Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart, by RAJIV DOGRA.

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Durand's Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart

by RAJIV DOGRA.

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The book has a single point, after backgrounds and histories are given - namely, that Durand Agreement was questionable in the first place, and invalidated soon thereafter, but Durand Line never intended as frontier or border, nor in practice administered as such, and is in fact long defunct.

Rajiv dogra is chiefly questioning the Durand Line and attempting to puzzle out why, the Amir who signed away so large a territory to British, did so.

At only halfway through the book as he takes time describing personalities and events, analyzing and questioning meanwhile, its unclear whether he's going to get the reply.

But the strong possibility is that British, having done do to Ireland, had always had partition of India in mind, with a territory on two sides of Sindhu River separated from mainland and heart of India, for use by wedt against Russia.

" ... Ever since 1893, these tribal areas have been in ferment; a people who wanted to be left to themselves are now home to multiple mutations of terror, not because they wanted to but because terrorists were imposed on them.

"The question that must be asked of heavens is this—why of all the tribes in the world are only the Pathans tormented?"

Dogra exaggerates.

Compared with native tribes of both, Australia on one hand, and the continent across Atlantic on the other, all of them forcefully dispossessed of their own homeland, and much worse in case of Australia's natives, Pathans in comparison have only a gullibility of their own to jihadist furore to blame.

Or so one would think, until one reads this! Just when on is exasperated with the legal nitpicking dogra repeatedly gies into regarding behaviour of British and subsequently pakis, neither of which have been exactly known to be anywhere near even moderately strict adherents of fair dealings as such, Dogra suddenly changes tack and gets interesting.

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"One such convulsion began in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski, the then US national security adviser, persuaded his president, Jimmy Carter, to launch ‘Operation Cyclone’ with an annual kitty of $500 million. Its aim was to mobilize Islamic militants to attack the Soviet Union in its Central Asian states and defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan.

"‘We didn’t push the Russians to intervene in Afghanistan,’ Brzezinski said in 1998, ‘but we increased the probability that they would… That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.’

"The US officials were quick to follow up on this political decision. They saw advantage in the mujahideen rebellion which grew after a pro-Moscow government toppled Afghanistan’s Daoud Khan government in April 1978. In his memoirs, Robert Gates, then a CIA official and later defence secretary under presidents Bush and Obama, recounts a staff meeting in March 1979 where CIA officials asked whether they should keep the mujahideen going, thereby ‘sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire’. The meeting agreed to fund them to buy weapons.

"Asked about this operation’s legacy when it came to creating a militant Islam hostile to the US, Brzezinski was unapologetic. ‘What is most important to the history of the world?’ he asked. ‘The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?’"

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"Kabul Must Burn

"There is an oft-quoted comment in this regard by the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. He told The Daily Star newspaper of Bangladesh about his experience as an 18-year-old on tour in Dacca in 1971. ‘These ears heard people saying: “Small and dark. Kill them. Teach them (Bengalis) a lesson,”’ he said. ‘I heard it with my own ears.’

"Many years later, as the leader of the political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Imran said he now hears similar commands being given in Pakistan. ‘It is exactly the same language which I hear this time,’ he said, adding that today it is the Pashtuns who are ill-treated. ‘In Pindi, in Lahore, in Karachi, they’ve been picked up and thrown into jail because they are Pashtun. This is a sad legacy.’*

"Pashtuns have been targeted under every Pakistani regime. To compound their misery, they were tortured by their own, too, when the Taliban were in government in Afghanistan. They wanted to bind the people in a tight fundamentalist leash. As a former torturer of the Taliban, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani admitted to The Telegraph, his indoctrination into methods of torture began with this instruction, ‘I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.’

"These were the words of the commandant of Taliban’s secret police to his new recruits.

"‘Pleasure was outlawed,’ Hassani added, ‘if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water—like a knife cutting through meat—until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.’*

"It is a matter of conjecture if the Taliban’s torture was being encouraged by their mentors across the border. But it is a fact that the attitude of the Pakistani Generals towards Afghans and Afghanistan has been nothing short of tyrannical. General Akhtar Rahman was the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during the period of Pakistan-sponsored Taliban resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In that phase, General Rahman had remarked that when the Taliban take over, ‘Kabul must burn.’

"No one questioned him or tried to impede his venom or asked why innocent men, women and children must burn?"

And yet, Pakistan citizens recall that they had a perfectly good alternative to a Swiss holiday close at hand until Russia was invited by the then president of Afghanistan to help against the jihadists streaming in from Pakistan, as per Zia Ur Rehman policy of infiltration to destabilise Afghanistan.

"A recent case exemplifies this. Five days after the Pakistani army launched a major offensive in the summer of 2014, the people of North Waziristan received a notice of evacuation. All residents surrounding the towns of Miram Shah, Mir Ali, Datta Khel and others were given three days to leave, after which all roads leading out of North Waziristan were going to be closed. Anyone who stayed behind would be considered hostile to the state, said the evacuation notice.**

"Pakistani army was not satisfied with simply pushing out close to a million people from their homes. The military suspected that terrorists could find shelter in these vacant homes. So, it removed the roofs of all the houses in the area to have a better aerial view and stop the militants from taking refuge inside the houses!

"Meanwhile, the displaced Pashtuns have been living like nomads in open, inhospitable spaces. Some are known to wonder in deep winter if the world is immune to their pain."

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"IN HIS ADDRESS TO THE nation on Afghanistan and Pakistan in December 2009, US President Barack Obama said: ‘We will act with the full recognition that our success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan…’"

" ... was Obama fearful of the terrorists that Pakistan breeds as in a hatchery? ... "

"The day after 9/11, I happened to be in Central Asia. Now, in retrospect, it seems like a leaf out of the Great Game that soon after a cataclysmic event an Indian diplomat should be in Central Asia consulting with its leadership. But this happened just by chance.

"Inevitably, the conversation turned to the horror of that attack and the likely retribution from the US. It could not have been mere coincidence that every Central Asian leader that I talked to conveyed the same message; if America targets terrorists in Afghanistan, it will only be trimming the branches. If it wants to strike out terror once and for all, it must destroy the roots of terror in Pakistan.

"Yet, after eight frustrating years of bombing Afghanistan and achieving very little because of Pakistani perfidy, Barack Obama was serenading Pakistan as America’s partner!"

"If the reality on the ground is the test of Pakistani sincerity to American concerns, then the harsh fact is that even as Obama was making that address, Pakistan was giving shelter to Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura, besides hiding Osama bin Laden.

"But the US propitiation of Pakistan did not end there. Seymour Hersh, an American journalist, wrote in his book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden, that under President Obama, Pakistan’s ISI secured ‘a commitment from the US to give Pakistan “a freer hand” in Afghanistan as it began its military draw-down there.’

"Once it had received that nod the ISI got busy pushing even more terrorists across the Durand Line into Afghanistan. And this time, they terrorized and slaughtered Afghans (mainly Hazaras) under a new brand name: the Islamic State.

"One of the most persistent myths of recent wars in Afghanistan is Pakistan’s decisive role. It is accepted unthinkingly as part of the conventional narrative of the war. And Pakistan does nothing to discourage it. Some Pakistanis go as far as to say that the alleged Soviet defeat in Afghanistan helped to cause the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Some claim they destroyed one superpower in Afghanistan and are on their way to destroying another."

Those claims are, have been for several years, routine over the internet, having percolate to common pakis presumably from above.

But are people in West really stupid enough to believe the obvious lie about pakis fighting terror, when the whole Central Asia knows, apart from India, just how very opposite reality is, and has been?

"The reality is different. The US and Pakistan-backed mujahideen did not defeat the Soviets on the battlefield. They won some important encounters, notably in Panjshir valley, but lost others. The Soviets could have stayed on in Afghanistan for several more years, but they decided to leave when Gorbachev calculated that the war was no longer worth the high price in men, money and international prestige.

"In private, US officials came to the same conclusion. Morton Abramowitz, of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research said: ‘In 1985, there was real concern that mujahideen were losing, that they were sort of being diminished, falling apart. Losses were high and their impact on the Soviets was not great.’

"If that was so, why is the US worried? Surely it can defeat the Taliban. It can also summon courage to keep Pakistan in check, or at least check its potential for mischief in Afghanistan."

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"In 2014, Barack Obama told then Afghan President Hamid Karzai that Pakistan is a strategic ‘ally’ in the War on Terror, and while already fighting a war in Afghanistan, his administration ‘cannot open another front against Pakistan’. He repeatedly urged his Afghan counterpart to address Pakistan’s ‘concerns’ about the Indian influence in Afghanistan. Encouraged by Pakistan, the US President even suggested that Karzai find a ‘resolution of differences’ on the Durand Line with Pakistan. He proposed that ‘any issues concerning the border must come through mutual agreement between the parties concerned’."

Was he really that stupid?

"Karzai is said to have responded that Afghanistan cannot accommodate Pakistan’s desire to control Kabul’s foreign policy, nor can it be expected to recognize the imposed Durand Line.*"

Courage under fire, there!

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"‘Will that historical wrong ever be corrected?’ I asked Mr Karzai, ‘What did your American interlocutors think about it?’

"He was hesitant at first. But when I pressed him to give at least one instance from his discussions, his eyes sparkled, ‘In the last year of my presidency, I was meeting CIA Chief John Brennan at his office in Washington,’ Karzai said opening up. ‘We were discussing the issue of the Durand Line and my anguish over its historical inequity. At one point, he went into one of the adjoining rooms and came back with a map of South Asia. It was a two-century-old map drawn much before the Durand Agreement was signed. There was naturally no Pakistan then. The CIA Chief smiled as he handed over the map to me.’

"Karzai too had smiled as he recalled that incident. I left our meeting wondering whether Obama and his CIA chief were playing good cop, bad cop. While one was massaging the Pakistani ego, the other was hinting at its demise. Otherwise, what was that two-century-old map about?"

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"China, too, has been consistently revisionist in its conduct. The most serious trouble to flare up in East Asia in recent decades was that between China and Vietnam. There have also been stand-offs between China and the Philippines besides those between China and Japan. The list of China’s transgressions is large, but by way of illustrating the point it should suffice to mention the following incidents:

"In 1974, China seized the Paracel Islands from Vietnam, killing more than seventy Vietnamese troops. This was followed in 1988 by another clash between the two sides in the Spratly Islands, with Vietnam again coming off worse, losing about sixty sailors.

"In early 2012, China and the Philippines engaged in a lengthy maritime stand-off, accusing each other of intrusions in the Scarborough Shoal.

"In 2013, the Philippines sought international arbitration through the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Giving its verdict in July 2016, the tribunal backed the Philippines’ case, saying China had violated the Philippines’ sovereign rights.

"China knew it had a weak case so it decided to boycott the proceedings. When the ruling went against it, China brazenly called it ‘ill-founded’ and insisted that it would not be bound by it. The world community has not been able to tell China that it should abide by the rules of the Convention to which it is a party."

Dogra seems to lack courage to mention China forcefully occupying Tibet, claiming Tibet, and conducting a genocide amounting to a million, of indigenous Tibetans.

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Dogra discusses the post WWII world order and subsequent changes.

"The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has gleefully termed the coming change, ‘Post-West World Order’.

"Lavrov may have been hasty in that pronouncement, but there is no denying the fact that the West is no longer the undisputed leader of the world. In this evolving picture, power and influence are not likely to stem from economic strength alone."

"Within the region, the picture is becoming increasingly complex and intense; more players are crowding into the Afghan arena. Pakistan continues to play all sides and all roles with equal ease. ...

"However, it is China that is positioning itself to take the lead role in the region stretching from the furthest steppes of Central Asia to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its ability to capitalize on resentment of centuries of Western domination should not be underestimated."

And yet, it was the worst coloniser ever, from the moment it occupied Tibet and proceeded with a genocide therein, more as a heritage from China's Mongol ruler's past inherited and accepted by China than a copy or revenge against West.

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"The Pathan response has mostly been emotional and knee-jerk; the code of ‘Pashtunwali’, the ‘way of the Pathan’ being their guide. The chief among its aspects is the need for badal, revenge, the tribal vendettas that can last generations. Badal wreaks its malign curse against foreigners too. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the Waziristan villages that were bombed by the RAF in the 1930s in an attempt to curb jihadist revolt proved readiest to take in al-Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan in 2001. The Haqqani network is among the Afghan Taliban’s deadliest elements, but its headquarters have for long been in North Waziristan, on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line."

