According to a report, Islamabad is planning to re-negotiate its Durand Line border with Kabul. The declared intention is to demarcate and patrol the entire border with Afghanistan to prevent terrorists/Taliban from freely crossing over into Pakistan. The decision to talk to the Karzai administration was arrived at after a high-level inter-provincial conference on law and order chaired by the interior minister, Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat.
The idea is not simply to get the two sides to reaffirm the Durand Line Agreement but to correct some of the provisions in it that no longer fulfil the need of the times. The most nettlesome problem arising out of the Agreement is the provision in it allowing the tribes divided by the Line to cross it freely. In reality, this has allowed the population living near the border to violate it at will; it has also allowed in our day the terrorists and the Taliban with prize-money on their heads to slip into Pakistan and go underground here. The other problem is that the long border with Afghanistan is not completely demarcated and border posts are frequently contested.
The inter-provincial conference also considered the new "India factor" in Afghanistan. Under the Karzai government, India has been allowed to open its embassy in Kabul as well as its consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad. Needless to say, an Islamabad that is unused to having any Indian presence in Afghanistan since 1989 is upset about being in a nutcracker position. India was close to the pro- Soviet regime of Najibullah and his predecessors. After the Taliban took over, it helped the Tajik militia under Ahmad Shah Masood and Ustad Rabbani from Tajikistan. In fact, it was a part of an anti- Taliban alliance that included Iran, the Central Asian states and Russia. After the defeat of the Taliban, the new government in Kabul is heavily represented by elements who were, and remain, friendly towards India. During the war with the Soviet Union, and then with the Taliban, their families were exiled in India, in parallel to similar refugees in Pakistan from the other side of the Afghan divide.
Pakistan's Taliban policy was linked by its military strategists to the doctrine of Strategic Depth vis-à-vis India, compensating for the lack of width of its own territory in case there was a war with India. Pursuing strategic depth, Pakistan backed Mullah Umar's Taliban against the Northern Alliance and placed its under-cover officers in all the big cities of Afghanistan in the guise of consular staff. There are reported stories of great bravery on the part of these officers that were printed in the Pakistani press.
Pakistan had the run of 90 per cent of the Afghan territory as the Northern Alliance shrank back in the face of the Taliban and their Pakistani volunteer army. When Ahmad Shah Masood caught Pakistani army officers and put them on display on TV, Pakistan responded by saying that they were all retired and had gone to Afghanistan as private soldiers fighting in the name of Islam. "Strategic Depth" became the new shibboleth in Pakistan as the old doctrine of insistence on the Durand Line faded into the background.
Why did Pakistan insist that Afghanistan accept the Durand Line as a lawful border? The 1893 agreement on the Pak-Afghan border was signed when the foreign affairs of the Afghan ruler, Amir Abdur Rehman, were formally in the hands of British India. It contained a clause saying that the Afghan Amir would have the right to be concerned about "the kindred tribes" on the "Indian" side of the border. Afterwards, Amir Habibullah denounced the Agreement as having being signed under duress. Some historians think that the British got Habibullah assassinated for that reason. But the border became legally binding under a treaty that materialised after King Amanullah was defeated in a war by the British in 1921.
Although Afghanistan at first voted against Pakistan's membership at the UN in 1947, it soon accepted the new state and, subliminally, also accepted the boundary that made it a state. Unfortunately, it became a part of the Pushtun-Afghan nationalism to reject the Durand Line agreement. That is why Pakistan's policy towards Afghanistan was always hinged on the acceptance of the Durand Line by the government in Kabul.
By putting this policy on the back-burner, Pakistan reopened a can of worms it had always wanted sealed: the coming together of the Pushtun nation and the destruction of the "territorial concept" of Pakistan.
There are many in Pakistan who don't believe in the "territorial state", but Islamabad has woken up to the dangers of losing Pakistan by uniting a nation, somewhat like the challenge the world faces with the Kurds of Iraq. Today, there is a three-way convergence on the revival of the Durand Line, its demarcation and control. Pakistan wants it because it can no longer take in an unknown number of refugees every time there is conflict inside Afghanistan. The Americans want the border made firm against the Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists trying to evade the dragnet in Afghanistan. And at least the dominant Northern Alliance elements in the Karzai government may want the Durand Line to become an obstacle to the reunification of the Pushtun nation against them, something that appeared to have happened under the Taliban. Pakistan was punished by its neglect of
the Durand Line in the 2002 election when the MMA bagged the Pushtun- nationalist vote and now threatens the country with a fresh wave of internal Talibanisation and external isolation. *
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