The Durand Line, 1893

On 12 November 1893 Sir Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary of the Government of India, and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan signed a short agreement at Kabul that fixed "the limit of their respective spheres of influence" along the eastern and southern edge of Afghanistan, from Wakhan to the Persian border. [7] Percy Sykes, Durand's biographer, says the talks took four weeks. [3] The line is known as the Durand Line (Pashto ډیورنډ کرښه, Ḍyūranḍ kərx̌a) and it runs through the country of the eastern Pashtuns. Since 1947 no Afghan government has accepted it as an international border, and Pakistan, which holds that it inherited the line from British India, treats it as one. [8, 10] The wider story is in Pashtun history.

Why both sides wanted a line

By 1890 the Government of India was moving up to the tribes. Olaf Caroe's history of the Pathans dates the new advances to the early 1890s: the Samana ridge was occupied in 1891 and Kurram taken in hand the next year, while in Baluchistan the Khojak range was tunnelled and the railway brought to Chaman. [5] Abdur Rahman wrote that the Indians were "pushing the railway line into my country just like pushing a knife into my vitals". [1]

The amir was pushing out too. Timur Mirza Shah of Asmar, in the Kunar valley, swore allegiance to him in 1887, and after the chief was killed General Ghulam Haidar Khan occupied Asmar in December 1891, which Abdur Rahman says "caused great indignation to the Indian Government". [1] Durand noted in 1892 that the amir had "taken Asmar, in spite of our prohibition against meddling with Bajaur" and was threatening Dir. [3] In the north Russia pressed on the Pamirs, and in the spring of 1893 it demanded that the amir leave Roshan and Shignan beyond the Oxus, as the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1873 required. That demand was the main object of Durand's mission. [3]

Abdur Rahman wanted a line too. He wrote that he wished the boundary with India "definitely marked out around my dominions, as a strong wall for protection". [1] Around 1891 he wrote to the viceroy: "Where is the frontier line of Afghanistan? Make up your minds and let me know the worst." [3] He feared that Lord Roberts, first named to lead the mission, favoured the "Forward Policy", and he sent his engineer Salter Pyne to India with orders to travel slowly until Roberts had left. [1]

The amir asked the viceroy for a map. On it Waziri country, New Chaman, Chageh, Bulund Khel, "the whole of Mohmand, Asmar, and Chitral" were marked as Indian. He replied with a letter about the hill country he called Yāghistān (یاغستان, "the land of the unruly"): [1]

In your cutting away from me these frontier tribes who are people of my nationality and my religion, you will injure my prestige in the eyes of my subjects, and will make me weak, and my weakness is injurious for your Government. [1]

The Kabul mission, September to November 1893

The mission left Peshawar in mid-September, was met at Landi Khana on the frontier by the Afghan commander-in-chief Ghulam Haidar, and entered Kabul on 2 October. [3] Abdur Rahman had his secretary Mir Munshi Sultan Mahomed Khan sit behind a curtain and write down every word that was spoken. [1]

The Russian question came first. The amir agreed to leave Roshan and Shignan in exchange for Darwaz on the Afghan side of the Oxus, and kept only a nominal suzerainty in Wakhan. At the end of the first discussion he told Durand: "We must finish this business first, as you have begun with it, but really the other frontier is the important one. My people will not care, or know, whether I go backwards or forwards in Roshan or Shignan, but they care very much to know exactly how they stand on your side." [3]

The Indian frontier took the rest of October. The amir said he wanted "a wall round his country, so that he might know exactly where he was". On 24 October he sat with Durand for about five hours and announced that he would never surrender Asmar, "the gate of Afghanistan". [3] When Durand asked what use a poor strip of Waziri hills could be to him, the amir answered with one word, "Nám" (name, honour). [3]

The agreement has seven articles. [2, 7]

• Article 1: the frontier of the amir's dominions "from Wakhan to the Persian border" follows the line on an attached map. [2]

• Article 2: "The Government of India will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of Afghanistan, and His Highness the Amir will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of India." [2]

• Article 3: the amir keeps Asmar "and the valley above it, as far as Chanak" and the Birmal tract. He agrees not to interfere in Swat, Bajaur or Chitral, and gives up his claim to the rest of the Wazir country, to Dawar and to Chageh. [2, 7]

• Article 4: joint British and Afghan commissioners are to lay the line down in detail "wherever this may be practicable and desirable". [2]

