Durand Line

Durand Line

Subject – IR

Context – Earlier this week, Taliban spokesman ZabiullahMujahid told a Pashto channel in Pakistan that Afghans oppose the fence erected by Pakistan along the Durand Line.

Concept –

• The Durand Line is the 2,670-kilometre international land border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in South Asia.
• The Durand Line is a legacy of the 19th century Great Game between the Russian and British empires in which Afghanistan was used as a buffer by the British against a feared Russian expansionism to its east.
• The agreement demarcating what became known as the Durand Line was signed on November 12, 1893 between the British civil servant Sir Henry Mortimer Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman, then the Afghan ruler.
• Abdur Rahman became king in 1880, two years after the end of the Second Afghan War in which the British took control of several areas that were part of the Afghan kingdom. He was essentially a British puppet. His agreement with Durand demarcated the limits of his and British India’s “spheres of influence” on the Afghan “frontier” with India.
• The seven-clause agreement recognised a 2,670-km line which, according to Rajiv Dogra, author of Durand’s Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart, Durand drew on the spot on a small map of Afghanistan during his negotiations with the Amir. The line stretches from the border with China to Afghanistan’s border with Iran.

• In reality, the line cut through Pashtun tribal areas, leaving villages, families, and land divided between the two “spheres of influence”. It has been described as a “line of hatred”, arbitrary, illogical, cruel and a trickery on the Pashtuns. Some historians believe it was a ploy to divide the Pashtuns so that the British could keep control over them easily. It also put on the British side the strategic Khyber Pass.

Cross-border tensions

• With independence in 1947, Pakistan inherited the Durand Line, and with it also the Pashtun rejection of the line, and Afghanistan’s refusal to recognise it. Afghanistan was the only country to vote against Pakistan joining the United Nations in 1947.
• ‘Pashtunistan’ — an independent country of the Pashtuns — was a demand made by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan at the time of Partition, although he later resigned himself to the reality of Partition. The proximity of the ‘Frontier Gandhi’ to India was a point of tension between the two countries almost immediately. The fear of Indian support to Pashtun nationalism haunts Pakistan to date, and is embedded in its Afghan policy.