Dogra is being slightly ingenious in indirect assertion that Pathans are, in fact, responsible; while fact is its pakis that have given the encouragement to terrorist networks and schools, training camps and more, and provided them weapons and ammunition as well, whether from funding from US - reports of Zia having sacks filled with US dollars lying around his hall aren't secret - or by stealing US military supplies trucks and replacing them with trucks filled with potatoes. As for the actual males in those networks, they are poor citizens used as cannon fodder for terrorism, known not often to live to mature age; but the population of Pakistan is reduced to the level of poverty where a free school for male children is a relief to families because it boards and lodges them from young age. Since family planning US against faith, it's a vicious circle that works To advantage of such regimes as have dominated Pakistan almost since beginning.

So when Dogra says "The Haqqani network is among the Afghan Taliban’s deadliest elements, but its headquarters have for long been in North Waziristan, on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line.", it's for the very good reason that ita of completely paki manufacture.

And the Taliban that have taken over Afghanistan after Biden had announced withdrawal of forces and they left, isn't Afghan at all, but paki, as attested by Afghans.

Illegal migrants from East Bengal pretending to be local are caught out by Indians from Bengal. This is no different.

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" ... if Mortimer Durand had followed this secret communication of 1892 by the viceroy’s office to London, he may not have caused the havoc of his agreement,

"All the Pushtu speaking tribes consider themselves Afghans whether they reside in what is now distinctly the Amir’s territory or what is now British territory, or in the intervening hills now occupied by what we call border tribes…they were politically part of Afghanistan till Sikhs annexed them; the fact that these border tribes are independent or semi-independent is nothing new; they were so when the Afghan boundary extended to the Indus, and then there were Governors of the Amir of Kabul in Peshawar and Kohat, and they were so still earlier when the whole of Afghanistan was part of the Mughal Empire. And in fact, not only these border tribes which are semi-independent; the same position has generally been held by the mountain tribes in most parts of Afghanistan… These mountain tribes, including those we call border tribes used to say that they were Afghans, and the Amir of Kabul their Amir…*

"But Durand and his colleagues refused to recognize the basic truth that all the Pushtu speaking tribes consider themselves Afghans."

How Dogra decides that it was Durand’s fault is unclear, but if he'd done something that British did not want, they could have torn it up, reprimanded him, and fenced off people from across Sindhu River fromm entering! If instead brits kept the territory and eventually claimed it, Durand can't be entirely blamed. If it weren't him, it would have been another.

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"Greater Afghanistan

"Soviet support in relation to the Pashtunistan case was also very important for Kabul. On 15 December 1955, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolay Bulganin stated that the Soviet Union supported the Afghan point of view and that a plebiscite should be conducted in the area where the Pashtuns live, ‘…The demand of Afghanistan that the population of neighbouring Pakhtunistan should be given an opportunity of freely expressing their will is justified… The people of this region have the same right of self-determination as any other people.’

"At different points in time, the leaders of the Soviet Union have publicly stated that, ‘Pushtuns should decide in a free referendum if they wish to stay in Pakistan, to create a new and independent state, or to unite with Afghanistan.’"

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"US Demurs

"However, the American attitude was ambivalent. During the sixties, it pretended that the best solution of the issue was to brush it under the carpet. When President Dwight Eisenhower tried to understand the issue from President Ayub Khan, the latter treated it as a bit of a joke. At their meeting in Karachi on 8 December 1959, Ayub told him, ‘…it (the frontier issue) went back to the eighteenth century when an Afghan dynasty controlled parts of Pakistan. The British took over the area and later relinquished it to independent Pakistan, and the Afghans claimed that it should revert to them.’*"

Eisenhower must have known there was at least one whopping lie there if not more; pakistan never existed until day before India was independent. Afghanistan on the other hand did exist. So 'eighteenth century when an Afghan dynasty controlled parts of Pakistan' is a lie.

" ... Eisenhower did not think it fit to probe further. Had he enquired, he would have found that British came close to that area only in 1839, not the eighteenth century as Ayub Khan had said.

"Had Eisenhower been impartial in the matter he would have also wondered if Ayub Khan had got his history right when he said, ‘it…went back to the eighteenth century when an Afghan dynasty controlled parts of Pakistan.’

"Afghanistan understood the game. Put in simple terms, Afghans were aware that they were weak and remote and of insignificant strategic importance to the Americans. Pakistan, on the other hand, was the supposed strategic partner. It is another matter that Pakistan duped the US at every turn and on each occasion. It could hardly intercede on America’s behalf with the Arabs; it had too many favours of its own to seek. And it turned its face the other way when America asked for its army to be sent to Vietnam. In recent years its role in Afghanistan has aided the Taliban and irritated the US consistently."

That last bit is put it so mildly it's a lie. Why Dogra is soft pedalling when musharraf had openly, publicly, on television, declared that he had generated the taliban and told them to do whatever they did thereafter, is questionable.

"Afghanistan, on the other hand, may have proved a steadier and more reliable strategic ally for the US. It was located next to Iran, China and the Soviet Union. Moreover, it would have provided ample manpower for the US military engagements. But the US had decided to court Pakistan."

Dogra forgets. Pakistan is used as a military base, And Afghanistan might not have agreed to be that base fir free use against USSR. Besides, it has no port. Karachi was given to Sindh which was separated specifically for this purpose from Bombay province, so they had a military supply route from a port to a northern military base for flights over USSR.

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"Meanwhile, the country has undergone some change.

"Unlike in the previous two centuries, Pashtuns have not remained rooted to their soil in recent decades. They have fled during wars in large numbers. Two of the largest exodus happened during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and during the Taliban rule over it.

"Over the course of the last forty years, they have scattered like autumn leaves wherever they were granted refuge. As a result, Afghans have been dispersed so far and wide that they belong everywhere and nowhere. They live there indifferently and uncertainly at the whims of their local hosts. ... "

One has seen them in UK, and Khalid Hosseini writes about life in US.

" ... The greatest majority have migrated to different parts of Pakistan. There they live in slums; where they are increasingly being racially profiled and hounded by the security agencies.

"Every bomb blast in Pakistan becomes an excuse for police raids on Afghan homes. Even the Pathans from the frontier and Khyber are under search and suspicion.

"To add to their woes, Afghans living in Pakistan are now being repatriated en masse back to Afghanistan. There, they face the grim prospect of starting life all over again."

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"Afghanistan today can be described as a strong nation but a weak state, while Pakistan is a strong state with no strong sense of nationhood. Each, therefore, has different sets of vulnerabilities and different constituencies to satisfy. Afghanistan’s current central government is institutionally fragile, but this weakness is counterbalanced by a strong sense of national unity that has developed among its people over the past thirty years.

"Even in the absence of a state administration in Kabul, Afghans never feared that their country might disintegrate. By contrast, Pakistan never developed a secure national identity. It has been preoccupied throughout its short history by fears of internal disintegration."

" ... As a Pakistani commentator said, ‘Afghanistan does not see Pakistan as a friend—it never has and, perhaps, it never will. More than the realities of international relations, this fact is rooted in how Afghans define their identity. Ever since Pakistan was created, Afghanistan has defined its identity in opposition to its neighbour.’*"

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"Amir Dost Mohammad expressed Afghan angst best when after he had been dethroned he asked his British interlocutor,

"‘I have been struck with the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.’

"Whether he was given a response that satisfied him has not been recorded. But he may have got satisfaction from the fact that British interference in Afghanistan had provoked a tribal chief in Africa, the Sultan of Ben Walid, to ask a British traveller, Dr Richardson, ‘Why do you go so far from home to take other people’s country from them?’

"‘The Turks do the same,’ Dr Richardson replied.

"‘Do you wish to be oppressors like the Turks?’ the Sultan asked curtly."

Neither considered the unfairness of what islamic barbarian invaders had done to India during a millennium prior to that, of course!

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"Writing to the secretary of state for India in April 1877, Lord Lytton mentions:

"I believe that our North-Western Frontier presents at this moment a spectacle unique in the world; at least I know of no other spot where, after twenty five years of peaceful occupation, a great civilized Power has obtained so little influence over its semi-savage neighbours, and acquired so little knowledge of them that the country within a day’s ride of its most important garrison (Peshawar) is an absolute terra incognita and that there is absolutely no security for British life a mile or two beyond our border."

What utter hubris!

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"It wasn’t just the Amir who was pushed into the darker realms. Many others have had unpleasant experience. That’s why there are people who believe strongly in the Durand’s curse. They add by way of proof that everyone connected with this Agreement has had an unhappy life thereafter. ... "

Dogra recounts subsequent lives of everyone present, briefly. It's nothing as dramatic or convincing as those related to excavation in Egypt.

"But the biggest victims of the Durand’s curse are undoubtedly the Pashtuns. They have not lived the life of peace and tranquillity ever since that Agreement was signed. And for the last few years, the bulk of them have been driven away from their homes because the Pakistani army wants to eliminate the terrorists that it had once encouraged the Pashtuns to shelter."

Neither is, strictly speaking, correct. It's hard to pinpoint when Afghans were living in peace, if ever, or not aiding someone against India when not invading themselves. As for pakis, they promoted jihadist attacks against neighbours, chiefly against India after - pakis claim on internet, incessantl - they, pakis, "broke up USSR" with "a little help from US", but as per their own citizens and media, never actually dared to attack Taliban, even when claiming to do so; as per the said paki citizens and media, the paki military and tanks were razing villages that had nothing to do with Taliban, but never went anywhere close to where Taliban were.

Even the attack against Malala is evidence thereof!

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"Having taken the frontier areas through the Durand Agreement, the British Empire’s treatment of tribes was arbitrary. Its governing principle was one-sided law; and that law always judged in favour of the British. This was typically the colonial manner of dispensing justice."

Does Dogra claim British were fairer to rest of India, or that Pathans deserved special treatment?

"Occasionally though, a British parliamentarian felt the prick of his conscience. He then spoke of the pain of the native and the empire’s responsibility towards the subjugated. But it was a lone voice of restraint in a chorus of the lynch mob. The mob demanded the expansion of the British Empire and they wanted it on terms that suited the empire. So having spoken and cleared his conscience that lone voice would consider his duty done and slink back into his seat. Once again, the mob would have had its way in the mother of Parliaments.

"Unfortunately for the Afghans, lone voices in their favour were ignored regularly in London."

Again.

Does Dogra claim British were fairer to rest of India, or that Pathans deserved special treatment?

In fact, while he says there were lone voices occasionally in British Parliament in favour of the subjugated natives, presumably he means only Pathans, not India in general.

Dogra quotes Balfour, but here Durand Line is mentioned explicitly, while, say, the Queen Laxmibai of Jhansi is not; so presumably Dogra is in silent agreement with British in India being of no importance?

"In a debate in the House of Commons on 15 February 1898, Asquith said,

""The Durand Agreement is a negative agreement. A sphere of influence is a negative conception—purely negative. What does it mean? It means this: that by contract between two Powers—which we will call A and B—A agrees to abstain from interference with a definite area, and B agrees to do the same as to a corresponding area. But that cannot affect the other Powers and nations of the world and à fortiori it cannot affect the Natives who are in occupation of the two spheres. They are not parties to the Agreement. They have never surrendered their independence to us. Because we go behind the back of a number of frontier tribes, making agreements with the Ameer that he shall not go into one place and beyond another, to say that, that affects their status is laying down a doctrine equally repugnant to international law, public justice, and common-sense.***"

That definitely applies to all of India, although here they - Asquith and Dogra - only mean Pathans; thus is no different from anti-India noise about Kashmir that ignores genocides in Balochistan, or, for that matter, in Noakhali.

"Whatever position Mr Asquith may have taken later as the prime minister, here he was clear and clinically correct. His statement was a legally and morally sound denunciation of the Durand Agreement. And his lament was that the Pashtun people had been denied justice. They were the affected party, yet they had not been consulted before the Durand Agreement was signed."

Do Asquith or Dogra opine thereby that India voted for British, or fir that matter, any of the barbarians invading to loot and colonise, with loot the norm and genocides perpetrated routinely?

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Dogra sums up the British position.

"Unlike the docile Indians, these tribes were ungovernable. ... "

One, India didn't either welcome invaders or lay down arms at British advent, but fought back long, and never stopped. Two, it's the terrain that helps Afghans, but it's the same terrain that makes living in peace difficult, just as in UK or Mongolia or Arabic lands; hence the drive to get elsewhere, to find another land better suited to survival.

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" ... over time, punishment became synonymous with effective political governance. R.H. Davies, a senior civil servant in the Punjab provincial government, described punitive expeditions as ‘in the nature of a judicial act’.

