Empires rise and fall, maps evolve, but borders often endure beyond the ambitions that created them. The Durand Line, stretching about 2,640 km between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is one such frontier, born of treaties, diplomacy, and the rival empires that shaped the region. The Afghan state took form in 1747 when Ahmad Shah Durrani, a former general under Nadir Shah of Persia, united the Pashtun tribes and established the Durrani Empire. From its inception, Afghanistan stood at the heart of competing powers, Persia to the west, Russia to the north, and British India to the east, becoming the central arena of the 19th-century ‘Great Game’ between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) stands as one of the defining chapters in that struggle. On May 26, 1879, Emir Mohammad Yaqub Khan and Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, representing the British Raj, met in Gandamak, a village near Jalalabad in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, to conclude an accord that would reshape the region’s political map. The Treaty of Gandamak brought an end to hostilities and established a new relationship between Kabul and Calcutta. Under its terms, key frontier regions, including Pishin, the Kurram Valley, the Khyber Pass, and adjacent tribal areas extending toward Balochistan, were ceded to the British. In exchange, Afghanistan was recognised as a British protectorate. Its foreign relations were placed under the supervision of the Government of India, a permanent British mission was established in Kabul, and the Emir was granted an annual allowance of six hundred thousand rupees, a symbolic tribute that reinforced dependence under the guise of diplomacy.
It was under Abdur Rahman Khan’s reign that the Durand Agreement of 1893 was signed, a document that continues to influence regional politics more than a century later.
Yet, true to the turbulent character of Afghan politics, the calm was short-lived. In September 1879, only months after the treaty was signed, the British mission in Kabul was attacked and wiped out, a diplomatic outrage even by 19th-century standards. The British responded with force, reigniting the war that had barely ended. By 1880, after another bitter campaign, Afghanistan was once again subdued, and the British installed Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901), a calculating and pragmatic leader known as the Iron Emir. Though allowed to govern internally, his foreign policy remained under the tight supervision of the British, ensuring that Afghanistan remained a buffer rather than a battleground.
It was under Abdur Rahman Khan’s reign that the Durand Agreement of 1893 was signed, a document that continues to influence regional politics more than a century later. Named after Sir Mortimer Durand, the Foreign Secretary of British India, the agreement clearly defined the boundary between Afghanistan and British India from the Wakhan Corridor in the north to Balochistan in the south. Contrary to later Afghan claims, it was not a unilateral imposition but a negotiated treaty, discussed, accepted, and later reaffirmed by successive Afghan rulers, including Amir Habibullah Khan (1905), King Nadir Shah (1930) and King Zahir Shah (1949).
Emir Abdur Rahman described it in his memoirs (The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, 1900) as a “settlement between two governments”, bringing clarity and peace to a long-uncertain frontier. He knew that peace with a stronger neighbour was vital for Afghanistan’s survival. Historian Olaf Caroe noted, “Frontiers are not accidents of geography; they are the last expression of political realities settled by history.” The same held true for Afghanistan’s borders with Iran and Russia, both negotiated with British involvement, yet only the Durand Line remains disputed. Afghanistan never questioned its northern borders after the Russian Empire’s fall or the rise of new Central Asian states in 1991. Its selective objection to the Durand Line reflects not legality but politics, a refusal to accept the realities that history has already defined.
When Pakistan came into being in 1947, it inherited the international borders of British India under the principle of state succession. The Durand Line automatically became Pakistan’s western frontier and was recognised by the United Nations and the international community as such. Even during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Soviet aircraft violated Pakistani airspace, those incursions were condemned at the UN as breaches of Pakistan’s sovereignty, an acknowledgement that the Durand Line functioned as a legitimate international border. Ironically, the same line that Afghans reject today became their greatest lifeline in times of tragedy. During both the Soviet and post-2001 conflicts, it was across this frontier that millions of Afghan refugees found shelter, food, and security, in the very country they now accuse of ‘dividing’ their nation. History rarely offers such paradoxes so plainly: the border they deny is the boundary that saved them.
Time neither forgets nor forgives the illusions of convenience. The Durand Line, drawn through agreement and recognised by the world, is not a relic of empire but a reality of international order. To reject it now would be to invite chaos, for if every nation began to disown its borders, no map on earth would remain intact. The world is built on such lines, the 38th Parallel that divides the Koreas, and the Sykes-Picot borders that defined the modern Middle East, the McMahon Line between India and China, the Radcliffe Line between India and Pakistan, and the Oder-Neisse Line between Germany and Poland, all born of conflict yet sustained by recognition. Borders are not matters of sentiment; they are the framework of peace and the grammar of coexistence. The Durand Line endures because history, diplomacy, and necessity have written it into permanence, a boundary that reminds us that nations survive not by erasing lines, but by respecting them.
The writer is a Ph.D in Political Science and a visiting faculty member at QAU Islamabad. His area of specialisation is political development and social change. He can be reached at zafarkhansafdar @yahoo.com and tweet@zafarkhansafdar.