CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Escalation on the Durand Line

Image Source: Weaveravel – CC BY-SA 4.0

On Iran’s eastern flank, far from the Gulf states now in the crosshairs, another conflict continues to grow. Pakistan has declared what it now calls an “open war” with Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities, striking Kabul, Kandahar and eastern provinces. As it happens, the Durand Line between them was never just a boundary.

It was an arrogant gesture of empire. A straight ruler drawn across a relief map in 1893, slicing through mountains the colour of ash and oxidised copper, through river valleys that flare into the most beautiful and drowsy of greens for a few weeks each spring—truly—through tribes and trading routes older than the states presently trying to outstare—and worse—across it.

It is a spectacular part of the world. Way too beautiful for man’s inhumanity to man. In winter, the wind combs the ridges clean before snow is laid down like a vast cold white duvet. In summer, dust rises in amber veils. Silence, though, is always brief. I remember being told about a dozen species of lark while ordnance thumped in the background.

Kabul has never formally recognised the line as an international border. Islamabad treats it as settled fact. The argument long predates the governments now trading artillery fire. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president when I made four later trips there, once declared Afghanistan would “never” accept the border as legitimate. Pakistan, meanwhile, has spent years fencing and fortifying it—stringing barbed wire along knife-edge crests, blasting tracks into occasionally lithium shale, posting thousands of Frontier Corps troops to lonely hilltop forts of sandbags and corrugated iron.

I may have been smuggled across the Durand Line in the early 1980s, the only Westerner with a tight group of Abdul Haq’s Mujahideen, but I was in awe of the people inhabiting this region. Even then it felt less like crossing a border than stepping between rival certainties.

Now........

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