Afghan Pakistan Conflict: The Durand Line Delusion
By Wahab Raofi Pakistani warplanes have recently struck villages in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, near the border. Civilians were reported killed. Kabul called it aggression; Islamabad described it as retaliation against Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan militants operating from Afghan soil. The Taliban denied it. Neither side agreed on the facts, let alone a remedy. This was not a new argument. It was the same argument the two countries have been having, in varying registers of violence and diplomacy, since Pakistan’s creation in 1947. At the center of it sits the Durand Line—a roughly 2,640-kilometer mountainous frontier drawn by the British colonial administrator Sir Mortimer Durand in 1893, dividing Pashtun populations between what are now Pakistan and Afghanistan. For over a century, Afghanistan has refused to formally recognize it. Pakistan has never agreed to renegotiate it. In the gap between those two positions, people die. The ethnic argument—and its limits ...