Is the Durand Line storm brewing again?

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Afghanistan was the only country which refused to recognise Pakistan as an independent country in 1947 as it did not accept the Durand line which divides NWFP and Baluchistan. Looks like Afghanistan is putting pressure on US !!

In 1948 Afghanistan’s Parliament denounced the Durand Treaty and refuses to recognize the Durand line as a legal boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Later Pashtuns in Pashtunistan (Occupied Afghan Land by Pakistan) proclaim an independent Pashtunistan, but their proclamation goes unacknowledged by the world community. If Pakistan demands Kashmir from India, Afghanistan would demand Baluchistan and NWFP from Pakistan.

Is the Durand Line storm brewing again?

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Afghanistan is asking the US to renegotiate its border with Pakistan, while some Afghan officials have issued a new map that shows Peshawar and Quetta as part of Afghanistan, says a United Press International (UPI) report.

However, the US neither has the expertise nor the desire to resolve what the report calls a “standoff.” The Durand Line was drawn in 1893 with a life of 100 years which means it “expired” 10 years ago, a position that the present Kabul regime maintains.

According to the report, it is this issue that has led to several skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan since April and has forced the US to form a tripartite commission, which has already held three meetings. The US officials in Kabul say they expect the Durand Line issue also to dominate the fourth meeting, scheduled in the second week of September in Rawalpindi. Officials in Kabul say in the previous meetings, the US administration made it clear it has no desire to get involved in renegotiating a deal made more than a 100 years ago between Afghanistan and Britain. “The best we can do is to help the two countries reposition small border posts but we are not here to rewrite the history,” a US official told UPI.

The report says: “Kabul has officially asked the US to use its influence on Pakistan to force it to redraw the Durand Line. Islamabad, however, has already rejected this demand saying the line is a settled issue. Informally, Pakistani officials are believed to have complained to the US that India is using its influence on the Northern Alliance to revive an old and settled issue. In the last meeting of the tripartite commission, Kabul repeatedly brought up the issue, which prevented the commission from making unanimous recommendations.

Diplomatic sources said that during the meeting, Afghans also presented a copy of the original 1893 agreement, which they acquired from Britain. The Afghan government has also demanded that the tripartite commission be empowered to redraw the line.

Officials in Islamabad say they always feared that a government dominated by the Northern Alliance would revive the Durand Land issue.

Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbours, which include the newly independent Muslim states of the former Soviet Union, also established close ties with the Northern Alliance when the anti-Taliban force was fighting to oust the militia. They too hold Pakistan responsible for the rise of the Taliban. “Diplomatic observers say only the US has been urging Afghanistan to maintain friendly ties with Pakistan but they may not succeed in doing so, adding to the region’s imbroglio,” concludes the report.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_12-9-2003_pg1_4

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[quote]

If Pakistan demands Kashmir from India, Afghanistan would demand Baluchistan and NWFP from Pakistan.

[/quote]

Kiyoon jee Afghanistan aap ka biological abba lagta hai jo uski itnee fikar lagee howee hai? Kashmir main Afghanistan kee soond kiyoon ghusairh rahay ho? By the way Azad Kashmir was fought for and liberated by the "occupied" Pashtun people.

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What has Kashmir and India to do with Afganistan's claim over NWPF / Baluchistan? If they feel it is their and want it back, they should claim it.

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Yeah lets ask Quetta and Peshawar if they want to join that great stable and successful country: Afghanistan!

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To be very honest, Afghanistan has ZERO leverage over Pakistan to be asking for Quetta and Peshawar. Karzai rules a 3 mile radius around his Presidential palace. He should first try to figure out how he wants to establish relationships with 101 war lords running their own show inside Afghanistan, instead of starting a new panga with Islamabad. What a dolt!

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This is a dead issue and has no relevece after Zia's regime anywayz.

durungo, youre loosing your touch

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I still say shoot karzai. He is a pain the ass to everybody including the Americans. Let some warlord come to power that can be bribed and controlled. That way atleast someone will control Afghanistan.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by mufakkar: *
Yeah lets ask Quetta and Peshawar if they want to join that great stable and successful country: Afghanistan!
[/QUOTE]

Game Set and Match right there...next!