"However, this practice was not limited to India or Afghanistan; it was the mantra of successful colonial practice everywhere. As the historian John Kaye wrote in his book The History of the War in Afghanistan,

""In Asia, we have pursued a career of shameless aggression in the name, not of liberal principles, ‘but of civilisation’; and when this pretext has not been sufficient, the necessity of containing Russia has been put forward. The result has been to turn India from a source of wealth into a drain upon our finances, from a secure possession into our greatest danger. As our attacks upon Persia and Afghanistan have made the inhabitants of those countries our enemies, so our annexations and our assaults upon the religion and customs of the inhabitants of Hindostan have made them our enemies. From the Caspian to the Indian Ocean we are without friends."

He ought to have said, not only "From the Caspian to the Indian Ocean we are without friends.", but extending it to its real boundaries, "From the Caspian to the Indian Ocean to Pacific Ocean, we are without friends."

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"Jihad of 1897

" ... In August 1897, the British government got the news that the Afridis and the Orakzais had planned a simultaneous rising in Khyber and Kurram. By this plan, Afridis were to take possession of the British posts in the Khyber Pass while the Orakzais were to attack the Sikhs and other troops in the British posts at Samana and other parts of the Kurram Valley. The rebellion of 1897 followed soon thereafter. It was a ferocious war that convulsed almost the entire northwest frontier and became the greatest challenge of that age to British arms in India."

"The 1897 jihad was but the start of a Pashtun challenge to the frontier that has continued with few interruptions ever since.

"Pashtun children still sing verses that commemorate the battles of 1897. One of the most haunting celebrates a warrior called Beram Khan, and imagines the words of his wife ... "

"The uprising of 1897–98 was one of the most significant events in the history of frontier wars. It took the British almost a year to crush the resistance of the tribes who rose en masse. The revolt had socio-politico and religious dimensions as well; the spread of fundamentalism and extremism in the region is often traced back to the temper of that uprising. ... "

Which is nonsense, of course - it merely amounts to counting lives of other than British as nothing. Else the genocides and more, conversions enforced at gunpoint or sword at throat, which was even reflected not only in the way Amir dealt with Kafiristan but in the very name of the region, out of which Hinduism was driven out soon after he acquired the said region by conversions as the only alternative offered to residents for being not massacred.

"There is no doubt that it also shook the foundation of the British Empire in India. Despite that huge shock, the British admired the professionalism and the fighting spirit of the tribesmen."

"One immediate result of the uprising was the British decision to separate the Pakhtun land from the rest of Punjab and the formation of a new province: the North-West Frontier Province in 1901.

"They also decided to introduce a separate and much harsher administrative structure for the tribal areas. The net result of all this was that thereafter, the British administration remained on tenterhooks. The British military machine may have managed to crush the resistance of the Pakhtun tribesmen for the time being, but it further deepened the animosity and hatred between the two.

"When George Nathaniel Curzon became the viceroy in 1899 the British were still smarting from the wounds of the Frontier War of 1897. In his assessment of the situation, the war had not tamed the Pathans, in fact, far from it. He had then remarked famously,

""No patchwork scheme and all our present and recent schemes: blockade, allowances, etc., are mere patchwork—will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine."

"He was right to be apprehensive because when Pathans are at war they are uncontrollable. And as Afghan history shows, the question that should more appropriately be asked is this—when are they not at war? Or as Dr Theodore Leighton Pennell noted tongue-in-cheek, ‘Afghans are never at peace among themselves, except when they are at war.’"

Again Dogra sums up halfway -

"If the Pathans had among them some gifted historians or prolific writers, they would have turned around and asked—when did the British leave us in peace? For that matter, and later on, they could have repeated the same question this way—when have the Americans and Pakistanis left us in peace?"

He forgets that India is an ancient land - even though not always politically united - unlike Pakistan, or even Afghanistan, which came into existence post colonial era; and India has suffered invasions galore from, and wars galore imposed at will by, Afghanistan, for not only centuries post islamic era, but long prior. There are mentions of the land even in ancient epics, none pleasant or happy, but generally related to demanding and cheating.

................................................................................................

"Another Misinterpretation

"The controversy over the Durand Line, however, got renewed after the death of Amir Abdur Rahman on 1 October 1901 and the accession of Amir Habibullah Khan, son of Abdur Rahman. The British refused to pay Amir Habibullah the subsidy which was paid to Abdur Rahman, asserting that as the deal was fixed between the Government of India and the previous Amir, it was a personal one.

"But this was a mischievous interpretation.

"The real British intention was to seek concessions, a more liberal commercial policy by Afghanistan, early delimitation of the Mohmand agency, and one more promise of non-interference by Afghanistan in trans-border areas. They defended their position by highlighting the use of the Government of India and the Amir as the two parties of the Agreement. The British also referred to the Treaty of Gandamak (1879), which restricted the Afghans from establishing relations with any country other than India, claiming that Amir Habibullah had violated it by accepting subsidies from Russia.

"In his rejoinder, Amir Habibullah questioned the British logic, ‘if the deal (with Amir Abdur Rahman) was personal then would it mean that the Durand Line Agreement stands invalid?’"

"In the new Agreement that was signed eventually, Amir Habibullah defended his full rights over Bohai Dag and parts of the Mohmand territory, previously promised to Amir Abdur Rahman in a concession for an early demarcation, which the British had later seized back in 1897. Amir Habibullah also claimed his right over Smatzai in the agreement."

Dogra might recall the devious ways kingdoms in India were swallowed, and Kohinoor claimed as gift from the nine year old son and heir of Ranjit Singh, who was taken away, converted and even almost married off to another converted royal heir, one from South India.

................................................................................................

"Third Anglo–Afghan War

"Unlike the two previous Anglo–Afghan wars (the first of which lasted the better part of three years, from 1839 to 1842, and the second for two years, from 1878 to 1880), this conflict began as the result of Afghan incursions into British-occupied territory across the border with India, rather than the other way round."

Which was until British advent the historical pattern of wars inflicted by Afghanistan on India.

"The New Statesman tried to find the logic of this war, but gave up the effort, ‘The reasons that led the new Ameer [Amanullah Khan, the King] of Afghanistan to begin war on India are obscure, and the version of his motives given by the Indian Government make him out to be little better than a fool. One feels that there must be another and more reasonable side to the whole business.’*

"One likely reason was that the Amir was trying to assert independence, both as an end in itself and due to domestic political considerations.

"Though the war was short, the casualties on both sides were heavy: 1,751 killed or wounded (including over 500 deaths from cholera) on the British side, and an estimated 1,000 deaths among the Afghans. British tactics included what was colloquially referred to as ‘butcher and bolt’ operations, in which villages would be destroyed, their inhabitants killed, and thereafter troops would immediately return to their base, making no attempt to occupy any territory. During the war, Kabul and the Afghan fort at Dakka were successfully bombed using the relatively new technology of biplanes, resulting in the following editorial comment in The Times: ‘This is the first proof that we have had of the immense military value of the aeroplanes in small wars with semi-civilized peoples.’"

So this served as rehearsal for WWI, even though the latter was begun by Germany.

"The war was ended by the Treaty of Rawalpindi, with both sides claiming a measure of victory; the Afghans successfully asserting their right to conduct their own foreign affairs, one of the first acts of which was to recognize the new Bolshevik government in Russia. And the British re-establishing the border as it was before the war and discontinuing their subsidy to the Amir.

"The most important point was the letter written by the chief British representative at the Indo-Afghan Peace Conference to the chief Afghan representative, and attached as an Annexure to the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 1919, which clearly stated that, ‘The said Treaty and this letter leave Afghanistan officially free and independent in its internal and external affairs. Moreover, this war has cancelled all previous treaties.’ Did it mean that all previous treaties, including the Durand (Agreement) and others that followed, stood cancelled?

"After Curzon’s statement in the British Parliament, this was the second time Britain was authoritatively stating that ‘all previous treaties stood cancelled.’"

................................................................................................

"In August 1945, Churchill, now in the opposition following Clement Attlee’s victory, had a meeting with Viceroy Archibald Wavell, who was visiting London to discuss India with the new Cabinet ministers. According to Wavell, Churchill left their meeting with these parting words: ‘Keep a bit of India’."

"Others were no better. Nor were their reasons for ‘keeping a bit of India’ any more solid. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin told the US Secretary of State George Marshall that ‘the main issue was who would control the main artery leading into Central Asia.’"

Dogra doesn't discuss what exactly Churchill meant; he meant, of course, partition, keeping a military base for use of West against USSR, disguised as a new country.

................................................................................................

"With such overwhelming endorsement, all that remained was an approving nod from the media. The Times provided it on the day of Partition, 15 August 1947:

""In the hour of its creation, Pakistan emerges as the leading state of the Muslim world. Since the collapse of the Turkish Empire that world, which extends across the globe from Morocco to Indonesia, has not included a state whose numbers, natural resources and place in history gave it undisputed pre-eminence. The gap is now filled. From today Karachi takes rank as a new centre of Muslim cohesion and rallying point of Muslim thought and aspirations."

It's hard to believe Times was that stupid! The muslim world certainly thought nothing along the lines. As for the said natural resources, if they existed, must say pakis have wasted them spectacularly in an unprecedented manner, using only human reproduction amongst the said resources, for a jihadist factory disguised as religious schools.

How was Times this wrong? Were they writing fraudulently? They surely had to have known importance of oil as long ago as since or before WWI, if even Upton Sinclair wrote it into his works!

Or were they, raking superiority of Europe for granted as basis for European racism, unaware of racism amongst muslim world, chiefly favoring Arabs but in effect anyone else over pakis, with possible exception of African muslims? Are they, one may wonder, still unaware of Chinese racism?

................................................................................................

"Quick on its Feet

"The Partition Plan was announced by Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten on 3 June 1947. Afghanistan reacted almost immediately. It is important to take into account the fact that communications in that age were tentative; and in a remote area like Afghanistan the full text of the Partition Plan may have taken a day or more to reach Kabul. Once they had received the details of Mountbatten’s announcement, the government machinery needed to absorb it and filter its response through the bureaucratic ladder right up to the top. That’s how it is in all governments for major issues. And that’s how it was in this case in Afghanistan. Yet the decision was speeded through the system and instructions were conveyed quickly to the Afghan embassy in London."

" ... It is creditable that within a short span of eight days, on 11 June, a senior Afghan diplomat was sitting in the British foreign office to convey his government’s protest against the referendum being planned in NWFP,

""The Afghan Government was concerned at possible fate of the population of this Province if…a referendum took place and the choice were offered to them of associating themselves either with Pakistan or Hindustan. The Afghan Government considered that the population… should have the opportunity of deciding whether they wished to rejoin Afghanistan or to form a separate State enjoying complete independence. The Afghan Government had hitherto acknowledged the necessity of treating the question of the NorthWest Frontier Province in connection with the question of partition in India. In view of recent developments, however, they considered that the moment was opportune for them to make official representations regarding the Province and to put forward proposals for its future in accordance with ethnological considerations."

"This was a balanced and well-formulated approach. Afghanistan was making the point that it had waited for the change in status, and since that was happening now, they were putting forward their viewpoint. And in so far as the referendum was concerned, the only choice should be between joining Afghanistan and opting for an independent status."

No, that's not what is said; those two alternatives are pointed out as also necessary to offer the people of the Frontier Province, not as the only ones as Dogra puts it.

"This meeting was followed within two days by a note verbale by the Afghan government to Britain on 13 June 1947, ‘…the settlement of a matter not related to India, should on no account be dependent on the future Government or Governments of India, (if in the past such matters have ever been discussed informally with the Government of India, it has always been considered as contact with Great Britain through the British Government in India)…’

"The Afghan government had, through this part of the note verbale, clarified that the issue of NWFP was a matter on which it would like to deal with Britain directly. Interestingly, it also said that ‘the settlement of a matter not related to India, should on no account be dependent on the future Government or Governments of India.’

"This is significant. It is a clear statement that Britain alone was Afghanistan’s interlocutor all through. Since Britain was not succeeded by Pakistan, there was no question of considering the NWFP issue through the prism of a new state. It implied that Britain had a moral responsibility to respect this distinction.

"Just in case this was not clear enough, the Afghan note went on to assert, ‘The decision that a referendum is being arranged for the North-West Frontier Province, so that it can express its wish to join either Pakistan or Hindustan, is in the opinion of the Royal Afghan Government incompatible with justice, as it debars them from choosing, either an obvious and natural way of forming a separate free state, or of rejoining Afghanistan their motherland.’

"So, to all those who have been doubting Afghanistan’s determination to make its case, these above should have been proof enough that Afghanistan had reacted quickly and registered its case strongly as per diplomatic norms. It is also worth noting that here, in this part of the note verbale, Afghanistan bluntly called the British decision to hold the referendum as ‘incompatible with justice.’"

................................................................................................

