A line drawn in blood

The 2,640-km-long Durand Line is more than just a frontier.

- SANTHOSH MATHEW

It is a century-old scar on the map of South Asia - a scar that has bled into three Anglo-Afghan wars, the Cold War, the Taliban's rise, and today’s great power rivalries. For the Afghan Pashtun, this line is not history. It is daily life.

It was in 1893 that Mortimer Durand forced Abdur Rahman Khan to accept a division of his territory. This act tore apart the Pashtun tribal belt, splitting families and communities. Though the agreement was meant to define zones of influence, the British treated it as a permanent international border. When Pakistan inherited this border in 1947, Afghanistan rejected it. Kabul had urged Britain to relinquish the agreement before leaving India. When the British refused, Afghanistan became the only country to oppose Pakistan’s entry into the UN. This single boundary line would go on to shape, and destabilize, the geopolitics of the entire region.

The Durand Line was drawn in imperial ink, but its story is soaked in the blood of empires. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Afghanistan became the pivot of the “Great Game” between the British and the Russians. Three brutal Anglo-Afghan Wars were fought. Afghanistan emerged battered but unconquered. Unlike India, it was never a classical colony. Yet it was trapped in the vice grip of great power rivalries - an early victim of what would later be called neo-imperialism.