Retracing Nato routes: Politics of access in the Pak-Afghan region
The year 2011 hasn’t been the only time in history when the politics of routes and access shaped international relations in this region.
While Nato supply routes for troops in Afghanistan have finally been reopened, the current security predicament faced by the Af-Pak region has much to do with its history.
It started in the late 1800s. Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain were engaged in the shadowy ‘Great Game’ – Russian expansionism in Central Asia alerted the British Raj to possible adventurism in India. As a result, Afghanistan’s boundaries, as they exist today, were demarcated in order to ensure a buffer between Russia and India. Amir Abdur Rehman Khan, the Afghan King at the time, said Afghanistan was “Like a poor goat on which a lion and bear have fixed their eyes”.
Russia and Britain engaged in railways and road building activity on both sides of the country. However, newly-carved out Afghanistan shunned transportation facilities in order to deter Russian or British incursions and sought shelter in a cocoon of “aloofness, isolation and deliberate underdevelopment,” as academic Vartan Gregorian puts it.
The Durand Line, however, always remained a bitter pill which Afghanistan was forced to swallow by the British. It refused to relinquish its claims over territories extending to the Indus River, including almost all of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas.
Mistrust and blockades
Following Britain’s departure from India, Afghans expected territories west of the Indus to automatically revert to them. When this didn’t happen, Afghanistan supported Pakhtun irredentism and the Pakhtunistan issue – leading to tensions between the new neighbours. Afghanistan was the only country that opposed Pakistan’s entry to the UN in 1947.
As a result of these tensions, Pakistan blocked Afghan transit trade in 1950, 1955 and 1961. These blockades took place because of a 1949 rejection by the Afghan Parliament of the Durand Line Agreement, subsequent attacks by Afghans on Pakistan border areas, an uproar over Northwest Frontier Province being merged into one unit which led to attacks on Pakistani missions in Afghanistan and in 1961, attacks on Pakistani posts again in Bajaur.
Relations normalised in 1964 when the Shah of Iran mediated the Tehran Agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Roads and Access
Besides the transit trade business, the route also caters to a thriving smuggling business over a porous border and in the past, nomad migration from Afghanistan. Following the 1961 tensions, however, Afghanistan tried to reduce its reliance on Pakistan routes.
This never really worked out – in the same year, when the Afghan foreign minister asked US President John F Kennedy to help construct routes through Iran, Kennedy told him to normalise relations with Pakistan. Later, when Iran and Afghanistan agreed to construct a railroad connecting the countries in 1977, the fall of the Shah of Iran caused the agreement to go up in smoke.
The impatience displayed by the US over the closure of routes reaffirms what history has already made clear –Pakistan’s land routes are indispensable for Afghanistan, or any actor involved in Afghanistan’s affairs.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 5th, 2012.
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Britain, the former colonial master in the Indian Subcontinent is long gone and far away, leaving a mess behind for modern history to sought things out. Indeed as consequences of Britain's arbitrary divisions - the Durand and the Radcliffe lines - people in Afghanistan and Pakistan today suffer from displacement, social grievances and sectarian violence. During Soviet occupation Afghanistan was a perilous Cold War battleground as it drew the US and its neighbours into the conflict. Pakistan began to play a key role in the region after the fall of the Taliban regime and the U.S. invasion and war on terrorthere. Today's key actors in Afghanistan's "Great Game" are India and Pakistan. Geographically, the latter has the upper hand.
another factor of strained ties between the neighbors were the fear of exporting communism from Afghanistan into Pakistan. This fear has never freed the military junta of Pakistan to enhance bilateral ties with Afghanistan and use Afghans non-excess to sea as an opportunity for its own economic advantages. Due to communism centric school of thought, Pakistan have left Afghanistan into a dark backyard where it had mushroomed Islamic fundamentalists.
"The impatience displayed by the US over the closure of routes reaffirms what history has already made clear –Pakistan’s land routes are indispensable for Afghanistan, or any actor involved in Afghanistan’s affairs."
Perhaps so. Until Balochistan becomes an independent country perhaps!
Pakistan's ground routes are indispensable for US and NATO but the Government of Pakistan has failed to use this card in a profitable manner. At least the GOP should now exercise strict control over the movement of NATO goods to prevent smuggling of weapons and luxury goods into Pakistan.