Fencing the Durand Line
There is little evidence that the new Afghan President’s opinion on the issue will vary from that of his predecessors
While both Pakistan and Afghanistan know the importance of peace after more than three decades of extreme instability in the region, the controversies that have surrounded the Durand Line — whether it should be converted into a permanent border or not, and later, whether it should be fenced or not — have been highly touchy subjects that have never been fully resolved. The Durand Line agreement, signed between British India and Afghanistan in 1893, ran into trouble soon after Partition, with legal, territorial, economic, ethnographic, military and geopolitical issues arising on both sides. More recently, with the US invasion of Afghanistan, the term ‘porous borders’ started being used to explain the regional conflict and more often than not, to shift the blame on Pakistan for the problem of militancy being experienced in Afghanistan. In this regard, former president Pervez Musharraf’s efforts to control cross-border infiltration by fencing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border stirred up strong emotions in Afghanistan.
What cannot be denied is the serious problem that both countries face in the form of militancy and the role that the porous border has played in exacerbating it severely, and hence the talk on the Pakistani side of building a fence along it. There is little evidence that the new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s opinion on this issue will vary from that of his predecessors. However, with newly emerging geopolitical realities in the region after the US withdrawal, as well as the fear of the rise of the Afghan Taliban and the emergence of transnational jihadist ideologies, the Durand Line issue and whether it should be fenced or not, is definitely one that needs some resolution. While it would be extremely difficult to fence the entire border, both in practical terms and keeping in view the extreme passions that such a step may arouse, some sort of consensus needs to be built among all stakeholders regarding a realistic solution that respects the opinions of the tribes on both sides, as well as both governments. “Frontiers are the chief anxieties of nearly every foreign office in the civilised world,” Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, once said. And while currently anxiety remains high on both sides, mainly because of mistrust, real progress will only follow once that ends.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 14th, 2014.
What cannot be denied is the serious problem that both countries face in the form of militancy and the role that the porous border has played in exacerbating it severely, and hence the talk on the Pakistani side of building a fence along it. There is little evidence that the new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s opinion on this issue will vary from that of his predecessors. However, with newly emerging geopolitical realities in the region after the US withdrawal, as well as the fear of the rise of the Afghan Taliban and the emergence of transnational jihadist ideologies, the Durand Line issue and whether it should be fenced or not, is definitely one that needs some resolution. While it would be extremely difficult to fence the entire border, both in practical terms and keeping in view the extreme passions that such a step may arouse, some sort of consensus needs to be built among all stakeholders regarding a realistic solution that respects the opinions of the tribes on both sides, as well as both governments. “Frontiers are the chief anxieties of nearly every foreign office in the civilised world,” Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, once said. And while currently anxiety remains high on both sides, mainly because of mistrust, real progress will only follow once that ends.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 14th, 2014.