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India-Pakistan rivalry reaches into Afghanistan

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN – The Indian Consulate here is bustling with delegations of Indian diplomats and businessmen, who are snapping up many of the lucrative projects to rebuild the roads and infrastructure of Afghanistan.
Just a few blocks away, the Pakistani Consulate is swamped as well - but with Afghans waiting for visas to visit refugee relatives across the border. It isn’t the diplomatic mission Pakistan really wants.
This unequal status reflects a turning of tables in 2001, when Northern Alliance forces - bankrolled for years by India - rolled into Kabul on the heels of the retreating Taliban, who had swept to power five years earlier with Pakistan’s assistance. The fallout has helped take the 56-year rivalry between India and Pakistan beyond their borders into a third country that both seek to befriend.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by durango: *
who are snapping up many of the lucrative projects to rebuild the roads and infrastructure of Afghanistan.
[/QUOTE]
Ok, help me understand.... how is it a lucrative business and who is footing the bill?

Its not like Iraq where the US taxpayer (and some future promise of oil revenue) is making it "lucrative". I don't think Indian contractors are building roads in Afghanistan out of goodness of their heart or picking up the tab themselves. Who is gonna pay them. The Afghan warlords are not gonna pay taxes on all the opium they smuggle out, will they?

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United Nations must be paying. Afghans are giving contracts to Indians.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by durango: *
United Nations must be paying. Afghans are giving contracts to Indians.
[/QUOTE]

Durango: Why do you have to be so petty? This is the business world, if Afghans give out contracts based on politics rather than economics, it they will be footing the bill, even if the UN is paying...Just think about it.

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In todays world, agreements and treaties dont mean anything if you dont have the big guns to back it up. If afghanistan had an airforce, army, nukes, all that stuff, it could take back nwfp. Pakistan, although not terribly advanced economically, has an army. Its not a controvery at all whether or not NWFP belongs to afghanistan or not. ITS OBVIOUSLY true and common knowledge that this line drawn had a 100 year time span which has expired, but everyone is going to make excuses and other lies just to move over this topic because there is no realistic chance anytime soon of anyone taking this subject seriously as afghanistan is pretty backwards, but it is feasable why [the afghans] want nwfp as it would be an economy booster for their country among other things. Pakistan on the other hand would face sure collapse if nwfp were to become part of afghanistan as it has many resources vital to Pakistan. Personally, I believe a united pakistan and afghanistan would be better as division only makes you weaker.

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Contracts are offered to companies which the administration favours. How come all the contracts in Iraq are being given to American cos. like Halliburton and Bechtel. In Afghanistan India is trying to do some charity work by building hospitals, schools, sending doctors, text books etc.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_28-7-2003_pg3_3

Trying to ‘Indianise’ Afghan problem

Ahmed Rashid

Pakistan has not built a single hospital, school or road in Afghanistan. There is no Fatima Jinnah hospital for women or Mohammed Iqbal School for children to compete with the Indira Gandhi, Nehru and other signposted Indian monuments to reconstruction

The Indians have built schools for Afghan children, hospitals for Afghan women, Indian buses by the hundreds ply Kabul’s streets and the national airline Ariana is being resurrected by the free gift of three airbuses. India is building roads in western Afghanistan and repairing dams in eastern Afghanistan.

India has developed a highly constructive, imaginative reconstruction strategy for Afghanistan that is designed to please every sector of Afghan society, give India a high profile with the Afghan people, gain the maximum political advantage with the Afghan government, increase its influence with its Northern Alliance friends and turn its image from that of a country that supported the Soviet invasion and the communist regime in the 1980s to an indispensable ally and friend of the Afghan people in the new century.

Clever?

No, not at all, just common sense. Iran, Russia and the Central Asian Republics are doing the same. This is the time to curry favour with the Americans and the international community who place Afghanistan only second to Iraq. By doing good in Afghanistan you do good to the Afghan people, show your worth to the international community and most of all do yourself some good by building close relations with a country that is the strategic heart of the Central Asia region.

And what about Pakistan? We have not built a single hospital, school or road in Afghanistan. There is no Fatima Jinnah hospital for women or Mohammed Iqbal School for children to compete with the Indira Gandhi, Nehru and other signposted Indian monuments to reconstruction. We have given little to the Afghan people of the promised US$100 million that we had offered at the Tokyo conference except for a US$10 million grant for the Afghan budget last year. Our promise to build the Torkhum-Jalalabad-Kabul road has not been fulfilled. There is no attempt to carry out high profile projects.

