Durand Line: Geopolitical issues

Arif Ayub When the British were consolidating their empire in India, they were looking for the natural boundaries of India. In the east, there was the buffer state of Burma and the theoretically impenetrable jungles and hills of Assam, while in the north, the Himalayas were impassable. In the south, was the ocean which the British anyway dominated worldwide. However, while reading Indian history they noticed that for the last 4,000 years the northwest had acted as a corridor for the continuous invasions of India - the Highway of Conquests. Starting with the Aryans in 2500 BC other invasions followed by the Persians, Greeks, Sakas, Kushans, Turks, Mongols, Moghuls and finally the Afghans. This was a route, which obviously had to be blocked, if the rulers were to sleep soundly at night. After their domination of the Punjab, the British, therefore, decided to extend their North West Frontier (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) to the natural boundaries of India, which they presumed to be the Hindu Kush as a continuation of the Himalayas, with Iran acting as a buffer state. As the Hindu Kush passes were too high to be continuously manned all the year round, a screen was envisaged along the Oxus. While this seemed eminently logical and easy on the map, on the ground it proved to be a policy that was practically impossible to maintain, due to a constraint which the British had so far failed to notice during their conquest of India i.e. the people of the country. The Afghans proved themselves to be a match for the British and handed them their first defeats in their endeavour to paint the global map red. This approach was not as straightforward as it appears in retrospect and was followed through in fits and starts with a great deal of discussion amongst different schools of thought. The entire matter was, however, precipitated by the Russian advances in Central Asia mirroring British advances in India. In the 100 years it took the British to advance from Bengal to the Punjab frontier, the Russians correspondingly advanced from Orenburg to the Oxus. The stage was, therefore, set for what the British called 'The Great Game and the Russians called 'The Tournament of Shadows in a rivalry in which each side tried to gain an advantage in dominating the approaches to India. The British played the first gambit by their invasion of Afghanistan in the First Afghan War of 1836, but had to give up the country after their army was completely wiped out. This led to a review of the 'forward policy and a return to the Punjab frontier where the British licked their wounds and pondered on their next move. After decades of debate on strategies of 'back to the Indus and 'masterly inactivity, the proponents of the 'forward policy again won the argument as the British consoled themselves with the thought that their defeat had been a fluke due to the incompetence of the previous leadership. The Second Afghan War was, therefore, launched with equally disastrous consequences for the British, who had to suffer the ignominy of losing their artillery at Kandahar. The British finally realised that, despite being the superpower of the day, they did not have the capacity to dominate Afghanistan against the wishes of the Afghan people. So, they had to give up their plans for controlling the 'keys to India - Herat, Kandahar and Kabul. The fallback position was the Durand Line Border Agreement of 1893, which essentially is the second best military line of defence, following, to a large extent, the watershed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Exceptions had to be made in the Mohmand area and in Waziristan where there is no clearly defined watershed, which has created problems that have lasted to the present day. The strategy envisaged was to defend the Khyber, with the main garrison being at Rawalpindi, while the counter offensive would be launched from Quetta along the Kandahar-Ghazni-Kabul axis to outflank any aggressor. The northern boundary of Afghanistan was settled along the Oxus after negotiations with the Russians and Afghanistan was established as a buffer state between the two empires. The British also decided to allow the Afghans to choose their own rulers and then to robustly support with financial and military assistance any strong ruler who emerged. This policy worked quite well in maintaining peace and security in the region for nearly a 100 years, until the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979, that brought anarchy and chaos to the region from which it has still not fully recovered and shows no sign of recovering. Additional problems were created by the countervailing force of the jihad, which was launched from Pakistan and that enabled the Afghans to defeat the aims of another superpower. Nowadays, the Afghans are well on their way to defeat a third superpower, which has tried to test their prowess. Defeating three superpowers in three centuries is not a bad record for a country written off as a failed state. A supplementary problem created by the Durand Line was that the Pashtun tribes within the line and the Punjab frontier were just as difficult to control as the Afghans, and the British had to create separate administrative arrangements to deal with the issue - the Prickly Hedge approach. The matter was never satisfactorily resolved and the British had to conduct military expeditions annually against one tribe or another in order to maintain their control. With typical British pragmatism, they decided to make the best of a bad deal and use the campaigns as a means to keep their army at peak efficiency, as it tested its mettle against some of the best fighters in the world. Unfortunately, both our army and the US seemed to be reverting to this model, which is hardly the way to ensure peace, security and development in the region. There is, thus, an urgent need to involve all the players in devising a comprehensive solution towards managing the problem that has the potential to set the region aflame. The writer is a retired ambassador.