• Articles 5 to 7: the line at the new British cantonment of Chaman, a promise to settle details "in a friendly spirit", and an increase of the amir's yearly subsidy by six lakhs of rupees, from twelve to eighteen, with leave to import munitions. [7]

Abdur Rahman's own summary says that Wakhan, Kafiristan, Asmar, "Mohmand of Lalpura" and part of Waziristan came under his rule, and that he gave up Kurram, Afridi, Bajaur, Swat, Buner, Dir, Chilas and Chitral among other claims. [1] Caroe observes that the text calls the line the limit of the amir's frontier and of non-interference, and does not call it the boundary of India, because the British did not intend to bring the tribes into their administration. In the international aspect, he writes, this made no difference, since the amir had renounced sovereignty beyond the line. [5]

Demarcation, 1894–1896

The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 records how far the joint commissions of Article 4 got. The Asmar Commission of 1894 marked the line from the Bashgal valley on the edge of Kafiristan to the Nawa Kotal, on the confines of Bajaur and the Mohmand country. South of that point no demarcation was made, because the amir was unwilling to accept the line in Mohmand territory, and none was attempted between the Kabul river and Sikaram on the Safed Koh. The stretch from Kurram to the Gomal river was demarcated in 1895. [4] Sykes adds that disturbances in Chitral, which he thinks the Afghan commissioner probably encouraged, stopped the work through the Mohmand country to the Khyber. [3]

The Mohmand section stayed open. In Caroe's account the watershed and the tribal map do not coincide there. The line left Lalpura to Afghanistan and reached the Kabul river at Shinpokh, which put all the Kama and Goshta Mohmands on the Afghan side and some Upper Mohmand clans of the Baizai and Khawezai, who took no allowances from Peshawar, on the Indian side. "An international line that divides the allegiance of a tribe", he writes, "is a fertile cause of disturbance." [5] According to Arka Biswas, Abdur Rahman claimed the whole of Mohmand country when work began in 1895. [7] The British later offered a "presumptive line" further east that would have left the Bohai Dag valley to Afghanistan, and it was never taken up. [5] Only a small piece at the western end of the Khyber was marked, in 1919. Caroe reports that the rest of the sector from Nawa Sar to the Sikaram peak has never been demarcated, and that the pillars set up elsewhere had disappeared by 1958. [5]

The risings of 1897

Caroe tells how the fighting began: in June 1897 a political officer who had gone to choose a levy post at Maizar in the Tochi valley was attacked by Madda Khel Wazirs; the Malakand garrisons were attacked a fortnight later; by August the Mohmands had risen, and then Afridi and Orakzai Tirah, where the Khyber posts fell. The Mahsuds were the only major tribe that stayed out. British columns crossed Swat, Bajaur, Buner, the Mohmand country and Tirah from end to end for the first time, and peace returned by the spring of 1898. [5] The Afridi side of the story is told in Afridi tribe, keepers of the Khyber.

Hasan Kakar writes that the amir's jihad propaganda was intensified by the British forward moves and the demarcation dispute, that the rising drew in Pashtuns beyond the line and the amir's own subjects along the border as far as Laghman and Tagao, and that he had not openly declared jihad. [6] Abdur Rahman pointed to the Chitral, Bajaur, Malakand, Waziri and Afridi wars as the fulfilment of his warning. [1] His reign is described in Abdur Rahman Khan, the Iron Amir.

Reaffirmations, 1905–1930

Abdur Rahman's son Habibullah confirmed the earlier engagements during the mission of Sir Louis Dane in the spring of 1905, which Biswas dates to 21 March and Caroe to April. [5, 7] The document Caroe prints says Habibullah has acted, is acting and will act on his father's agreements and "will not contravene them in any dealing". [5] After the Third Anglo-Afghan War (Anglo-Afghan wars, 1839–1919), Article 5 of the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919 states: "The Afghan Government accepts the Indo-Afghan frontier accepted by the late Amir." It also commits Kabul to the demarcation, by a British commission, of the open stretch west of the Khyber. [7] An annexed letter from the British delegate says that the war "has cancelled all previous Treaties". [7]

In Article 2 of the Kabul treaty of 22 November 1921 the two governments "mutually accept" the frontier as accepted at Rawalpindi, with the boundary west of the Khyber laid down by the British commission in August and September 1919, and a small realignment that gave Afghanistan Tor Kham and a stretch of the Kabul river bed. [7] In letters of 6 May 1930, after Nadir Shah took the throne, the two governments recorded that the treaties they named, headed by the 1921 treaty, "continue to have full force and effect". [5]

