THE PRESENT
Pakistan’s targeted strikes on December 4, 2024 on the training camps of the self-styled Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the Birmal area of eastern Paktika province of Afghanistan have brought Afghanistan’s irredentist policy out in the open. The strikes came after a string of terrorist attacks by the TTP on Pakistan’s security forces. The TTP, an internationally designated terrorist group, is hosted by the self-declared Afghan Interim Government on Afghanistan’s soil. The AIG — described herein as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Afghanistan (TTA) — has, despite multiple requests and démarches by Pakistan, refused to rein in the TTP.
Predictably, Afghanistan has protested the strikes and issued a démarche. But two other developments are more important than these pro forma moves. Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, TTA’s Minister of Information and Culture, called the TTP “guests” and stated that the TTA would not stop helping the group. The TTA Ministry of Defence put out a statement on the social media site X, calling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border a “hypothetical line.” Earlier in January 2024, TTA Minister for Borders and Tribal Affairs, Mullah Noorullah Noori, had called the recognised international border an “imaginary line.”
Like previous Afghan entities governing Kabul, the TTA refuses to accept the legitimacy of the border. In the case of the TTA, however, the Pakhtun nationalism is also coloured by sectarian religiosity. This is facilitated by the near-free movement across the border of tribesmen and groups since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
TTP is TTA’s leverage against Pakistan. While the TTA leadership acted as a facilitator for the talks, it (TTA) continued to set the conditions through the TTP to pressure Pakistan. The talks were also meant to provide legitimacy to the TTP as a party vis-a-vis the Government of Pakistan. One central example should suffice: the TTP’s demand to reverse the merger of erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the return of TTP cadres to those territories and for Pakistan to have little-to-no administrative-legal control in those territories. In simple terms, the TTA, through the TTP, wanted to capture these territories — the first part of its salami-slicing tactic. Why?
The recent strikes by Pakistan on Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan sanctuaries inside Afghanistan have inflamed Afghan rhetoric once again about sovereignty. However the basic issue that keeps coming up, as it has for the past 77 years, is the issue of the Pak-Afghan border and Afghan efforts to delegitimise it. Ejaz Haider examines the history of the contested ‘Durand Line’ and its implications for Pakistan-Afghanistan relations and Pakistan’s security and foreign policy framework
This is where one has to go into history because as Jocasta, the mother and wife of Oedipus, says in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, a man of sense must use his past experience to judge the present.
THE PAST
Since the formation of Pakistan as a successor state to the Government of India, Afghanistan has wanted to “reclaim” Pakistani territory up to the east of Indus River, what’s described in geographical terms as cis-Indus. To be sure, Afghanistan’s state practice has been uneven with Kabul accepting the border at crucial points in Pakistan-Afghanistan history. But the irredentism continues to lurk, reminding one of T.S. Eliot’s lines from Burnt Norton: “What might have been is an abstraction/ Remaining a perpetual possibility/ Only in a world of speculation.”
The Afghan idea of a border stretching to the western banks of the Indus River (and even parts of Balochistan) is an unfortunate abstraction that has done much harm not only to Afghanistan itself but also Pakistan-Afghanistan relations.
History and myth can wreak much havoc on the peoples. The settler-colonialism of Zionists is an ongoing tragedy with its roots in a mythological past inflaming the present and singeing constructive future possibilities.
If pre-nation state histories were to determine present-day realities, there would be no Afghanistan pre-Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani) because this was an area contested among whoever ruled India, Central Asia and Iran. History did not begin in 1747. But even if we were to consider for the sake of our present argument that it did, the Durrani dynasty was gone in what 19th century lawyer and historian William Fraser-Tytler called “five and forty years.”
“[T]he Afghan people as a whole [had not] acquired that stability of purpose which would have enabled them to consolidate control of the vast dominions acquired by Ahmad Shah, or to found an enduring dynasty to replace the dying empire of the Moguls. Such a task was too great for a people who were still largely tribal, resembling in their composition rather the clans of the highlands of Scotland in ancient days…”
Fraser-Tytler should have known. He was Scottish! But let’s get to an overview of the situation in the run-up to the Indian Subcontinent’s Partition.
