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

The Afghan position is well-known: the line was imposed under colonial duress, divides an ancient people, and lacks moral legitimacy. These claims carry genuine historical weight. The Durand Agreement was signed under conditions of profound asymmetry. No Pashtun community was consulted. The British drew a line that suited an empire, not a people.

And yet. The argument that shared ethnicity should dissolve a border collides with an uncomfortable reality: if it applied here, it would have to apply almost everywhere.

More than twenty Arab states share a language, religion, and cultural inheritance—and maintain separate, recognized borders. Spanish-speaking nations across Latin America coexist as distinct states with no serious movement toward merger. The Kurds, with a stronger historical claim to statehood than almost any group on earth, remain divided across four countries. The international system has never accepted ethnicity alone as sufficient grounds for border revision. When it has been tried—in Europe’s early twentieth century and in the Balkans in the 1990s—the results were catastrophic.

Tens of millions of Pashtuns live in Pakistan as full citizens. They vote, serve in the military and judiciary, run major businesses, and have held the highest offices in the state. That this coexistence has been imperfect—and that movements like the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement have raised serious concerns about discrimination, enforced disappearances, and collective punishment—does not alter the basic picture. Grievance is not the same as secessionism. Marginalization, where it exists, demands accountability within the Pakistani state—not the redrawing of its borders.

Pakistan’s conduct is not above question

A serious argument for border stability cannot ignore what Pakistan has done along this frontier—and what it continues to do.

In 2023 and 2024, Pakistan expelled over a million Afghan refugees in a mass deportation campaign widely condemned by humanitarian organizations. Many had lived in Pakistan for decades; some had been born there. Families were given days to leave. In chaotic border crossings, some were separated in the rush. People were sent back to a country under Taliban rule with no preparation, no resources, and no guarantee of safety.

The cross-border airstrikes—framed by Islamabad as counterterrorism operations—have repeatedly killed civilians. Pakistan’s claim that the TTP operates from Afghan territory may be partly true; the Taliban’s denials are not credible. But bombing campaigns that produce civilian casualties in a neighboring country are not simply defensive responses. They are acts with political consequences, and those consequences include deepening the mistrust that makes any negotiated settlement harder to reach.

Pakistan’s own intelligence services have, at various points, maintained relationships with militant factions that have since turned on the state. The TTP problem is not simply Afghan-hosted; it is in part a creation of Pakistani policy choices. Islamabad’s argument would carry more weight without that history.

Who keeps the dispute alive—and why

The Durand Line dispute persists not because it is unsolved, but because it is useful.

For successive Afghan governments—and now for the Taliban—refusing to recognize the line serves a domestic political function. It sustains a nationalist grievance that can be activated when needed and defers any concession that would be politically costly at home. For armed groups like the TTP, the border’s ambiguity provides operational cover: a zone of contested sovereignty where neither state can easily project authority. For Pakistani military and intelligence planners, a degree of instability along the frontier has long justified maintaining influence in Afghan affairs—a posture that predates the current crisis and has contributed directly to it.

None of these actors bear the principal costs of the dispute. Those are borne by the communities who live along the frontier—Pashtun and Baloch populations on both sides who face military operations, economic stagnation, and the constant threat of violence, with little voice in the decisions that shape their lives.

The uncomfortable conclusion

The Durand Line is not going anywhere. No credible international actor—not the United Nations, not China, not the United States, not regional powers—supports border revision in South Asia. The precedent would be too dangerous; the consequences too unpredictable. Whatever moral force the Afghan claim carries, it does not translate into a viable political outcome in the world as it currently exists.

The more productive question is not whether the line is just—it may not be—but whether it can be managed in a way that reduces violence rather than generating it.

That begins with smaller, realistic steps. Afghanistan does not need immediate formal recognition to change behavior, but it would need to stop using non-recognition as a political instrument. Pakistan does not need to abandon its security concerns, but it would need to end indiscriminate airstrikes, reform its refugee policies, and create legal avenues for addressing Pashtun grievances inside its own borders. Joint border mechanisms, intelligence coordination, and basic communication channels—largely absent today—would do more to stabilize the frontier than rhetorical escalation ever has.

Neither government shows much willingness to move in this direction. The Taliban have little incentive to concede what they see as historical territory. The Pakistani military has little incentive to abandon a security posture that has defined its regional strategy for decades.

So the violence continues. And the people who live along the line—who did not draw it, were not consulted about it, and cannot escape it—continue to pay.

Borders do not require justice to be real. But they do require management to be livable. On the Durand Line, neither side has found the will to provide it.