The two sides read this record differently. Caroe takes the 1919 wording to mean that the frontier of 1893, as reaffirmed in 1905, was accepted, and he concludes that every Afghan ruler through Nadir Shah accepted the line. [5] Biswas argues that the 1893 and 1905 arrangements were personal agreements with the amirs, that the 1919 and 1921 treaties followed a cancellation of earlier treaties, and that the 1921 treaty could be ended on twelve months' notice after three years. [7]

After 1947: two positions

The North-West Frontier Province joined Pakistan in August 1947, and in November the tribes up to the line declared their loyalty in jirga, according to Caroe. [5] Biswas reports that on 31 July 1947 the Afghan prime minister Shah Mahmud Khan told the British that every agreement on the Indo-Afghan border had been made with British Indian authorities and would be void once British India ended. [7] In 1949 a loya jirga in Kabul declared every agreement about the line void, the Afghanistan Analysts Network says, and Biswas, who dates it to 26 July 1949, quotes it as recognising "neither the imaginary Durand nor any similar line". [7, 8] A paper from Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies describes the 1949 act as a parliamentary resolution instead. [9]

Afghanistan's case, as Biswas sets it out, has several parts: Pakistan was a new state and not the heir of British India; Pakistan itself broke its non-interference clause; and some Afghans say it ran for a hundred years and lapsed in 1993, which the Islamabad paper says no document supports. [7, 9] The Afghan historian Hasan Kakar writes that by the agreement "the core of the original Afghanistan came to be regarded as within the British sphere of influence", and that the loss led to "a strong irredentist movement inside Afghanistan". [6] The Afghanistan Analysts Network reports that no Kabul government has called the line valid, and that Pakistan asked for recognition of it in 1992 and in 1996 and was refused by Sebghatullah Mujaddedi's interim government and then by the Taliban. [8]

Pakistan's case rests on succession. The Indian Independence Act of 1947 provided that rights and obligations under agreements with an exclusive territorial application "will devolve upon" Pakistan, and Pakistani writers cite Article 11 of the Vienna Convention on succession in respect of treaties, which protects boundaries fixed by treaty. [7] The British government backed this: on 30 June 1950 Philip Noel-Baker told the Commons that Pakistan inherited the rights of the old Government of India "and that the Durand Line is the international frontier", and the prime minister said the same in March 1956. [5] Biswas answers that the 1893 text divides spheres of influence and does not create a sovereign boundary, while Caroe held that the amir had renounced sovereignty beyond the line and called the Afghan claim "veiled irredentism". [5, 7] In February 2024 Pakistan's foreign ministry spokeswoman, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, called the Taliban deputy foreign minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai's statement that Afghanistan would not accept the line "self-serving and fanciful". [10]

The Afghan claim was first put as a demand that the Pashtun country up to the Indus return to Kabul, and later as a call for a separate Pashtun state, Pashtunistan (پښتونستان, Pəx̌tunistān), carved out of Pakistan, Caroe writes. [5] Under Mohammad Daud, prime minister from 1953, Kabul pressed the claim by propaganda and army moves into the tribal agencies, and Pakistan answered by closing its borders to Afghan trade. Daud later dropped the issue. [8] Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement) and his brother had developed the idea of a Pashtun state earlier, and his movement boycotted the 1947 referendum when it offered no such choice. [8]

The tribes the line divides

The Afghanistan Analysts Network names the tribes that live on both sides today. The Shinwari, Mohmand and Safi straddle the line between Kunar and Nangarhar and Pakistan's Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber districts. The Dzadran (Zadran), Gurbaz, Mangal and Turi live in Khost and Paktia and in North Waziristan and Kurram. Wazirs live in Barmal district of Paktika and in North and South Waziristan, the Muqbal and Dzazi in Dand-e Patan in Paktia and in Kurram, and Achakzai at Spin Boldak and Chaman. [8] The pass the line crosses at Torkham is described in The Khyber Pass: landscape and connections.

Sources give the length of the line in different figures. Sykes put the frontier of 1893, ending at Kuh-i-Malik Siah on the Persian border, at about 1,200 miles, and the Afghanistan Analysts Network gives 2,640 kilometres in one place and 2,600 in another. [3, 8] From 2017 Pakistan fenced it, and in April 2023 the Pakistani army's public relations wing said 98 per cent of the work was finished. Afghans protested, and President Ashraf Ghani said that "the fence only needs a few cuts". At Torkham Afghans now need a passport and visa to enter Pakistan. [8]