If pre-nation state histories were to determine present-day realities, there would be no Afghanistan pre-Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani) because this was an area contested among whoever ruled India, Central Asia and Iran. History did not begin in 1747. But even if we were to consider for the sake of our present argument that it did, the Durrani dynasty was gone in what 19th century lawyer and historian William Fraser-Tytler called “five and forty years.”
With the Durrani dynasty losing out to the Barakzais (Muhammadzais) and its territorial reach reduced, there was much strife. Nor did the fall of the Durrani dynasty in 1818 bring about calm. It was not until 1826 that Dost Muhammad, the youngest of Painda Khan’s sons, finally prevailed over his brothers and lay claim to what remained of the Durrani empire. There was little left.
Writes Fraser-Tytler: “During the years of anarchy and of internecine strife, which had continued for upwards of a quarter of a century, one province after another had broken away from the central authority.” Sindh, Balochistan, the entire southern country from the Persian border to Ghazni and Balkh in the north had seceded.
Into this mix came a bigger problem: the Sikhs. In the later years of his rule, Ahmad Shah Durrani had resigned control of central Punjab to the Sikh Federation. During his grandson Zaman Shah’s reign the Sikhs killed the Afghan representative. The incident forced Zaman Shah to personally return to Punjab to re-establish his authority. He is also said to have tinkered with the idea of moving his seat of power from Kabul to Lahore. That didn’t happen because his tribal chieftains didn’t want to leave Kabul. He then chose to have a Sikh governor in Lahore rather than an Afghan plenipotentiary. Enters Ranjit Singh.
The canny Singh entrenched himself and began to take advantage of the growing weakness of the Durrani dynasty. By 1818, “he held all the northern Punjab between the Indus and the Sutlej.” Between 1820 and 1823 he chipped away at the Afghan possession west of Attock in the Battles of Attock and Nowshera. The Nowshera battle brought all of Peshawar valley under the Sikh rule. “While retaining his rights as suzerain of the country to the east of the Khyber Pass, [Ranjit Singh] entrusted the governorship of Peshawar to Sultan Muhammad Khan on the payment of a small tribute.”
By the time of the Battle of Jamrud between the forces of Ranjit Singh and Dost Mohammad in 1837, Dost, facing internal strife in his territories within Afghanistan, wanted British mediation between Afghanistan and the Sikh kingdom. This is why, despite having defeated the Sikh force, including killing Hari Singh Nalwa, the famous Sikh general, he did not venture towards Peshawar. The letter to Lord Auckland, who had recently arrived in India, “opened the door to British intervention in Central Asia.”
Dost Mohammad corresponded frequently with the British (the Library of Congress has multiple volumes on Dost Mohammad Khan’s life) and sought their intervention. He also signed two agreements with the British in March 1855 and January 1857, respectively. The texts of these agreements clearly indicate and confirm his acceptance of the existing frontiers between Afghanistan and British India. By then the Afghan frontier’s eastern outreach was Ali Masjid Fort at the entrance to Khyber Pass. The Frontier Corps now maintains a company-strength in the fort.
It is important to mention these agreements because they preceded the Durand Treaty of 1893 and clearly show that Afghan rule did not extend to the Indus River much before the 1893 Treaty was signed. If anything, there’s no indication after 1849 of an Afghan army setting foot anywhere near Peshawar. The 1857 agreement also stipulated 4,000 muskets and a monthly subsidy of 100,000 Indian rupees for Dost Mohammad Khan.