"Caroe’s Last Act

"Some Britishers were ranged against Afghanistan, the foremost among them being Olaf Caroe, the governor of NWFP. His partiality towards the Muslim League was an open secret. His actions and recommendations were biased and so one-sided that he had to be removed abruptly from his position. In his place, Rob Lockhart was appointed as acting governor of NWFP on 19 June 1947.

"Unfortunately, the damage had already been done and one of Caroe’s last acts was to come out openly in support of the emerging Pakistan. His recommendation to the viceroy was,

""It was inevitable that the Afghan would bring their weight to bear in this matter and raise the cry of Afghanistan irredenta, but it is interesting that they should have timed it and brought it into line with the Congress theme of Pathanistan. I do not myself think that this Afghan interference is going to be very dangerous, if (and this is the important point) the successor authority make it quite clear that the tribesmen are going to get the benefits that they enjoy at present from this side (Pakistan)."

"Caroe did not let the humiliation of his abrupt removal deter him. He kept espousing the Pakistani cause and, later in England, wrote extensively about Pakistan’s strategic location and its role in the oil-rich Islamic world. The logic of his argument also appealed to the American power centres and he was much sought-after there for his views."

Wonder if the idiocy was checked post the shock after first year - and three quarters - of new millennium.

"Besides Caroe’s negative role, there were practical reasons for the departing British to choose the path of least resistance. The Second World War had been a huge drain on Britain financially. Its troops were exhausted and its primacy in the world was no longer what it once was. There were new power centres which had taken its place. Thus reduced, it did not want an avoidable controversy to exhaust it further. So it opted for the less-trying option by stalling Afghanistan and going ahead with the referendum as it had planned."

No, those are definitely not the reasons why, and Dogra can't be this silly!

Reality was, they did not believe India would refrain from acquiring lands list in partition as soon as possible, and so Brits did everything possible to sabotage India and help pakis, even to the extent of helping pakis attack Kashmir and stop India from helping even after accession was signed; left to Nehru, who was pressured by Mountbatten threefold using Gandhi and more, apart from his own bringing up at Harrow, Kashmir would be lost. It was only Sardar Patel who saved it, as far as he could without Nehru meddling.

So the last thing Brits would allow was pathans being either independent or returning to Afghanistan with their lands. That might have lost them - and US - their free military bases for use against USSR.

"The decision of the British government to proceed with the referendum was unusual, and stranger still was the agreement of the (Indian National) Congress party to go along. In the case of other Indian states, no such referendum was proposed and where necessary, the decision to join either India or Pakistan was left to provincial assemblies. Had the same principle been applied to NWFP, the Congress-dominated assembly would have opted to remain with India."

Yes, this shows the crooked nature of partition plans, and exposes the fraud of those who claim British did not wish to break India.

What's more, the Pathan leader called for a boycott of the referendum, so only those pro-pakistan voted! Subsequently he accused Gandhi of having thrown them, the pathans, to wolves, at their last meeting, publicly.

Was Gandhi party to a crooked trick played against NWFP by British? Why did Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan ask his followers to boycott, knowing his opponents would vote for Pakistan?

................................................................................................

"IN A DISCUSSION ABOUT SUCCESSOR states, there is usually a doubtful shake of head by the cognoscenti when it comes to Pakistan. Does Pakistan really belong to that category? If it was a successor state, who was it succeeding? Was it succeeding Britain? Or was it succeeding India?

"All along, almost right up to the end of the Second World War, the official British view was that the Durand Agreement had only earmarked the area of its influence over the frontier. The British were not given the right to annex the area. Therefore, there was no question of territorial rights being transferred by Britain to Pakistan.

"The Anglo–Afghan Treaty of 1921, like the other treaties before it, was executed only between British authorities and the Afghan government. If that was the case, then the axiomatic inference is that since Britain had not disintegrated as an entity in 1947, Pakistan could not have been a successor state to it.

"In 1925, an official British army publication, the Military Report on Afghanistan, stated that,

""The [Durand] line was not described in the 1893 treaty as the boundary of India, but as the eastern and southern frontiers of the Amir’s dominions and the limits of the respective sphere[s] of influence of the two governments, the object being the extension of British authority and not that of the Indian frontier."

"Nothing could have been clearer than this. A British army publication has a certain stamp of authority to it and it was giving out a definitive view. Is it not obvious then that Britain could not have passed on any territory of such a frontier to Pakistan? And there was no way it could pass on ‘authority’, which it was carrying back with it to London."

But Dogra is not taking into consideration a fact, namely, that almost from beginning, rather, from inception thereof, Pakistan was a militant state more than willing use terror. Not only it was conceded due to the massacre of Hindus ordered by Jinnah in Calcutta, subsequently copied on huge scale in Noakhali, but after he failed to take all of Kashmir due to Sardar Patel acting against obvious pressure by Mountbatten, Jinnah promptly attacked Baluchistan. This was bizarre because he was the lawyer who had pleaded for case of independence of Baluchistan and eon it, so Baluchistan had become independent on August 11, 1947!

So it's hardly about legality of the case, much less about people or truth, when it comes to Pakistan helped by Brits - former are a jihadist entity who intentionally claim heritage of every barbaric invader of India, and latter may claim civilisation but did cheat, steal, loot and worse, whenever they could get away with it.

................................................................................................

"Executed vs Executory

"That’s why there was great consternation in the British foreign office in the 1950s when a contrary opinion on the Durand Agreement reached London. The British ambassador in Afghanistan, Dan Lascelles, suggested that there was need to revisit the Durand Agreement.

"The crux of his argument was that in international treaties there are two types of clauses, ‘executed’ and ‘executory’.

"The first term, ‘executed’, describes a clause which means that something needs to be done only once. The second term, ‘executory’, describes an act which is continual and requires the constant participation of both parties for its fulfilment.

"Clauses related to the establishment of sovereign boundaries are ‘executed’, because once they are done, they are treated as a permanent feature even if one party should repudiate them. In short, an ‘executed’ clause cannot be revoked.

"‘Executory’ clauses fall in a different category. They are for matters such as trade and tariff agreements which are continuous actions, which can be broken off if one of the parties should decide to do so.

"Ambassador Lascelles studied the issue carefully in Kabul. In his communication to London he referred to it as the contested clause, ‘The Government of India will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of Afghanistan, and His Highness the Amir will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of India.’

"He argued that an agreement not to ‘exercise interference’ constitutes an action that is ongoing and continuous, requiring a constant effort from the contracting parties, rather than something which is executed once and for all. He pointed out to the foreign office in London that the clauses in the 1893 Durand Treaty had the appearance of being ‘executory’ rather than ‘executed’ and open to repudiation by either party. Hence, he reasoned, the Afghan government of President Daud Khan, which was at that time eager to repudiate the Durand Agreement and which had already denounced the frontier treaties, might well be in their rights to withdraw from any acknowledgement of the Durand Line.

"He insisted that such an action by the Afghan government would stand the scrutiny of the law. It being an ‘executory’ clause, they would legitimately be able to cease any recognition of it.

"If the matter were to be taken to an international tribunal, he argued further, Afghanistan had a good chance of winning that case against Pakistan. This would not only cause problems for Pakistan, but would cause considerable humiliation to Britain given the fact that it had, since the end of the Second World War, started asserting that the Line was legally watertight as an international boundary."

Is that why West manipulated destruction of Afghanistan, beginning with zia inducted fanatics alarming Afghanistan government enough to ask USSR for help, so West could then interfere?

................................................................................................

"Offer Your Blood

"However, Afghanistan did not give up its efforts. It has all along refused to recognize the Durand Line. And it has consistently pressed its case with an uncaring world.

"When it opposed Pakistan’s membership to the UN in September 1947, Afghanistan’s representative to the UN said,

""Afghanistan cannot recognize the NWFP as part of Pakistan so long as the people of the NWFP have not been given the opportunity, free from any kind of influence, to determine for themselves whether they wish to be independent or to become part of Pakistan."

"Shocked by this development, Pakistan took the initiative in December 1947 to discuss the issue with Afghanistan in Karachi. The Afghan representative, Najibullah Khan, took the stand at this meeting that his country wanted ‘the Durand Line to be seen as null and void and also wanted Pakistan to allow the establishment of Pashtunistan.’

"Afghanistan kept up its efforts consistently. In an appeal to ‘Pakhtoon Brethren’ on 22 December 1952, Kabul Radio gave out this message,

""…freedom cannot be achieved through begging, it will have to be courted and wooed with red, fresh blood. Offer your blood at the altar of freedom and she is yours. If you hesitate, others will snatch her away from you and you will ever afterwards curse your cowardice.""

Very reminiscent of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, and of course, his sojourn through Afghanistan was vital to his escape and the subsequent march into India at the head of INA, to plant the flag of Azad Hind!

"In 1960, Afghan Prime Minister Daoud sent about 1,000 Afghan soldiers disguised as nomads to Bajaur district for acts of disruption against Pakistan. Later, in the 1970s, Daoud’s government established camps on Afghan territory where thousands of Pathan and Baloch tribesmen were trained for guerrilla war against Pakistan.

"In its turn, Pakistan resorted to force by surreptitious means.

"The common and mistaken impression is that armed opposition to the government in Kabul started with the occupation of the capital by Soviet troops. That is not so. Actually, jihadi activities long predated the arrival of Soviet troops in December 1979. Every one of the Pakistan-based Afghan mujahideen leaders who became famous during the 1980s as the Peshawar Seven were helped by the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China. Pakistan had sheltered and financed their activities to blunt Daoud’s aggressive posture on the Pashtunistan issue.

"After the fall of the last communist regime, Pakistan hoped that the Islamist leaders, whom it had supported in their fight against the Soviets, would settle the issue of the Durand Line to its satisfaction. However, to Pakistan’s disappointment, the Islamic leaders, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud, refused to accept the Durand Line as the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"It was the same when by 1996 the Taliban had established its control over 90 per cent of Afghanistan’s territory to form the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Much to Pakistan’s disappointment, even the Taliban refused to recognize the Durand Line. It may have been because of their firm stand on Durand Line that Major General Mahmud Ali Durrani said at a seminar at the Pakistan embassy in Washington, ‘I hope the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism don’t merge. If that happens, we’ve had it, and we’re on the verge of that.’"

With a name like Durrani you'd think he was pathan, therefore true to pathan cause!

"In view of the uniformity of the stand taken by successive Afghan governments post 1947, it would be fair to say that they had no doubt at all that the Durand Agreement was unfair and unjust."

................................................................................................

" ... As Winston Churchill wrote to a friend in September 1897, ‘After today, we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The Mohmands need a lesson, and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.’

"He noted matter-of-factly in his autobiography, My Early Life, how the British went about their business: ‘We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.’

"Churchill’s letter was written when he was just 23, so his enthusiastic support to British methods could be blamed to his youth. But the gleeful record that he wrote in his autobiography was in the autumn of his life. Even then, there was neither remorse nor a feeling of regret at the cruel treatment of Afghans by the British."

" ... As Viceroy Lansdowne admitted in a private letter in 1889, ‘punitive expeditions have been frequent, but have been attended with very few permanent results.’

"If that was so, why kill so many for the fault of a few? But the powerful want quick results, not debate. And the tribes continued to be punished."

" ... In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been the British prime minister during World War I, gloated: ‘We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.’

"Unfortunately, his view prevailed."

................................................................................................

"Kabul Must Burn

................................................................................................

Chapter 11 is titled

11.A Case of Mervouness

What is mervouness? When searched, the book gives no clue, nor dies Wikipedia or Bing translator, the Kindle tools. Presumably it's a typo, but one can only guess he wrote nervousness and autocorrect messed up by not correcting a slip.

He explains later.

"On 13 February 1884, the Merv oasis was captured by Russians. For them, it was of considerable military and strategic importance. With its capture, their control of Central Asia was complete. Durand’s diary entry of 23 July said it pithily, ‘…in the meantime the Russians have occupied Merv…’

"This news was received with great alarm in Kabul, Calcutta and London. The intensity of feeling in England was summed up by the Duke of Argyll as, ‘Mervouness’."

................................................................................................

"Rout at Punjdeh

"Separately, in a case typical of the games being played then, Abdur Rahman’s forces began to make a pre-emptive move on ground. The Afghan commander pushed some of his troops into Punjdeh in 1884 and the Amir in a follow-up move threatened to send an even bigger force. This angered the Russian commander, General Komarov, who decided to meet the challenge with countermoves by his forces. By November, the situation became grave.

"The Russian forces pushed forward steadily towards Badghiz giving the British representative the unenviable task of somehow keeping the two armies apart. When the Russian forces pushed a little further to a post called Pul-e-Khatun, which was just 12 kilometres short of Punjdeh, the Afghan commander General Ghas-ud-din was infuriated enough to shoot off a letter to the Russian colonel calling him a liar and a thief. The Russian colonel wasted no time in sending an equally poisonous response."

