikh Empire invaded Afghanistan from the southeast in 1813, and the British fought three wars with the Afghans (1838, 1878, and 1919).

The Himalayas block access from central Asia to the Indian subcontinent and to the Indian Ocean. Their western most extension, the Hindu Kush, is penetrated by the Salang Pass, which separates northern Afghanistan (and Central Asia) from the rest of Afghanistan, and the Khyber Pass through the Spin Ghar Mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in turn an extension of the Hindu Kush. The two passes are the traditional trade and invasion route from central Asia to the Arabian Sea or into the Punjab of north India and from there the rest of the Indian subcontinent. For millennium, Afghanistan has been fought over by would be conquerors, both for its mineral wealth and also for its strategic position at the crossroads of central and south Asia. Even in the technologically driven world of the twenty-first century, geography still matters.

In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan became a pawn in "the Great Game" between the Russian Empire and Great Britain for control of central Asia. As Russia gobbled up one central Asians khanate after another, the steadily expanding Russian Empire began to encroach, in British eyes, dangerously close to British India. In an attempt to preclude any further Russian expansion south, Great Britain twice invaded Afghanistan only to be defeated by a guerilla army drawn primarily from the Pashtun tribes that inhabited the region.

In an effort to secure control of the strategic Khyber Pass, in 1893, Great Britain dispatched a British diplomat, Mortimer Durand, to negotiate an agreement to delineate the border between the Emirate of Afghanistan and British India. The resulting agreement resulted in a frontier that ran from the Karakoram Range in the northeast running south through the Spin Ghar mountains (Safed Koh and Toba Kakar Ranges) before turning west along the Chagai Hills to the border with Iran.

The new border, dubbed the Durand Line, divided the Pashtun tribal lands, a region informally referred to as Pasthunistan in two, with half of the Pashtun tribal region now part of British India and the balance remaining part of Afghanistan. The line also resulted in the loss of the province of Baluchistan to British India, depriving Afghanistan of its historic access to the Arabian Sea. The Durand Line also ensured that there would be a thin strip of Afghanistan running to the Chinese border, thus separating the Russian empire from British India. The Durand Line would become one of the principal issue of Afghanistan's foreign policy for the next century and even now remains at the heart of Afghanistan's relations with Pakistan.

The original agreement was only a page long. The treaty was written in English with copies in Dari and Pashto. The English copy, a language that the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan could neither read nor understand, Durand insisted, was to be the definitive copy. The 1,584-mile boundary was subsequently delimited between March 1894 and May 1986. The Durand Line precipitated a long-running dispute between the governments of Afghanistan and Great Britain and prompted a third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919. Under British pressure, subsequent Afghan governments reaffirmed the boundary line in additional treaties and agreements in 1905, 1919, 1921, and 1930.

The newly formed state of Pakistan inherited the boundary line delineated by the 1893 Durand agreement and upheld by the subsequent treaty of Rawalapindi (1919) that ended the Third Anglo-Afghan war. The government of Afghanistan however has, subsequently, refused to acknowledge that the frontiers represented by the Durand Line were legally binding. In 1947, when Pakistan joined the United Nations, Afghanistan was the only member to vote against its membership. On July 26, 1948, followed two years of steadily deteriorating relations between the two countries, the government of Afghanistan declared that it did not recognize "the imaginary Durand nor any similar line." It also declared that all previous Durand Line agreements, including the subsequent Anglo-Afghan treaties upholding it, were void because they had been imposed on Afghanistan by British coercion.  - Read More at the Huffingtonpost

Afghanistan and Pakistan: The Poisoned Legacy of the Durand Line

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