Another treaty which precedes the much-touted and maligned 1893 Treaty was the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak, following the first campaign of the second Anglo-Afghan War. Dost Mohammad’s son, Sher Ali Khan, fled after the British invaded Afghanistan and his son, Yaqub Khan, sued for peace. According to Article 9 of the Treaty, Yaqub relinquished Afghan sovereignty over Sibi, Kurram and Pishin as assigned districts and also accepted British sovereignty over the “Khyber and Michni Passes, which lie between the Peshawur and Jellalabad Districts, and of all relations with the independent tribes of the territory directly connected with these Passes.” (Quote from the Treaty) The peace treaty did not last long. The British mission led by Louis Cavagnari was massacred by some Afghan soldiers and the treaty got interred with their bodies. There are other details until the ascension to the Kabul throne of Abdul Rahman but those are not relevant to our purpose, except that Rahman was told that Kandahar would not be part of his dominion.
The British position in Kandahar became untenable after a British army was defeated in the Battle of Maiwind by Yaqub’s younger brother, Ayub Khan, who was the governor of Herat. Incidentally, Ayub Khan is considered a national hero in Afghanistan. He died in Lahore in 1914 and is buried in Peshawar. Another interesting bit is about how the Taliban used the reference to the Battle of Maiwind in their tarani [songs]. (See, ‘The Battle of Maiwand and the Taliban’s Tarani’ by Roshan Noorzai.)
DURAND TREATY 1893
It’s time to get to 1893. Rahman entered into a treaty with the British, delimiting the Indo-Afghan frontier, and their respective “spheres of influence.” Maps were attached to the treaty and Amir Abdur Rahman relinquished Afghanistan’s sovereignty over the frontier districts of Bajaur, Swat, Chitral and Chagey. In the bargain, he got Asmar, Kafiristan and the Birmal tract, areas over which Afghanistan had exercised almost no control previously. Further, the Government of India undertook to “increase by the sum of six lakhs of rupees a year the subsidy of twelve lakhs now granted to His Highness.”
Many Afghan writers and politicians make false claims that Afghanistan lost most of the territory between the Indus River and the Durand Line because of the Durand Treaty. That territory, as our historical overview shows, was lost three decades before the treaty, between the 1810s and 1870s. As Afghan academic Arwin Rahi argues, “In fact, through the Durand Treaty, Afghans would cede some territory to the British for the last time, not for the first time.”
The second false claim made by Afghans and many Indians is about a 100-year time-limit on the Durand Treaty. There is nothing in the text of the Treaty — available to anyone interested — which gives even a hint of a 100-year time-limit.
Yet another claim made by the Afghans is that Rahman signed the treaty under duress. As British historian and barrister Bijan Omrani writes, “The negotiations lasted a month, and a stream of correspondence between Sir Mortimer Durand and the Government of India shows that there was a genuine process of negotiation over this period: the British conceded to the Government of Afghanistan that a number of areas should fall on the Afghan side of the Durand Line which they had originally wished to fall on the Indian side.” Contemporary accounts suggest that even if Abdur Rahman had mixed feelings about the agreement, his assent was not brought about by duress.
The 1893 frontiers under the treaty were also reaffirmed by Rahman’s son and successor Amir Habibullah in the 1905 Kabul Treaty, including accepting the Durand Line as the frontier with India. Interestingly or perhaps for our present purpose, ironically, it was a victory for Habibullah since the Government of India had sought more concessions from Habibullah after Rahman’s death and even stopped the subsidies to Kabul. After three months of negotiations with Louis Dane, Habibullah got his way with the arrangements under the 1893 Treaty. The Kabul Treaty was to be repudiated by Amanullah Khan in 1919, resulting in the third Anglo-Afghan War.
Resultantly, the treaty, signed in Rawalpindi, is short and curt. It not only got Amanullah to accept the border but under Article 5 stipulated “early demarcation by a British Commission of the un-demarcated portion of the line west of the Khyber, where the recent Afghan aggression took place, and to accept such boundary as the British Commission may lay down.” Articles 2 and 3 of the treaty also withdrew certain privileges to Afghanistan and the subsidy to the Amir.
The 1919 Treaty was followed by the 1921 Treaty in Kabul which also reaffirmed the previous arrangements regarding the border in addition to other matters related to trade and setting up of diplomatic missions etc. This treaty, however, has a withdrawal clause in Article XIV. It was nonetheless reaffirmed in 1930 by Mohammad Nadir, then monarch of Afghanistan. The situation stood as it were until 1949 when Kabul claimed that it had withdrawn from the 1921 Treaty, a step very different from irredentist claims made under the Durand Treaty.