We have no reconstruction strategy and prefer living off our “past sacrifices for the Afghan people” such as providing succour to the refugees and backing the Taliban. To top it all, after adopting this totally negative strategy, President Musharraf, his generals, his agencies and most lately his ministers Shaukat Aziz, Sheikh Rashid and Faisal Saleh Hayat — incredulously claim that its Indian interference that is wounding Afghanistan, damaging our relations with Kabul and supporting terrorism.

Blame it all on India. The easiest thing in the world is to “Indianise” our lack of good relations with Afghanistan and our refusal to build better relations with President Hamid Karzai. However this time round, this worn out agency line doesn’t have any reverberations amongst the Pakistani people.

While the army sweeps into FATA to re-conquer Pakistan’s historic territory, the agencies allow hundreds of Taliban to regroup in the Quetta-Chaman-Pishin triangle without much interference. While Balochistan is used as a training ground for the Taliban in a replay of 1994-5 when the Taliban emerged from Chaman, in the NWFP we are fighting terrorism, extremism and tribalism.

While the Americans can be taken for a ride because they are blind to the difference and the neo-cons in Washington do not really mind a few of their troops getting shot at by the Taliban, the populations of Balochistan and NWFP are thankfully not so dumb. They see the distortions from the reality on the ground. Most Pakistanis see Afghanistan not as a new arena of tensions with India but as an arena to do business, trade, sell and buy.

General Musharraf has constantly told the Pakistani people that he alone knows, understands and has the authority to carry out what is in the ”national security interests” of Pakistan. Is it in our interests to wrap up our failures in Afghanistan in a tissue paper and say it is all India’s fault.

Despite the government’s best efforts not to have a good relationship with Afghanistan, the Pashtuns from Peshawar are trading like mad in Kabul, 6000 skilled and semi-skilled Balochis are labouring in Kandahar, Pakistani cement is being sold all along the border and Pakistani construction companies are trying to win some of the sub-contracts for road building.

Pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes is not gong to work this time. Pakistanis know where their best interests lie and they are not likely to listen to the well-tutored ministers or anyone else. They want to do business with Afghanistan, improve relations and help in the reconstruction of that country – in short, prosper and let prosper.

Ahmed Rashid is a journalist and author of the famous book on the Taliban

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EI16Df01.html

This revolves around the so-called Durand Line, named after a British colonial official, that marks the present day border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The present-day Afghan government says that the agreement reached between their King Abdur Rahman Khan and British colonial official Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in 1893 was for 100 years only, and expired in 1993. The Afghans are now asking the US to renegotiate the border, and some Afghan officials have already issued a new map that shows such major Pakistani cities as Peshawar and Quetta in Afghanistan.

The issue has already caused several skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan and has forced the US to form a tripartite commission to resolve border disputes between its two allies. The commission, which also includes the US, has already held three meetings and officials in Washington say that they expect the Durand Line issue also to dominate the fourth meeting, scheduled this month in Rawalpindi.

In the previous meetings the US administration made it clear to both sides that it has no desire to get involved in re-negotiating a deal made more than a 100 years ago between Afghanistan and Britain. In its last meeting, the tripartite commission asked its sub-committee to continue with deliberations on proposals to sort out disputes over some border posts. The commission also established a hotline between Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent further armed clashes between the two countries. The hotline also allows the two US allies to stay in touch with US military officials based in the region.

But apparently Afghanistan wants more. The sources say that Kabul has officially asked the US to use its influence on Pakistan to force it to re-demarcate the Durand Line. Islamabad, however, has already rejected this demand, saying that the Durand Line is a settled issue and it has no desire to reopen it. Informally, Pakistani officials are believed to have complained to the US that they believe India is using its influence on the Northern Alliance, which dominates the present government in Kabul and has close ties to New Delhi, to revive an old and settled issue.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by yusuf1982: *
ITS OBVIOUSLY true and common knowledge that this line drawn had a 100 year time span which has expired, but everyone is going to make excuses and other lies just to move over this topic because there is no realistic chance anytime soon of anyone taking this subject seriously as

[/QUOTE]

No it's not true, it's nationalist propaganda that you have eaten up without questioning. There was no 100 year time limit. The treaty and Durand line was for indefinite period of time and only war or agreement between Pak and Afghan will change that now.