Pakistani Soldiers Died Near Long-Disputed Border





The footage gives a sense of how remote the location of the mountaintop posts is, in Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal region near the border with Kunar Province in Afghanistan.

In the immediate aftermath of the raid, a NATO spokesman, Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, said the airstrikes had come during an operation in a “border area where the Durand Line is not always 100 percent clear.” As regular readers of The Lede might recall, the Durand Line was the 1,600-mile boundary drawn to divide Afghanistan from British India in the 19th century, which is, for the most part, recognized in Pakistan as the country’s western border today.

But adding to the difficulty of fighting insurgents along this porous and mainly unmarked border is the fact that Afghanistan still refuses to accept the line as its border. So while Pakistan acts as if Afghanistan begins more or less where this line was drawn on the world map in 1893, in accordance with an agreement negotiated by a British colonial officer named Henry Mortimer Durand, for Afghans — including both the government and the Taliban — the frontier remains undefined.

The Durand Line, drawn in 1893 to divide British India from Afghanistan, forms the basis for modern Pakistan's western border. Central Intelligence AgencyThe Durand Line, drawn in 1893 to divide British India from Afghanistan, forms the basis for modern Pakistan’s western border.

As the scholar Barnett Rubin noted in an article in Foreign Affairs in 2007, when the British left India in 1947 and the northwest part of the territory was carved into the new state of Pakistan, the Afghans stopped recognizing the Durand Line as a border:

Afghanistan claimed that Pakistan was a new state, not a successor to British India, and that all past border treaties had lapsed. A loya jirga in Kabul denied that the Durand Line was an international border and called for self-determination of the tribal territories as Pashtunistan. Skirmishes across the Durand Line began with the covert support of both governments.

While the two governments today are not actually fighting a war over the location of the border, the fact that the Durand Line runs right through the traditional Pashtun lands means that Taliban fighters from Afghanistan blend easily into the local population on the Pakistani side of the frontier. Suggestions from Pakistan to stop illegal border crossings by either putting down land mines or erecting a fence have been rejected by Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, who is himself Pashtun.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s raid, The News, a Pakistani daily, reported that some Pakistanis in the tribal area also refused to recognize the Durand Line as their border.

Elders of the Khugakhel tribe that lives in the border area in Mohmand Agency, where the NATO air raid took place in the early hours on Saturday, have claimed that the real international border is at least nine kilometers inside Afghanistan, and not at the Salala security check post in the Anargai Ghakhi mountain peak, which was bombed and strafed by the U.S. gunship helicopters.

Speaking on behalf of the Khugakhel Mohmand tribal elders who met him Saturday after the NATO air raid, former provincial minister Iftikhar Mohmand said the NATO strike would not have taken place at the Salala post if Pakistan had not given up its rightful claim on this piece of land inhabited by the Khugakhel tribe.

He said their tribe hadn’t given up its claim on this piece of land. “Our Khugakhel tribe is living there, and it considers itself Pakistani. We have complained to the Pakistan government in the past as well, and we are reiterating our complaint about why Islamabad gave up this territory and accepted the Durand Line border at the Anargai Ghakhi mountain peak by setting up the Salala security post there,” he argued.

INSERT DESCRIPTIONLibrary of Congress A map of the border between Afghanistan (in yellow) and British India (in pink) from 1893, the year the Durand Line was negotiated. When the line was drawn, Afghanistan’s border was moved further to the west.

In a study of the ongoing dispute over the Durand Line, Bijan Omrani, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, explained that this particular part of the boundary was never actually defined. After the agreement between Britain and Afghanistan was signed in 1893, Mr. Omrani wrote, “when the demarcation teams went out into the field to try to delimit the boundary, there were areas represented on the map which did not exist on the ground, and vice versa.”

According to Mr. Omrani, one of the places where the boundary was never drawn at all was in the Mohmand hills, where Saturday’s airstrikes took place.

The line, as demarcated between 1893 and 1896, was drawn all the way from the Persian frontier to the Wakhan, the little area on which the British insisted to keep a distance between the British and Russian Empires. There were two exceptions, which at that time remained undemarcated: an area in the region of Chitral and another area a little north of the routes towards Kabul — the country of the Mohmand tribe.

He added:

The people on the ground did not like the idea of being under any sort of British jurisdiction. The officers who were demarcating the line soon found themselves the object of unwelcome attention, mainly in bullet form. By 1897 there was a general uprising all over the area, which it took 60,000 British regular troops to pacify.