[Reader-list] Pakistan's Border: Line of Fiction

[yasir ~يا سر]

Thats the Pakhtunkhwa (NWFP) border.
There's also the Goldsmith line demarking Baluchistan/s

its very screwed up nonsensical and what not    :)



On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Paul D. Miller <anansi1 at earthlink.net>wrote:

> Pakistan's Border's were drawn by Britain - the guy who drew the line
> barely bothered to do any research! Hilarious. I guess it's just one of
> those bizaare situations from the 20th century that just won't go away.
> Hundreds of thousands of people died in the ethnic cleansing that followed
> the imposition of the new border Sir Cyril drew between India and Pakistan -
> what will happen with the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet
> another Western fiction?
> Paul
>
>
>
> Pakistan’s British-Drawn Borders
>
>
> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/pakistans-british-drawn-borders/
> Robert Mackey
>
>
> In their fascinating account of a series of interviews with a Taliban
> tactician in Tuesday’s New York Times, Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah point
> to “one distinct Taliban advantage: the border between Afghanistan and
> Pakistan barely exists for the Taliban.”
>
> In previous posts on The Lede, we’ve mentioned that Pakistan and the rest
> of the world believes that Afghanistan ends (and Pakistan begins) more or
> less where a 1,600-mile line was drawn on the world map in 1893, at the
> direction of a British colonial officer named Henry Mortimer Durand, who
> sought to define the outer edge of what was then British India. At the time,
> the Afghans grudgingly accepted this map, despite the fact that what became
> known as the Durand Line cut right through Pashtun tribal areas and even
> villages that they considered part of Afghanistan.
>
> Sir Henry, whose portrait can be seen in Britain’s National Portrait
> Gallery in London, drew his line with the memory of Britain’s two failed
> wars against the Afghans fresh in his mind. Not long before, in 1879, during
> what the British call the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Sir Henry had completed
> and published an account of “The First Afghan War and Its Causes” begun by
> his father, Sir Henry Marion Durand. As Sir Henry noted in his introduction
> to the book (which has been scanned and posted online in its entirety by
> Google), his father, who died before he could complete the history, “had
> some special qualifications for the task,” having participated in that
> first, disastrous attempt to subdue Afghanistan, four decades earlier.
>
> So, as the entry on Pakistan in the Encarta encyclopedia explains,
> splitting the Pashtun tribes was in some sense the whole point of what is
> still known today as the Durand Line:
>
>    As the British sought to expand their empire into the northwest
> frontier, they clashed with the Pashtun tribes that held lands extending
> from the western boundary of the Punjab plains into the kingdom of
> Afghanistan. The Pashtuns strongly resisted British invasions into their
> territories. After suffering many casualties, the British finally admitted
> they could not conquer the Pashtuns. In 1893 Sir Mortimer Durand, the
> foreign secretary of the colonial government of India, negotiated an
> agreement with the king of Afghanistan, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, to delineate
> a border. The so-called Durand Line cut through Pashtun territories,
> dividing them between British and Afghan areas of influence. However, the
> Pashtuns refused to be subjugated under British colonial rule. The British
> compromised by creating a new province in 1901, named the North-West
> Frontier Province, as a loosely administered territory where the Pashtuns
> would not be subject to colonial laws.
>
> In November, 2001, as the United States confronted the Taliban in the
> aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Cener and the Pentagon, Vartan
> Gregorian explained on The Times’s Op-Ed page how the arbitrary line the
> British colonial administration in India drew through “Pashtunistan” in the
> 19th century, which still forms much of the modern border, created problems
> that have still not been resolved in this volatile border region.
>
> 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 January, Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon official, told Bill Moyers in a
> discussion of American strategy for fighting militants along the
> Afghan-Pakistan border, calling the Pashtuns who live along both sides of
> the Durand Line “a tribe,” can be misleading. In an interview, Mr. Sprey
> said:
>
>    It’s not a tribe. It’s a nation. This is 40 million people spread across
> Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know, who don’t even recognize that border.
> It’s their land. … There’s 40 million of them. That’s a nation, not a tribe.
> Within it are tribal groupings and so on. But they all speak the common
> language. And they all have a very similar, very rigid, in lots of ways very
> admirable code of honor much stronger than their adherence to Islam.
>
> Pakistan’s other borders were created in 1947 by another British colonial
> officer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was made chairman of the boundary
> commission and given six weeks to carve a Muslim-majority state from British
> India. As the historian Karl Meyer wrote in his book “The Dust of Empire,”
> Sir Cyril “was a curious choice,” since he had never previously visited
> India. In a chapter called “Pakistan: Sins of Partition,” Mr. Meyer
> explained:
>
>    As Radcliffe’s former private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, later
> remarked in an interview, the chairman had never traveled east and “was a
> bit flummoxed by the whole thing. It was a rather impossible assignment,
> really. To partition that subcontinent in six weeks was absurd.”
>
> Hundreds of thousands of people died in the ethnic cleansing that followed
> the imposition of the new border Sir Cyril drew between India and Pakistan.
> W.H. Auden made the absurdity of the way the border was created the subject
> of the poem “Partition,” published in 1966:
>
>    Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
>    Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
>    Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
>    With their different diets and incompatible gods.
>    “Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late
>    For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
>    The only solution now lies in separation.
>    The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
>    That the less you are seen in his company the better,
>    So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
>    We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
>    To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”
>
>    Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
>    Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
>    He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
>    Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
>    And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
>    But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
>    Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
>    And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
>    But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
>    A continent for better or worse divided.
>
>    The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
>    The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
>    Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
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