"Had the communications been better and speedier in that age, this outburst may have been entirely unnecessary. The field commanders of the two sides would not have taken the sort of aggressive actions that they took. But matters were brought to a head and the Russian and the Afghan armies were straining at the leash. A single misdirected shot could have started the conflict at any moment. It was now up to the two capitals in London and Moscow to somehow untangle the mess.

"In India, two army corps under the command of General Roberts were being mobilized just in case they had to be sent to defend Herat. Queen Victoria considered the situation grave enough to send a telegram to Czar Alexander appealing that he should prevent the calamity of a war."

Her second son was married to his daughter, and her granddaughter Alexandra to his son.

Perhaps one is mixing father and son?

Victoria's second son must have been married to daughter of the Tsar Alexander II, sister of the Alexander III referred above, since it's 1885 in question and Alexander II died in 1881. Alexandra, daughter of Princess Alice of Battenburg, was certainly married to Nicholas, son and heir of Tsar Alexander III.

So she was writing to someone related by several strands of marriages between the two clans. There was also the closer relationship, that of his mother having been a Battenburg, Marie, sister of Princess Alice's father-in-law. Perhaps Battenburgs too were cousins of Hanover family, before Victoria?

"Russian Foreign Minister de Giers was quick to get a grip on the situation, treating it as misplaced enthusiasm on the part of local commanders. For good measure, he assured the British ambassador that Russia had no intention of attacking Punjdeh or moving towards Herat.

"The foreign minister’s soothing words may have mollified the diplomat, but his Russian commander in the field was reacting to the situation on ground as he saw it. And what he saw was not reassuring for the military man.

"An Afghan force of 900 cavalry with infantry men and eight guns had crossed the Kushk River. When the Russians asked them to withdraw, the Afghan commander refused. To add to the provocation, someone from the Afghan side fired at Russians. This was enough for Komarov to order 4,000 men armed with modern equipment to charge across the plain into the Afghan ranks. It was a one-sided battle in which the Afghans were massacred and the only survivors were those who could run away from the battle.

"By 1885, the Punjdeh oasis was in Russian hands."

................................................................................................

"AMIR ABDUR RAHMAN WAS AS unstable as water, but he kept all others in a constant state of tension. He was restless, vigilant and always anxious about foreign designs on Afghan borders. In 1892, Mir Yusuf Ali, the Beg of Shignan province, had welcomed a Russian explorer named Dr Albert Regel to his territory. When this news reached the Amir, he decided to depose him, and not long afterwards, St Petersburg’s Novoye Vremya would report that the Shignan province had been occupied by the Afghans.

"A month later, the Amir’s men brought Yusuf Ali to Kabul and imprisoned him there. In his place, Gulzar Khan, a native of Kandahar, was appointed as the governor of the occupied Shignan. At around the same time, the Amir deposed Ali Mardan Shah, the native chieftain of Wakhan, and replaced him with his own official, Ghafar Khan, extending his influence northward.

"This was not welcome news for the Russians. They had been concerned about the Amir’s motives ever since 1885. This latest expansion into the Beg territory bordering Russia was certainly a big source of their anxiety. But they were also convinced that the real threat was not from the Amir of a small country, who also happened to be their former pensioner and asylee, but from the British government. The monetary and political support that the Afghan Amir received from Britain made his occupation of the Begdom look like British expansion into the areas bordering Russia.

"Not surprisingly, a few months later, the Russian Imperial Cabinet gave a memorandum of remonstrance to the British ambassador at St Petersburg. The document noted that the Amir in Afghanistan had encroached into an independent territory bordering Russia. It added that based on the 1873 Anglo–Russian Agreement, the provinces of Roshan and Shignan were now under the unlawful occupation of the Afghans. Russia wanted the British government to put pressure on the Amir to withdraw from these provinces.

"The British ambassador was quick to respond. But his response contained the surprising confession that British India had limited knowledge of the region. The ambassador’s reply also conveyed that the Amir of Afghanistan had claimed that the province of Roshan and Shignan belonged to Badakhshan, which was clearly stated as Afghan territory by the 1873 agreement.

"Given the fact that by the 1870s the British were already completing almost a century-long period of involvement in Afghan politics, it was highly unlikely that the British had only a limited knowledge of the region.

"Instead, there could be two possible reasons behind the British response. First, the Anglo–Russian treaty was only clear on the boundary demarcated by the Oxus River, while Roshan and Shignan lay beyond the length of the river. Second, and perhaps a more likely interpretation, the more territory rested between British India and Russia, the bigger would have been the ‘buffer zone’ between the two empires. By this line of reasoning, it was a British charade for more territory.

"Whatever may have been the British plan, the subsequent response from Russia was blunt. The Russian message made it clear that they were not in the mood for negotiations. Seeing their attempt fail, the British quickly turned towards Afghans; after all, the whole point of establishing a buffer zone was to avoid a conflict with a strong Russia.

"The viceroy in India asked the Amir to retreat from Roshan and Shignan. But the Amir avoided the British call and his officials continued to resist the small expeditions in the area by Russian explorers. At that time, the British did not read too much into it; they thought it was merely the Amir’s usual habit of procrastination. But the Amir had begun to realize that both the British and the Russians were keen to delimit their boundaries with Afghanistan, so his plan was to lay hands on as much land as possible and earn himself some leverage for any future negotiations."

................................................................................................

"Expansionist Ambitions

"In the north, he had occupied Shignan and Roshan, and to the southwest, he was slowly encroaching into the Pashtun tribal areas. But here the Amir’s encroachment was relatively diplomatic. For this purpose, he would often invite chiefs from the tribes bordering British India to pledge allegiance to Afghanistan. The Turis, Orazkaiz, Wazirs, Sheranis and the inhabitants of Zhob were all invited, at different times, to accept the Amir as their sovereign. But gaining overlordship in these parts was not always easy for the Amir; his expansion there could be categorized under three fronts.

"The first front was the Kafir (infidel) areas; the area between, roughly speaking, Kashmir to Badakhshan and down to Kafiristan (now known as Nuristan). These areas seemed to be the least problematic for him in the southeast, because the residents there were non-Muslims, and as a Muslim ruler, he knew that he was able to rally support easily against the non-believers of the area. In fact, he had successfully done so in the past. When some Hazara chiefs supported Sher Ali Khan’s rebellion against the Amir, he labelled the Shiites as infidels and his men massacred a large number of Shiite rebels. Sayed Askar Mousavi, the author of Hazaras of Afghanistan, has provided detailed accounts of such atrocities committed against Hazaras by the Amir. Some of these involved the Amir’s men making small mounds with severed human heads.

"Beyond the Kafir areas, in the second front, was the portion to the south. There, his chance of winning over the fiercely independent tribals seemed thin. His expansion in this area faced several challenges. At first, the Amir had extended some authority over the territories west and north of Peshawar, and the border tribes in Swat, Kunar and Bajaur. But he could not make any serious moves further, as in doing so he would have had to confront the heavily armed tribes. Moreover, the Amir was preoccupied internally because of constant rebellions against his rule.

"Due to these reasons, the Amir had been able to force his way only up to Asmar in Kunar. Beyond Asmar his progress was checked by Umra Khan of Jandol, the ‘Napoleon of the Frontier’. This leader of the tribals could not be subdued by either the British or the Amir.

"The Amir did not have sufficient military power to defeat him and the British never seriously made the attempt to do so because Umra Khan was a useful foil against the Amir’s encroachment into the tribal areas. This state of stalemate was fine with the British because by their philosophy of governance a divided subject were easily ruled."

"Finally, on the third front, further down towards Balochistan was the strategically important district of Zhob, a caravan route by the Gomal Pass which was located at an important point between Punjab and Ghazni.

"In January 1892, the Amir sent two of his officials, the governors of Katawaz and Mukur, to the area with an escort of over a hundred horsemen. They marched down the Gomal River and arrived at Gahkuch to establish an outpost there. In the following July, another detachment of the Amir’s troops, under the leadership of Sardar Gul Mohammad Khan, advanced to Zhob. From there, he wrote to the British political officer, saying that the people of Gustoi were subjects of the Amir and the British must not interfere with them. The same men would later travel to Wana and Waziristan and repeat this procedure there."

"By 1893, their relations were fast deteriorating and some sort of boundary settlement was in the minds of British authorities. In a blunt letter to the Amir, the new viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, wrote that regardless of whether the Amir would accept the offer or not, it was imperative for the British to decide which territory should and should not be part of Afghanistan.

"The Amir must have been disappointed to receive this viceregal missive. But it was too strong a nudge for him to ignore. The border settlement was now only a question of time."

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"Mortimer Durand—The Man

"In 1879, when Mortimer Durand was in Kabul attached to General Roberts, he happened to read the General’s proclamation to the people of Kabul, declaring the murder of the British mission diplomats ‘a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people.’

"Young Durand was alarmed by what he had read and by its implication. How could an entire civilian population be held accountable for the excesses of its army?

"This was not all. There were extremely harsh punishments that the General had planned already. The followers of Yakub Khan, General Roberts declared, would not escape and their ‘punishment should be such as will be felt and remembered…all persons convicted of bearing a part in [the murders] will be dealt with according to their deserts.’

"Durand confronted Roberts over his proclamation. ... "

"The planned action against the population was indefensible, but the crimes during the battle were gruesome too. Durand, however, was well aware that the Afghans were not the ‘fiends in human form’ of popular fiction. In 1893, he describes the Afghan army commander, Ghulam Hyder, as an inquisitive and generous man ... "

" ... Mortimer Durand was born near Bhopal in central India in 1850, and his background fitted him perfectly for a career as a high imperial official.

"His father, Major General Sir Henry Marion Durand, was the illegitimate son of a brother of the Duke of Northumberland, and, in the course of his own career, helped crush the 1857 Indian Mutiny with efficient brutality. When he felt it necessary, the senior Durand did not shrink from burning the Indian villages that had harboured insurgents, or ordering prisoners to be shot in cold blood."

True predecessor, Durand senior, of nazis in Khatyn and throughout East Europe, especially Belarus and Russia, exterminating two million people during WWII by burning whole villages alive and shooting anyone attempting escape.

"Mortimer was only seven when he was sent away to school in Switzerland. It was there that he learnt that his pregnant mother, Annie, had died of a fever, having been forced to make a series of marches to escape the rebels who had captured the family’s home at Indore.

"When he reached India as a new arrival in the civil service, Durand used to worry that he was not, as most senior civil service officers from pre-Mutiny days were, a ‘Haileybury’ man. Haileybury was the training college in Hertfordshire which was once run by the since disbanded East India Company, a place where Britain’s old aristocracy was trained and tutored to govern India.

"Having sat for the civil service exams a little more than a decade after the 1857 war, Durand saw himself as a ‘competition-wallah’ and, therefore, different from the former who were of a higher social class and, according to the conventional wisdom of those times, more suited to the job of governance."

Rajiv Dogra does not say caste, using the phrase 'higher social class' instead; this merely shows success of Macaulay policy of lies perpetrated against India in general and Hindus in particular. George Eliot shows the caste system in her works, and John Galsworthy uses the term as well. Bit most of the world behaves as if caste is an Indian invention, never stopping to reflect that the word 'caste' is Anglo-Saxon and predates colonial era.

"But this complex, of not belonging to the superior class, did not stand in the way of his personal life. He fell in love almost immediately after arrival in India. One fine day, he saw Miss Ella Sandys whom he described as, ‘a graceful sunny haired girl in a grey habit who rode her bay stallion on the race course as no girl had ever ridden a horse before.’

"They got married in the spring of 1875 and moved to Simla. One immediate effect of marriage was a change in his fortunes. He was selected for the Foreign Service; and, as a committed professional, he lost no time in mastering Persian, a proficiency that remained unrivalled in Foreign Service for long.

"But the difference in the young couple’s temperament soon began to tell on the relationship. Ella was vivacious and a splendid dancer. Mortimer felt miserable on the dance floor. And he expressed his anguish bluntly, with a touch of jealousy, ‘We went to a dance together and I spent a rather unpleasant night… I wish that damned waltz had never been invented. That and the low dresses of the period madden me sometimes. I wish… I had between me and a brick wall the man who invented waltzing, with free leave to work my vengeance.’"

There's the caste difference, whether or not Dogra terms it so; she, obviously brought up to life with social graces that he was not. The jealousy part, including dance and caste differences, is so reminiscent of a Hindi film Jab Jab Phool Khile, wonder if it was inspired by this. They too do not call it caste, in that film, because the film shows differences of caste of western kind, glossing completely over the Indian caste difference question.

................................................................................................

