Securing Afghanistan's border

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The border, commencing from the intersection with China in the northeast and extending to the east, south and southwest across to where Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran today intersect, was largely fixed under an agreement signed in Kabul on 12 November 1893 by the Afghan ruler Amir Aburrahman Khan (1880–1901) and the head of the British Commission, Sir Mortimer Durand, who determined the course of the boundary that became known as the ‘Durand Line’. For the text of the agreement see Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan 1900–1923: A Diplomatic History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 176–7. 2. For a detailed discussion see Alastair Lamb, Asian Frontiers: Studies in a Continuing Problem (London: F.W. Cheshire, 1968), pp. 86–9; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch. 18. 3. Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 173. 4. Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 159. 5. For an Afghan perspective on the course of developments, see Mir Gholam Mohammad Ghobar, Afghanistan in the Course of History, vol. 2, translated by Sharif A. Fayez (Alexandria, VA: All Prints Inc., 2001), pp. 189–96. Some Afghans have also claimed that the 1893 agreement was to be valid for one century: that is, it would expire in 1993. No documentary evidence exists to substantiate this claim and Pakistan has discounted it entirely. 6. The Afghan case for Pashtunistan is made poignantly by Abdul Rahman Pazhwak, Afghan ambassador to the UN and president of the General Assembly in 1966, in his Pashtunistan: A New State in Central Asia (London: The Royal Afghan Embassy, 1960); also see Arnold Fletcher, Afghanistan: Highway of Conquest (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1965), ch. 17. 7. For a detailed discussion, see Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), ch. 5; Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1983), ch. 2; Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation & Collapse in the International System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), ch. 4. 8. For details see Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, chs 5 and 7; Dupree, Afghanistan, ch. 23. 9. For a detailed discussion see J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 1986), ch. 2. 10. See Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, ch. 6. 11. Ibid., p. 180. 12. For a detailed discussion of Pakistan's objectives and role in the Afghan resistance, see William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), ch. 3. 13. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. parts 1–2. 14. See Richard Mackenzie, ‘The United States and the Taliban’, in William Maley (ed.), Fundamentalism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban (London: Hurst & Co., 2001), ch. 5. 15. Amin Saikal, Islam and the West: Conflict or Cooperation? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 106. 16. BBC News, 24 July 2003. 17. For Khalilzad's criticism of Pakistan and a perspective on how Musharraf's policies have revived a border problem that his successors had been trying to banish for 50 years, see Zia Sarhadi, ‘Pakistan Paying a High Price for Musharraf's Urge to Please the US’, Muslimedia International, 16–31 August 2003. 18. Daily Times, 1 August 2004. 19. See Paul Watson, ‘The Lure of Opium Wealth is a Potent Force in Afghanistan’, Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2005. 20. For a detailed discussion of drug production and strategies to control it, see Amir Zada Asad and Robert Harris, The Politics and Economics of Drug Production on the Pakistan–Afghanistan Border (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 21. ‘Afghanistan's Forgotten War’, The New York Times, 5 August 2005. 22. If two developments clearly illustrate the extent of US failures in Afghanistan, they are the recent decision by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) to pull out of Afghanistan, after 24 years, because of insecurity and use of humanitarian aid by coalition forces for gathering intelligence on terrorism, and the warning by the US Government to its citizens not to travel to Afghanistan. AFP, 24 July 2004; ABC Radio Australia News, 31 July 2004. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAmin SaikalAmin Saikal is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University. His recent books include Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004) and Islam and the West: Conflict or Cooperation? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).