And this brings us to 1947.
POST-INDEPENDENCE PAST
Afghanistan cast a negative vote against Pakistan in September 1947, arguing that Pakistan’s northwest frontier “should not be recognised as a part of Pakistan until the [Pakhtuns] of that area had been given the opportunity to opt out for independence.” However, it withdrew the negative vote in October 1947 and both sides exchanged ambassadors in February 1948.
Zahir Shah sent his uncle, Sardar Shah Wali Khan, as ambassador to Karachi. Wali spoke Urdu and is said to have stated at one point that while Afghanistan might have had a claim on Pakhtun-majority areas of Pakistan, it would forgo such claims.
In reality, as American diplomat James Spain who had served in Pakistan noted, “Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have come to be centred on one issue.” That issue was Afghanistan’s demand for ‘Pashtunistan’ and Kabul’s repeated attempts to subvert the Pakhtun (and later the Baloch) through covert and overt actions.
The ‘Pashtunistan’ issue, couched in the right of self-determination for the Pakhtun, was actually irredentist. It was clear that if such an “independent” state were to actually come into being, it would not be able to survive and would be subsumed into Afghanistan, satisfying Kabul’s idea of Greater Afghanistan.
In a 1963 article for Asian Survey, titled ‘The Pak-Afghan Detente’, George Montagno, who served as a visiting professor of American history at the University of Karachi, wrote that Afghan agents operated among Pakhtun tribesmen for many years, distributing large amounts of money, ammunition and even transistor radios in an effort to sway loyalties from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and to develop sentiments for the ‘Pukhtoonistan’ cause.
Montagno also noted that Kabul had made no mention of including any Pashto-speaking areas of Afghanistan in a future ‘Pukhtoonistan’. This silence would indicate that the Afghan plea has probably been one “prompted by a veiled irredentism.”
It’s important to note that this article mentions a period of detente following the May 1963 Tehran agreement to normalise relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which had nosedived because Afghanistan’s prime minister and King Zahir Shah’s cousin, Sardar Muhammad Daoud, had sent an Afghan army into Bajaur in September 1960. It took Pakistan and Bajauri tribesmen an entire year to evict the Afghan elements. Daoud was a vocal opponent of the border and a hardliner on the issue of ‘Pashtunistan’. Pakistan had also challenged Afghanistan to hold a referendum in its own Pakhtun areas to see if the Afghan Pakhtun wanted to live in Afghanistan or join Pakistan.
There is a vast literature on how Kabul did everything to keep the border issue alive both through overt and, later, covert actions. This space does not allow for a full treatment but two points must be made: one, the negativity that mostly defined Pakistan-Afghanistan relations was the doing of Kabul; two, Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy has been defined by Kabul’s irredentism and its linkages with India, Pakistan’s adversary in the east.
SARDAR DAOUD OVERTHROWS ZAHIR SHAH
On 17 July 1973, Sardar Daoud ousted Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic. The putsch was bloodless and Daoud was supported by a large number of military officers. Daoud also revived the ‘Pashtunistan’ campaign and began supporting Pakhtun and Baloch separatists. At home, his campaign against conservatives led to purges and a number of future Afghan leaders fled to Pakistan. Some important names included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Ahmad Shah Massoud et al.
The late Maj Gen Naseerullah Babar, then a brigadier, was Inspector-General Frontier Corps. He apprised Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of the situation. As Barnett Rubin notes in The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, “The influx of Islamist refugees after 1974 was a welcome opportunity [for the Bhutto government]… Pakistan covertly organised and supported the attempted uprising by the Islamists in 1975 which, together with pressure from the Shah [of Iran], had the desired effect of bringing Daoud to the bargaining table over his support for [Pakhtun] and [Baloch] separatism in Pakistan and other regional issues.”