"Young Mortimer seemed to have been driven by contradictory impulses in his family life. He was intensely possessive of her, but he was too career-minded to give her all the attention that she craved. He wanted children, but he was afraid that it might lead to division of affection by Ella between them and him. ... "

"Yet, as they grew older, Durand became exceedingly protective towards their children.

"Ella longed for the company of her husband, but Durand kept long hours in his office. Bizarrely, his relationship with Mrs Neville resurfaced just as he started his negotiations in Afghanistan in 1893. Its damaging effect on his marriage suddenly became a major distraction."

"As long as Lytton was in position as the viceroy, Durand had endorsed his Afghan policy completely. But soon after Lytton’s departure, he began to find fault with the choice of the Amir that he had helped install!

"Incidentally, Abdur Rahman, the Amir installed by Lytton and the one that Durand was complaining about, turned out to be the most successful Amir of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. It was Abdur Rahman who united Afghanistan in the shape that we see today. And it was this united Afghanistan that Durand was writing about in his minute of 26 January. Yet, this was the man Durand wanted overthrown!

"Finally, if Durand had such a low opinion of Abdur Rahman, why did he lobby in 1893 to go to Kabul and negotiate with him for the Durand Line?"

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"Tryst with Fame

"Sometimes circumstances dictate your career. Then, there are some people who anticipate opportunities, grab them and mould their careers. Yet others pursue an issue because they are convinced that it is the right course for their country, and as professionals, they are obliged to get the best out of it for their nation. Durand had been following developments in Afghanistan from the very beginning because of a combination of these factors. In that respect, his choice of learning Persian was no accident.

"It followed, therefore, that he should take keen interest in the settlement of Afghan borders. As he wrote in his journal in January 1884, he was concerned about the favourable position Russia enjoyed, ‘…a big nation absorbing a number of small weak tribes…’

"This was a realistic assessment of Russia’s position. But it did not prevent him from noting with a touch of pride that Britain was lucky to get away with a huge prize like India, ‘We, on the other hand, are a small body of foreigners holding two hundred and fifty millions of Asiatics in leash…’

"It was because of this objective reality that he advocated an early settlement of Afghanistan’s boundary with Russia. With that in view, Durand recommended that the British Raj should, ‘precisely [define] the limits of Afghanistan…and [recognize] the extension of Russian influence up to those limits.’

"He was of the opinion that the sooner this understanding was reached the better it was for everyone. Durand’s initial view of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, however, was not very favourable. He considered the Amir as ‘a troublesome and unsatisfactory ally…thoroughly detested throughout the country. His cruelties are horrible…especially as he shows the utmost jealousy of ourselves… I should not be sorry to see him driven out of the country.’"

" ... Had Durand been truly objective, he would have compared Amir Abdur Rahman’s actions with those of Lord Lytton, General Roberts or even his own father, Henry Durand. Each one of them had been responsible for ordering mass killings.

................................................................................................

"This is not to deny the fact that the Amir was cruel. Any ruler who takes pride in saying that he had ordered the execution of a hundred thousand people during his reign had to be extremely cruel.

"But that was one part of his rule. The other was the role he played as the leader of his country in pulling it out of the morass that it was in. There is no doubt that he was successful as a consolidator of his country, and was a pragmatist in his relations with Britain and Russia.

"According to Durand’s notes, Abdur Rahman once told him that, ‘The Russians want to attack India. You do not want to attack Russian Turkmenistan. Therefore the Russians want to come through my country and you do not. People say I would join with them to attack you. If I did and they won, would they leave my country? Never. I should be their slave and I hate them.’

"Despite that optimistic view of Britain, it was she and not Russia, which had repeatedly attacked Afghanistan. This diary entry by Durand raises the doubt whether he had always faithfully recorded his conversations with the Amir. Or had he written them down as he might have wanted the Amir to say them?

"Whatever be the truth in that, at least Durand was not leading a military mission to Kabul. In fact, he was not meant to lead any mission to Kabul. The viceroy had initially wanted to send General Roberts to negotiate with the Amir. But this was opposed by the Amir because of Roberts’s oppressive role during the Second Afghan War. So Durand was opted in as a substitute.

"However, some in the British government were filled with foreboding about Durand’s mission to Kabul in 1893. They wondered if it was the proper time for a British team to visit Kabul. They feared that this group might share the fate of Sir Louise Cavagnari, the leader of a similar British mission, who, after negotiating the Treaty of Gandamak, was killed by mutinous Afghan troops in Kabul. For that matter, they also recalled with horror the betrayal and wiping out of an entire British army by the Afghans in 1842.

"In this present case, the risk of a perilous end was far greater because Durand was going without an army; not even a nominal escort was accompanying him.

"But the decision to send the mission had been made, and the Afghan ruler’s consent had been received with considerable difficulty. If there were risks, it was too late to think of them.

"At the Indian end, they had taken a deliberate decision to keep the team small. There was no point in sending a large military contingent with the team because it would have made the Afghans suspect the motives of this visit. On the other hand, sending a small escort was pointless as it would have been ineffective against an Afghan attack. So it was decided to take a calculated risk and leave the security of the mission to the Afghan hosts."

" ... he was going to Kabul with the hope of ‘seeing great deeds, with the chance of distinction’. Durand was reasonably certain that he would not be disappointed; that this was going to be his tryst with everlasting fame."

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"Amir’s Confidant

"Sir Thomas Salter Pyne’s was an amazing success story in Afghanistan. ... "

" ... In fact it was a Frenchman, not him, who should have been there.

"If that had happened, if the Frenchman had stayed on in the Amir’s employment, the Durand Line may never have come about, nor indeed all the troubles that have followed since.

"This is the report based on what Pyne related after his retirement to the Australian newspaper Kalgoorlie Miner of 19 January 1901, ‘He was still in Calcutta when the Ameer of Afghanistan paid a visit to Lord Dufferin at Rawalpindi. A portable engine, with a dynamo and flashlight, caught the Ameer’s eye, and gave him the idea of introducing machinery into Afghanistan.’

"A Frenchman who was in charge of the machinery accepted the Amir’s invitation to go to Kabul, but he made his way there disguised as a dumb Afghan. He could not, however, summon up enough courage to last him long. Shortly after his arrival at Kabul, he looked out of his window one morning and saw two men hanging on the gallows and two women having their throats cut. This spectacle proved too much for the Frenchman. Since he could not just pack up and leave, he waited for his chance. Fortunately, this was not long in coming. When the Amir sent him to England to buy machinery, he decided not to risk his life again.

"While the machinery was dispatched to Kabul, the Frenchman never returned.

"This is where the British played a clever hand. The Afghan Amir needed someone urgently to install the machines that were coming all the way from England. So he sent a request to the Indian government asking for an engineer to replace the Frenchman. But the government played coy; it declined to appoint one officially on the pretext that it could not force its nationals. There was also the hint that a stay in Kabul was considered equivalent to suicide.

"However, young Salter Pyne, by then 25 years old, volunteered for the position. Isn’t it interesting that he should have become conveniently available precisely then? One moment the British government says sorry it could not suggest a man for the position, yet the very next moment, one of its own volunteers for the post. The fact that emerged later was that Salter Pyne was working for British intelligence. And they had played this little game to establish Pyne’s credentials as an independent man, with no connection to the government."

"When he began work in Kabul, the Amir found qualities in him as a sound manager and a good engineer. So the Amir gave him a contract to construct a godown for ammunition and thereafter to manage it. That was the beginning of Pyne’s rise in the Amir’s esteem, and he managed to make himself so indispensable that over time he became the second most powerful person in Afghanistan, next in importance only to the Amir and outranking even the army chief of Afghanistan.

"Pyne had won the Amir’s trust to such an extent that when he had to send a personal confidant to convey a message to the viceroy, he chose Pyne over an Afghan.

"On paper at least, Pyne is said to have faithfully conveyed that the Amir considered Mortimer Durand to be his personal enemy. He also passed on the Amir’s impression that it was because of Durand’s misguidance that the viceroy had become inimical in his attitude towards Afghanistan. In addition, Pyne took care to convey the Afghan concern about the British occupation of various tribal territories belonging to Afghanistan.

"At the same time, it is claimed that Pyne’s stay in India was opportune from the British point of view. When he went back to Kabul, his principal agenda was to assure the Amir that the British had nothing but his good in their heart and that Durand was genuinely nice. He is said to have been eminently successful in achieving both these objectives.

"This wasn’t all. Pyne was going to play a critical role in Durand’s mission as well."

................................................................................................

" ... new documents are emerging from the vaults where so far they had been kept in great secrecy. And new interpretations about the nature of Durand’s mission are coming up regularly. While much of it remains an enigma, there are enough straws in the wind to support the suspicion that it was a fixed match. Did Mortimer Durand know the outcome even before he had set foot in Afghanistan?"

" ... They had travelled to Afghanistan because the Amir had begun defying the British and Russian rules in the region. He had been gradually reoccupying territories in the northeast and southeast Afghanistan. While the former moves angered the Russians, the latter incursions needled the British.

" ... Over the previous few months, the viceroy had choked off arms and ammunition supplies to Afghanistan. Both sides were, therefore, busy putting pressure on the other before the talks started.

"To be historically fair, it must be said that these territories were once ruled by the Amir’s ancestors when Afghanistan was at its prime. Now, these places were either claimed by the Russians or the British. Although it may seem that the mission was sent to deal with British claims, in reality, it was the opposite.

"Durand’s primary task was to advise the Amir that Russia wanted a literal fulfilment of the Agreement of 1873, which Russia claimed the Amir had breached."

"Durand was told that he ‘might probably take the opportunity of his presence in Kabul’ to discuss the ‘differences of opinion’ that the Amir had with the Government of India.

"Therefore, the frontier areas were nowhere in the list of ‘must do’ things for Mortimer Durand in Kabul. That, at least, was the story spun by the British prior to the talks."

" ... When on his arrival in Kabul, Salter Pyne helpfully suggested that he should make an offer of guns to the Amir as a way of softening him on the boundary negotiations, Durand’s immediate retort was, ‘I don’t carry guns about in my waistcoat pocket…’"

"It is important to note here that Mortimer Durand tells the Amir right at the start of their negotiations that ‘for the future, the Persian text of all communications between the Government of India and the Amir would be regarded as binding.’ Despite this British undertaking, the Amir was made to sign only the English text of the Agreement on 12 November. But moral issues and broken promises did not unduly trouble Durand.

"A second important observation was the Amir’s refusal to be bound by any agreement made by his predecessor Sher Ali. More importantly, the Amir makes it clear at the outset that he did not believe in the accuracy of British maps. Interestingly, he also questioned the genuineness of British documents."

"Durand’s instructions were to change that attitude of hostility because only Russia would gain from that state."

"After their meeting, this is what Durand recorded,

"He seemed much more interested in the British frontier than in the Russian, which was perhaps mere acting. But on the whole I was extremely pleased with the interview. At the end of it he said to me, “My people will not care or know whether I go backwards or forwards in Roshan or Shignan (in north), but they will care very much to know exactly how they stand on your side.”

"This last bit was important, especially when you consider what happened eventually. If Abdur Rahman was so conscious of his people’s sensitivity on the borders to the south, why did he then give in without first consulting them? In his notes of that meeting, Durand also wrote, ‘My impression is that he will give way about the Agreement of 1873, and push us harder on our side, but I am by no means confident. His line was that Sher Ali was a fool and did not know what he was doing…’"

................................................................................................

" ... Durand was so frustrated with the Amir’s antics that he wrote in his diary, ‘The Kabul mission has broken down; the Amir is going to Balkh to arrange matters. I believe he was afraid of having us, lest we should ask too much.’

"Mortimer was not in any great hurry to return to India, but his frustration with the Amir’s stalling tactics was growing steadily. As the negotiations about the frontier with India dragged on, Pyne counselled patience. He told Durand, ‘Amir never gives any real decision on any other day except Sunday.’"

" ... There were no Afghan nationals in the room with the Amir, just an Indian named Sultan Mohammad Khan (father of the poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz) and the British delegation. To be absolutely correct, even Sultan Mohammad was not in the room. He was hiding in purdah behind the Amir so that he could keep notes of the meeting. These notes could have provided a clue to what actually transpired, but there is no trace of them."

"When this British group emerged from the royal chamber, they came out with two signed documents. The agreement about the northern part fixes the ‘boundary’ between Afghanistan and Russia (see Annexure I). The agreement with the British is about the ‘spheres of influence’ in Afghanistan’s eastern and southern frontier. This latter piece of paper was to become known as the Durand Agreement (see Annexure II). It was signed in a language that Amir Abdur Rahman had no knowledge of."

