Revisiting the Durand Line — Historical and Legal Perspectives 
By Lutfur Rehman
IPS Press
ISBN: 978-969-448-836-3
229pp. 

To write his book, Revisiting the Durand Line: Historical and Legal Perspectives, author Lutfur Rahman had to, in his own words “rescue” hundreds of thousands of documents and over a dozen maps from “forgotten files and dusty archives.” An immense task indeed!

The agreement defining the border between Afghanistan and British India was signed between Afghan monarch Ameer Abdur Rahman and British India’s Foreign Secretary Henry Mortimor Durand on November 12, 1893, in Kabul. The ‘Iron Ameer’, according to the author, was more interested in finalising the frontier than the British side. It was this agreement which Pakistan inherited.

The agreement had — or has — seven clauses and author Rahman discusses each one of them to enlighten the reader. Article One says the frontier between the two countries “starts from Wakhan and ends at the Persian border.” Under Article Two, the two sides pledged they would at “no time” exercise interference in “territories beyond the line.”

Article Three gives details of territorial adjustment, the withdrawal by both sides from the territories mentioned, and the Ameer pledged not to “interfere” in Bajaur, Swat and Chitral. The British agreed to give Birmal to the Ameer, who in return withdrew his claims to the “rest of Waziristan”, besides Chaghi in Balochistan.

Excavating archival documents and maps, a recent book offers a wealth of source material on Afghanistan’s fraught relationship with Pakistan

While articles Four and Five have the usual diplomatic stuff, Article Six makes it clear that the two sides are “fully satisfied” with the agreement, while Article Seven tells us that Britain would allow Afghanistan to import arms and ammunition from British India.

The point the author emphases is the permanence of the agreement and repudiates the claim by many scholars, especially Indian, that the agreement ceased to exist after Britain withdrew from the Subcontinent. Some scholars assert that the landmark agreement was only for a century. Author Rahman says nowhere does the agreement give a time limit and asserts that the Durand Line agreement “is a perpetual agreement and has no time limit.”

In the author’s own words, “the simple truth is that the words ‘one century or hundred years’ and ‘lease’ have not been mentioned in the Durand Line agreement and [in] all the subsequent Anglo-Afghan treaties. These are the assumptions unsupported by any empirical evidence. As such, the Durand Line Agreement is a perpetual agreement with no time limit.”

The chapter on Afghanistan’s history gives us landmark events — the country’s emergence as a sovereign state under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Abdali in 1747, the Great Game — the 19th century geopolitical drama involving Britain, Russia and Iran — and the blood-drenched Anglo-Afghan wars, culminating in the Durand Line agreement of 1893.

However, the man who finally succeeded in having his country recognised as a sovereign state was King Amanuulah, whose stupidity later gave him an unexpected victory. Believing that the British were exhausted by World War I, and hoping for an early success, Amanuulah crossed the Torkham border, only to see the British using a weapon the Afghans had never seen before — air power.

Luckily for him, the British were in no mood to continue fighting and both sides settled for peace, signing the Rawalpindi agreement of August 1918, under which the British recognised Afghanistan’s sovereignty in both domestic and foreign policy matters. The end of the monarchy and King Zahir Shah’s exit are events that have happened in our lifetime.

Today’s post-America Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban faces, according to the author, three challenges: getting international recognition, overcoming its economic crisis and taking on the so-called ‘Islamic State’’s Khorasan chapter (IS-K).

Coming to Kabul’s relations with Islamabad, the author says that, “contrary to popular belief”, the Taliban government is not on good terms with Pakistan. The author is wrong about popular opinion. Most people in Pakistan firmly believe the Taliban regime is far from being friendly. In fact, in spite of all that this country has done for its western neighbour since the Soviet invasion in December 1979 and the help of all sorts it gave to Afghanistan, successive governments in Kabul have been anything but grateful.

Whatever the government in power — and not just ones dominated by Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani who both acted shamelessly as Indian stooges — most governments in Kabul have been openly or secretly working against Pakistan’s interests.

The public opinion in Pakistan has not forgotten that the terrorists who committed the blood-curdling act of slaughtering nearly 140 schoolchildren at the Army Public School in Peshawar in December 2014 had come from Afghanistan. The caretaker government in Islamabad has rightly minced no words and blamed the Kabul regime for providing safe havens to anti-Pakistan terrorists. As the author points out, the Kabul regime has not expelled the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leaders from their safe havens.

The truth is that, in spite of the treaties, including the Durand Line agreement it signed with British India, Afghan rulers have not given up their “irredentist” claims on Pakistan, and on this they have always received military and diplomatic support from countries hostile to Pakistan.

Kabul was opposed to the very creation of Pakistan and, as the author himself points out in Chapter 5, it asked the British government to ‘return’ Balochistan and the then North-Western Frontier Province to Afghanistan instead of making them part of Pakistan.

Chapter 2 on the history of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan gives valuable information to the reader, while Chapter 4 on the Durand Line and international law makes the book a source of academic research for scholars. The maps are photos of archival material which, otherwise, would not be available to us.

On the whole, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature on Afghanistan and its vicissitudinous relationship with Pakistan.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 11th, 2024