Asian Window

Robert Mackey at the Lede, the New York Times:

A map of the border between Afghanistan (in yellow) and British India (in pink) from 1893, the year the Durand Line was drawn. The Swat Valley was then considered a part of Afghanistan.

…Pakistan and the rest of the world believes that Afghanistan ends (and Pakistan begins) more or less where a 1,600-mile line was drawn on the world map in 1893, at the direction of a British colonial officer named Henry Mortimer Durand, who sought to define the outer edge of what was then British India. At the time, the Afghans grudgingly accepted this map, despite the fact that what became known as the Durand Line cut right through Pashtun tribal areas and even villages that they considered part of Afghanistan.

Sir Henry, whose portrait can be seen in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery in London, drew his line with the memory of Britain’s two failed wars against the Afghans fresh in his mind. Not long before, in 1879, during what the British call the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Sir Henry had completed and published an account of “The First Afghan War and Its Causes” begun by his father, Sir Henry Marion Durand. As Sir Henry noted in his introduction to the book (which has been scanned and posted online in its entirety by Google), his father, who died before he could complete the history, “had some special qualifications for the task,” having participated in that first, disastrous attempt to subdue Afghanistan, four decades earlier.

So, as the entry on Pakistan in the Encarta encyclopedia explains, splitting the Pashtun tribes was in some sense the whole point of what is still known today as the Durand Line:

“As the British sought to expand their empire into the northwest frontier, they clashed with the Pashtun tribes that held lands extending from the western boundary of the Punjab plains into the kingdom of Afghanistan. The Pashtuns strongly resisted British invasions into their territories. After suffering many casualties, the British finally admitted they could not conquer the Pashtuns. In 1893 Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the colonial government of India, negotiated an agreement with the king of Afghanistan, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, to delineate a border. The so-called Durand Line cut through Pashtun territories, dividing them between British and Afghan areas of influence. However, the Pashtuns refused to be subjugated under British colonial rule. The British compromised by creating a new province in 1901, named the North-West Frontier Province, as a loosely administered territory where the Pashtuns would not be subject to colonial laws.” More:

[Image: Library of Congress / NYTimes]

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