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"The Durand Line passes through present-day Pakistani provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (NWFP), Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan. It also includes ten provinces in Afghanistan. According to some accounts, the British, under a false pretence, assured the Afghan ruler that Balochistan was a part of British India. Therefore, they were not required to have the consent of anyone from Balochistan while finalizing the Agreement, or later for the demarcation of the boundary on ground. This was incorrect because by a treaty signed with the Khan of Kalat in 1876, the British had recognized the independence of this state. By internationally accepted norms, Balochistan too should have been a party to the Agreement because a part of its territory was also involved. But, the British kept the Baloch rulers in the dark about the Durand Line Agreement to avoid any complications. Therefore the Agreement was drawn as a bilateral document between Afghanistan and British India only. It intentionally excluded Balochistan. Hence, from a legal standpoint, the Agreement became null and void as soon as it was signed.

"By this act of exclusion the British were being economical with the truth. As Bernard Shaw once said, this typified the British character, ‘…he (Britisher) does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.’

"The way the British writers treat this issue reeks of self-censorship on a vast scale. They skip over the subject and make it out as if the entire Durand trip, and the negotiations with the Amir, was a lark, not a case of strenuous and serious negotiations.

"Let’s try and view the negotiations through a sarcastic lens. It might then spin out in this manner:

"Durand, it would seem, had gone to Kabul with his small band to get away for a few weeks from the worries of office. They were entertained there by an Iron Amir who seemed most anxious to please the visitors. When they had had enough of this idyllic stay in the Amir’s palace, they decided to head back to work in Simla. As a going away present, the Amir produced two sheets of paper; one was blank, the other had a map of Afghanistan on it. Durand was reluctantly dragged away from the piano that his host had thoughtfully placed in his room, and scrawled a few short some-things in English, which would have ordinarily made no sense to the Amir. But since it was Durand who had written them down, the Amir jumped with joy and grabbed the nearest pen to put his Royal signature on it.

"But Durand wasn’t done yet. He was still in a state of ecstasy which comes from playing an exceptionally fine aria on the piano. So he waved his magic pen again, quite like an accomplished conductor, and drew a line across the map. And pronto, he had given Afghanistan a new border. The Amir felt blessed that the visiting Englishman had given him a scientific border. All seemed to have been decided except a slice of the Waziri territory which the Amir wished to retain. Now, if we were to continue in that same supercilious manner, then British historians will also make us believe that the Amir wanted this small piece of Waziri territory for sentimental reasons because his old nanny used to live there."

"However, here the British accounts make a slight concession to truth and quote a real conversation, ‘When Durand asked him why this insistence on a piece of land where population is small and revenue meagre, the Amir turned towards him slowly and held him in a steady gaze before responding with a firm voice, “Nam-name-honour”.’

"This last bit of conversation is what actually happened. All the rest that I have described in the satirical piece above about the way the Agreement was signed is imaginary. In part, this is atonement, a regret that Afghans should have been denied a factual and historically correct peek into what really happened on 12 November 1893."

...............................................................................................

" ... there was no concession from the British side. The only sweetener that Durand had offered was to increase the annual money grant given by Britain from ₹12 lakh to ₹18 lakh. But this additional ₹6 lakh could hardly be called a significant addition to the Amir’s revenues. In any case, that increased fund was largely for the maintenance of his administration in the Wakhan corridor, which he had very reluctantly agreed to absorb at British insistence."

"Is it likely that the king of a country could have agreed to partition his country for this extra ₹6 lakh? It appears even more improbable when that king happens to be a very proud Abdur Rahman. It is also a fact that despite its economic problems, Afghanistan was not a poor country. In fact, when Shah Shuja abdicated in 1842, he had left behind £2 million in the treasury. So to say that either of these two—a message from top or need for greater money—was the reason for Abdur Rahman to change tack and capitulate, will be stretching credulity.

"The Amir could not have given in to blackmail or temptation of the sexual kind; his visits to the harem were generally limited to once a week. Therefore, there was hardly any scope there for the British to blackmail him. What then could have made him take so dramatic an about-turn? This is a mystery."

"Unfortunately, there are no Afghan records on the issue and even if there was a scrap of paper somewhere in the official or a private collection in Kabul, it would have been bombed out in one of the many wars that have been inflicted upon this unfortunate land."

"The only area that was given to the Amir was Kafiristan. And that too, as Durand would write later in a secret letter to the viceroy, was granted to the Amir because Kafiristan was ‘miserably poor’. It was severed from Chitral by the Shawal Mountains, and the area was not easy to supply during winters. Moreover, its remote location had made it a difficult place for the British to govern. But the Amir was happy to keep the area because as far as his wishes went, it would greatly please his subjects. The real reason, as the Amir told Durand, was to send in his army and convert the Hindus living there to Islam. This was the only concession made by Durand; otherwise, the entire Agreement was a losing proposition for the Amir."

And converted they were, literally at gunpoint. Those who refused were massacred.

"The Agreement did not make sense for a very practical reason too. Abdur Rahman was a Pashtun. He derived his basic strength from the majority Pashtun population rather than from minorities like Tajiks, Uzbeks or Hazaras; the last being Shias were not trusted by him for anything other than menial jobs. For such an Amir to cut off over 50 per cent of Pashtun lands, and to part with more than 50 per cent of the Pashtun population, did not seem logical at all. It defied reason then, and it continues to defy logic even now. Could it have been something personal; was it due to a medical condition that turned him temporarily into a compliant marionette for the British?

"It will be unwise to rule out this possibility. The Amir had his local hakeem, but he relied more on a British doctor to cure him of serious ailments. Some of these were of a grave nature, requiring heavy doses of tranquilizers.

"As a rule, British accounts tend to be copious especially where they have won a great diplomatic victory. They go into considerable detail describing every aspect of the negotiation, because they write with an eye on history and as a guide for their future generation of negotiators. This was the case with the three Afghan wars. Durand’s journey to Kabul and the negotiation over the northern part of the Afghan border with Russia have also been amply written about. The question that intrigues is this: how is it that we have a complete picture of the whys and why nots of the northern border part of the negotiations, but there is next to nothing about the far more important Durand Agreement? Why and how was the Amir brought about?

"It is strange that even Percy Sykes, who wrote a rather authoritative biography of Mortimer Durand, simply skips over the crucial issue as to how the Amir turned around. He does not give us a clue as to when and by whom the Durand Line was drawn on the map. Further, the biography does not touch on the fact that if Durand was so adept at Persian why did the two sides not sign the text in Persian? After all, the Durand Agreement was the most important agreement that was ever signed by the two sides. And both the Government of India and the Amir had recently agreed that only the Persian text would be considered as binding. Yet just the English text of the Agreement was signed by the two sides."

"In fact, many in Afghanistan assert that the Amir did not sign the document. They suspect his signatures were forged on the document. That may be an emotional assertion rather than a statement of fact. But the doubt about it persists to this day, indicating the strength of resentment against an unfair agreement and a line drawn unfairly. In the latter case, even the signatures are missing.

"If you look at the map and see that line, you cannot help but remark as to why the line was drawn on such a small-sized map. The line travels in a zigzag fashion across the map, which makes you wonder as to how this casual romp of a pen could become the dividing line of people’s destiny?"

Dogra compares it with work by Radcliffe who used large scale maps for seven weeks and had help from several experts.

" ... In fact, the level of rage against him was so high that he left India immediately upon completion of the border plan. And he vowed never to return again because he was afraid of being killed by one side or the other. ... "

"In contrast, Durand, if he is the one who is suspected to have drawn that zigzag line across the map, got away with it all. It is true that like Radcliffe, Mortimer Durand too had spent seven weeks in Afghanistan, but most of that time was spent lying in wait for the right opportunity to bait the Amir. Once the Amir was brought around, the map-making was a casual affair. Durand’s was an instant line, drawn on a small copybook-type map and covered nearly 1,600 miles. Mortimer did not have the time to consult anyone, nor did he have the professional help of the kind that is necessary in such a major undertaking. And he considered neither the historical evidence nor consulted any representative of the affected regions. People who were to live on the two sides of this line were given no say in the matter. Nor was their approval sought. Durand did not spend time worrying over the future of those divided by his line.

"Unfortunately for the people, the Durand Line was a diktat to which the dictatorial Iron Amir submitted meekly! There was not a squeak against the line by the Sirdars either. Wasn’t this strange, eerily strange? And unlike Radcliffe, Mortimer Durand did return to Afghanistan."

................................................................................................

"As for his being a wizard at diplomacy, the fact is that the American President Theodore Roosevelt took a rather dim view of Durand’s abilities and had him sent back prematurely from Washington. Demanding the recall of an ambassador is a grave affair. Such a drastic step is rarely taken in international diplomacy, and it is rarer still in a relationship as close as the one between the United States and the United Kingdom. So was Mortimer Durand really such a great diplomat?

"If he wasn’t a wizard at diplomacy, and this is our little puzzle here, then how could he mesmerize Amir Abdur Rahman into blindly signing the English text of the document? And what is more, how did this hugely suspicious Amir agree happily that a small unsigned map with a hastily drawn line was to be his country’s ‘scientific’ border henceforth?

"These issues continue to preoccupy the Afghans. Alas, unlike in a tour of Baker Street, the puzzle here concerns the real-life tragedy of the Pashtun people; a tragedy that continues to draw blood a century after that line was forged through an unwilling land.

"Periodically, questions have also been asked about the Amir’s medical condition. Was he disabled naturally or purposely when he signed the document?

"The sketch that Salter Pyne’s successor Frank Martin draws in his book, Under an Absolute Ruler, is of an Amir who was meticulous to a fault and cautious in every detail:

""Possessed of very exceptional ability, he was as conscientious in all matters of routine as Philip IL of Spain. His whole time and attention was given to the task before him, working from the hour he quitted his bed until he lay down again. He put off no work until a later date that was possible of completion, but tried to get each day’s work finished the same day. It was his custom to sit up working most of the night and not to retire to rest until about four in the morning… This habit of keeping awake most of the night was probably due to fear of a rising, or treachery, which would be attempted at night rather than during the day when all the people were about."

"If that is an accurate portrait of the man, then how could he commit a blunder like signing blindly on a piece of paper? Is it possible that he may have been persuaded into doing so under a medical condition? It will be unwise to rule out that possibility. After all, there are many examples in history where states have employed dubious means to achieve their ends. Murders have been sanctioned and honeytraps have been used. Poison and drugs were given in the name of higher national interest.

"The British put an entire people on opium because it was profitable business. As Bernard Shaw said, they were capable of employing every trick in the trade to achieve their goals.

"Moreover, they were accomplished at covering their tracks well, and equally good at broadcasting as evil the same fault in their adversaries. For instance, they were quick to inform the world about the cruel practices and the spy network of the Afghan Amir. But the British themselves had employed similar practices; sometimes they were vastly crueler and their spy network was far wider. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century and for a better part of the twentieth century, the British intelligence service was acknowledged as the biggest and the best in the world. But the big difference was that they controlled the media. So they had the power of the propaganda. It had to be so, otherwise they could not have sustained such a huge empire for so long a time.

"Since the more sensitive of their operations remain shrouded, we still do not know the methods they had employed in Afghanistan. One can only try and connect the dots on the basis of random clues and scraps of information that have recently come out in the open from the archives. The clinching evidence still lies buried.

"Therefore, the Durand episode remains largely a mystery."

................................................................................................

"A Paranoid Amir

"it is also a well-recorded fact that Amir Abdur Rahman was cruel and suspicious. In fact, he was mortally afraid of his people, and went to extreme lengths to find what they were doing and saying. ‘He was so obsessed by the possibility that his subjects might be conspiring against him that he set up an elaborate network of spies and informers modelled on the Czarist intelligence system that he had seen in operation during his exile in Tashkent.’*"

" ... Every large house had one or two spies among the servants who reported all they saw and heard. That task was considerably facilitated by the fact that it is a custom in Afghanistan for servants to sit in the same room as their master, where they can hear all that is said at any time.

"‘The Amir had spies in the houses of his sons, and among the women of their harems, and spies in his own harem. Amir’s obsession turned out to be infectious. His wives and his sons started having their spies among his servants, who informed them of all that concerned them.’ In the end, it became a merry-go-round where rumours had no beginning and no end. All were spying and everyone seemed to know what the other was doing."

"It is not known how much and to what extent the Amir’s English confidant Pyne was spied upon and by whom, or whether some fly on the wall was listening to every word uttered by the visiting Durand delegation."

"There may have been occasional passing curiosity about the subject, but historians have not probed the issue in any great detail. British historians, in particular, have been guarded about the matter because of the fear that the entire can of worms might be split open. Lately, however, some clues have started to emerge. By piecing them together, the picture begins to emerge of a seriously sick man. It is likely that some of his psychological excesses may have been due to his imprisonment in his father’s jail and the subsequent exile of eleven years in Central Asia. Both these unhappy experiences may have left him with emotional and health-related scars."