It is clear from reports and analyses of the time and later that Pakistan’s policy of reverse-pressure on Daoud’s Afghanistan was not an attempt to meddle in Afghanistan’s internal affairs but to use Daoud’s troubles to get him to settle the border and end his irredentist policy.
To cut a long story short, for a number of reasons Daoud began moving away from the Soviet Union and towards the United States, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and Gulf states like Saudi Arabia. Books by Barnett Rubin, Diego Cordovez — then Under-Secretary General for Special Political Affairs who co-authored Out of Afghanistan with Selig Harrison — Angelo Rasanayagam, another United Nations diplomat who also served as the Director of UNHCR in Peshawar and many others note that Daoud had come round to putting an end to the “Durand Line” issue. [This was also corroborated to the writer years ago by the late Riaz Khokhar, former foreign secretary who was a young notetaker during Bhutto’s meeting with Daoud.]
Bhutto visited Kabul in June 1976 and Daoud visited Islamabad in August, indicating his willingness to accept the Durand Line as an international border in return for Bhutto’s undertaking to release the imprisoned National Awami Party leaders.
It is interesting to note that by 1975 Bhutto had also become wary of Soviet actions in West and South Asia. Bhutto’s three letters to the then US President Gerald Ford (June to August) are intriguing, especially the August 17 letter in which Bhutto, quite presciently, speaks of how the Kremlin was likely to focus on West and South Asia after the centre (Europe) was stabilised through the Helsinki Final Act signed on August 1, 1975. Bhutto’s argument was that “assured of security in Europe, the Soviet Union will relentlessly exert pressures on the smaller states of Asia and on Pakistan in particular, with a view to achieving its purpose of establishing an unchallengeable sphere of influence in this continent.”
Ford’s response basically ignored this point. The US would in about four years come to appreciate the developments that would lead to the Soviet tanks rolling south of Amu Darya.
What Bhutto was not counting on was a coup at home. The positive development was, however, picked up by Gen Ziaul Haq after he removed Bhutto in July 1977. Zia latched on to the diplomatic push since he knew the outlines of the Bhutto-Daoud discussions and he had, ironically, opposed Bhutto’s decision to release the Baloch and Pakhtun leaders. After removing Bhutto, he pursued the latter’s policy and engaged Daoud, visiting Kabul in October 1977. Daoud had a reciprocal visit in March 1978.
Cordovez and Harrison write that when Daoud was asked at a farewell press conference “whether the Durand Line was discussed, he replied that ‘everything was discussed, and with the passage of time everything would fall in place.’”
The two writers also mention that Daoud had begun to mould public opinion at home and met Pakhtun and Baloch leaders who had taken refuge in Kabul and told them that “all of their eight thousand activists and guerrillas from Pakistan… should leave by April 30 [1978].” Cordovez and Harrison also quote the late Ajmal Khattak, a NAP/ANP leader, on this meeting and what Khattak said to Daoud about being “either a fool or a knave and we would not go [back to Pakistan].”
DENOUEMENT AWAITS
April 30 proved a date too far. Daoud and his family were murdered in a coup by officers belonging to the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) on April 27, 1978.
The PDPA took over. True to Afghanistan’s history, resistance by tribal solidarity groups emerged to central control and suppressive “reforms” by the communists. The situation got to a point where the USSR’s Leonid Brezhnev, an emotive alcoholic with failing health, took the decision to get invited (read, invade) Afghanistan to stabilise the PDPA. On December 24, 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan.
The communist misadventure was to come to an end in a decade. But the Soviet withdrawal was also the beginning of an entire era of new troubles for the region and Pakistan. Pakistan’s primary policy objective, the acceptance by Kabul of the international border, had earlier died with Daoud. That problem has recrudesced. While the border is recognised by the world, the western neighbour remains irredentist and, this time, also religiously charged.
The situation requires a thorough review of relations with Afghanistan and recourse to an array of non-kinetic and kinetic means. It also requires a constitutional compact within Pakistan, since facing the outside world prerequisites internal harmony.
The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider
A longer version of this piece can be accessed at dawn.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, January 12th, 2025