"Recently, some medical experts had looked at the symptoms of the Afghan ruler’s illness. Their conclusion was that he was suffering from a disease, or combination of diseases, much more acute and dangerous than previously suspected. In their opinion, his frequent illnesses may have disabled him physically and brought about a steady deterioration of his mental powers."

"This illness had incapacitated him to such an extent that he lost the use of his hands and feet. By the middle of the 1890s, the Amir was so ill that he had to be carried everywhere in a palanquin. During the more violent and serious attacks, he was susceptible to fits and prolonged periods of unconsciousness. In order to conceal the severity of his illness and disabilities from his court and the public, Abdur Rahman used to retire to the harem, where only a few of his trusted officials were allowed to meet him. The result was virtual paralysis of state business."

................................................................................................

"Talks Coincide with Attacks

" ... By the middle of the 1890s, these attacks were a regular feature and they happened generally between the middle of October and the end of February.

"Is it just a coincidence that Mortimer Durand should have timed his arrival in Kabul in such a way that he was there from October to November? Normally, such negotiations do not last for more than a couple of days. Why was it necessary for Mortimer Durand to stay for as long as seven weeks?"

" ... During one of the meetings the Amir developed the symptoms of a cold or flu. It was then that Pyne came over and gently placed his hand on the Amir’s forehead. ... "

................................................................................................

"Salter’s Sleight

"Durand’s report to the viceroy acknowledges unhesitatingly that Pyne played a critical role in convincing the Amir to agree to part with a huge chunk of his territory.* This was most remarkable considering the fact that the settlement of the frontier with British India did not figure in the list of objectives given to Durand. It seems that the decision to take up this issue was impromptu, based on the assessment that the Amir could be brought around. Pyne then played a critical role in persuading the Amir to sign on the dotted line. Otherwise, there was no reason why an absolute ruler like Abdur Rahman who was otherwise arguing every inch of the way on the Russian side of the boundary, should have been so malleable on this sensitive southern and more contentious side.

"Pyne’s input must have been vital otherwise why should the British Empire rush to give him a knighthood. The Durand Agreement was signed on 12 November 1893 and just about a month later, Pyne figures in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list! Isn’t that remarkable speed in the age of the snail mail?

"With this award, he became the youngest recipient till then of the Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India (KCSI). The clerk from a Bombay office was now known as Sir Salter Pyne. Just playing piano and entertaining the Durand party could not have got him this honour.

"In fact, the honour of the KCSI given to Salter Pyne in the New Year’s honours list of 1894 was the same as the one given to Mortimer Durand! Now, Mortimer was the foreign secretary and the celebrated architect of the Durand Agreement, whereas Salter was a nobody. There is no public record of any distinguished service done by Pyne during the Durand negotiations. Yet he was given the same decoration as Mortimer! So was this a deliberate royal put down of Durand, or is there more to the entire episode than the world is aware of?

"Pyne also knew that once the Amir had signed on the dotted line, there was no question of admitting mea culpa thereafter. The Amir could hardly retract a decision that he had taken; that admission would be lèse-majesté."

" ... If he had made a mistake by signing the Durand document under duress or when he was incapacitated, why did he not retract it after he had recovered to his normal self? ... "

Dogra discourses regarding Amir and his conviction about having a messianic role in building of Afghanistan, and about his supernatural powers.

"How could such a man, who considered himself far above the rest, concede that he was merely human? How could he admit that he had made a mistake in signing the Durand Agreement and retract from a commitment given in his capacity as the Amir?"

................................................................................................

" ... was the Agreement just a huge opportunity to grab land which accidentally came Durand’s way?

"Perhaps it was so. And there is some evidence to support that conclusion. The British phobia of Russia had lasted through most of the nineteenth century, but it had begun to recede somewhat by the end of that century. Instead, it was the Pathan pride which pricked them now. This had to be punctured by dividing them.

"This line that distinguished British India from Afghanistan was laid across the tribal lands; from the Khyber Pass to the desert town of Chaman, a dust bowl frontier post at the base of a great desert of sand and grey mountains a hundred kilometres from Kandahar. Unfortunately for Pathans, these ‘lines in the sand’ were in the course of time conveniently recognized by the great powers.

"The traditional Pathan life had been disrupted and in many cases the line ran right through the middle of houses, dividing brother from brother. But that did not matter to Durand. His task was to advance British interests.

"However, to the Pashtuns, the borders were meaningless. These tribesmen did not consider themselves Afghans or Indians, or later as Pakistanis. They were, and remain, Pashtun-speaking Pathans who believe they live in a space called ‘Pashtunistan’, which lies on both sides of what Durand called a Line.

"Even after signing the 1893 treaty, the Afghan Amir did not cease to ‘exercise interference’ on the British Indian side of the Durand Line. He continued to send grants of money, arms, dresses of honour and deputations to tribal chiefs on the British side of the Line. These tribal chiefs continued to play a role in the Afghan state; they were invited to jirgas in Kabul, and participated in the choice of new Afghan Amirs. Abdur Rahman also used propaganda and agents to incite their feelings against British."

Dogra quotes another source on the question.

"What they are alleging here is that the Amir was forced to sign on the dotted line under the threat of an economic blockade and discontinuance of subsidy. Now the issue here is not whether a nation can indulge in blackmail of this type, which unfortunately was, and, is, a fact of international life. After all, that is what sanctions are all about. If we accept the suggestion that Durand had issued such a threat, the point then to consider is this—was the threat potent enough to hurt Afghanistan seriously and disrupt its economic life?

"We do not have the data to show the extent of Afghanistan’s economic dependence on external sources in 1893. Nor do we know the quantum of Afghan imports then from India. Still, we can make a rough comparison with what has happened in recent years. Immediately after its creation, Pakistan began to block exports to Afghanistan. On 1 January 1950, it blockaded fuel trucks destined for Afghanistan and repeated this action in 1953, 1955 and 1961. It has carried on in this vein, blockading Afghanistan every so often. Among other things, Afghanistan is critically dependent on Pakistan for some of its daily needs. Because of that Afghanistan has been the first to blink every time there was a blockade."

It's unclear why Afghanistan depended on this fickle, selfish, blackmailing neighbour, rather than join USSR.

"But it is open to doubt if in 1893 Afghanistan was critically dependent on India for its daily needs. Moreover, if the threat of economic embargo had done the trick, then the British would not have had any reason to hide this. On the contrary, they may have quoted it as an example of successful coercive diplomacy.

"It had to be something else."

" ... In a letter to Viceroy Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Abdur Rahman recalled that the Pashtuns in the NWFP ‘being brave warriors and staunch Mohamedans, would make a very strong force to fight against any power which might invade India or Afghanistan. I will gradually make them peaceful subjects and good friends of Great Britain.’

"After that he added on a cautionary note to the viceroy, ‘if you should cut them out of my dominions, they will neither be of any use to you nor to me: you will always be engaged in fighting and troubles with them, and they will always go on plundering.’

"From the British perspective, that was exactly the reason why they wanted the area under their control. They wished to check the plundering raids by the tribals. Moreover, the Agreement gave them the opportunity to secure high passes into India and curb Afghan interference in Balochistan."

" ... Amir faulted it as flawed and assessed the issue differently. He argued that the British ‘had not the sense to understand that taking and keeping under British possession all these barren lands on the borders of Afghanistan was a very unwise step, by which they burdened the exchequer of India with the heavy expense of keeping an army on the spot to maintain peace in these territories.’

"In fact, many Britons, from Disraeli to Lawrence, had warned of precisely these risks, but those in authority then, were jubilant. They were in no mood to see the fly in the ointment."

................................................................................................

"Illogical Line

"This strike across the Pashtun heart was the hardest part. The Line had cut tribes and tribal groups in half. The Birmal tract of Waziristan was on the Afghanistan side, with the rest of Waziristan on the Indian (or as it is now, the Pakistani) side. The Mohmand tribal areas are also cut in two. And, inevitably, because the border is generally in a very distant set of areas, it is highly porous and difficult to police, especially when family groups are on both sides. This is specially so in Waziristan, where there are many passes and paths through which it is easy to move into Afghanistan and back.

"It was because of this ease of movement that the British, and later Pakistanis, did not succeed in establishing an effective administrative authority in the FATA. These included the seven semi-autonomous agencies previously created by the British (Bajaur, Khyber, Kurram, Mohmand, Orakzai, South Waziristan and North Waziristan) as well as the NWFP tribal areas adjoining Peshawar (Kohat, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan).

"The line itself, as demarcated between 1893 and 1896, was drawn all the way from the Persian frontier to the Wakhan, the little area on which the British insisted to keep a distance between the British and Russian empires. There were two exceptions which, at that time, remained undemarcated; an area in the region of Chitral and another area a little north of the routes towards Kabul, the country of the Mohmand tribe.

"There were some important advantages that the Line gave to the British. Strategically, they now held positions forward of the passes and controlled the heights thus facilitating the policing of the passes; it was through these passes that the tribals used to raid trade caravans and the settlements in Punjab. By drawing this line they also managed to achieve the tripartite border, a British ambition for a long time.

"The first part of the border was the buffer state of Afghanistan. The second part was the tribal areas in the hills, which the British did not try to govern, but simply garrisoned. These areas were vassal states on the Indian side of the line but not under the sovereignty of British India. The third part was further back, where the real government of India started. The depth of this frontier system certainly kept the Russians away, but the corollary was that the British were now faced with the internal policing problem."

................................................................................................

"Exaggerated Fears

"Every rumoured sighting of a horse-riding Russian near the Afghan border would set the telegraph wires buzzing between Simla and London. If that Russian was to be seen advancing into Afghan territory, it meant that a Rubicon had been crossed, and an alert needed to be sounded. God forbid if that exhausted Russian was to somehow limp into Kabul and worse still, if he was to be admitted into the Amir’s presence. That was enough to launch British troops into Afghanistan. Sometimes, it was not even necessary that a Russian had to be seen; just the rumour of his presence was enough to wind up the British military machine into action.

"The fact is that there was a vast amount of exaggeration in the British fears. Russians were actually rare visitors to Afghanistan. Just to give one example—the ostensible reason for Durand’s labours was the desire to keep the Russians away. And Salter Pyne had smoothed that effort by counselling the Amir appropriately. Yet, soon after leaving the Amir’s service, he admitted this to an Australian journalist, who wrote, ‘Sir Salter makes light of the rumoured despatch of a Russian Mission to Kabul, and says that all the time he was in the capital, he never saw a Russian.’* And Salter Pyne was in Kabul for thirteen years."

................................................................................................

"WHY WAS BRITAIN SO DEEPLY interested in the frontier area? There may have been many reasons for British concern, a principal one being the need to keep the tribal raids in check. It was then a law and order issue rather than a desire to gain more territory. Britain also knew it was futile to aim for total control over the frontier. Durand admitted as much on 23 October 1893 in negotiations with the Amir. The Amir asked Durand if he would undertake that the Government of India would not absorb Waziris, if he left them alone.

"Durand replied, ‘…we do not regard Waziristan as British territory…’*

"What did the British principals in India make of the Agreement? They were delighted by this unexpected surprise. But they were guarded in their enthusiasm as the frontier was considered an administrative beehive.

"More importantly, the clear intention in Calcutta and London was that it should not be mistaken for annexation. A secret report sent by the Government of India to the secretary of state for India on 3 January 1894 sets the limit clearly, ‘We…wish it to be clearly understood that nothing is further from our intentions than the annexation of tribal country on our frontier.’**

"Just in case that was not clear enough, the report adds, ‘We believe, however, that without annexation and without interference in the internal affairs of the tribes, it will be possible to bring them further within our influence and to induce them to regard themselves as owing allegiance to us.’

"This important communication was dated 3 January 1894. It means that the viceroy considered the subject vital enough to advise London of his cautionary note within days of receiving Durand’s report. The tone of this communication is noteworthy. It is not celebratory, and it makes it a point to stress that the frontier area should be treated like a hot potato. It advised London that it was better to handle the tribes from a distance and repeatedly stressed that Britain should perish the very thought of annexation."

"This note has been a matter of public record for some time. Why is it that historians have chosen to ignore it? Is it because this note contradicts the later British construct that the frontier had become a part of British India?

"In this background, there is little doubt that the Durand Line was disruptive, but was it definitive? It has been 124 years since the Agreement was allegedly signed, but it continues to remain a topic of contest and debate. There are question marks about its authenticity as also its intent. Was it meant to demarcate borders or was it a temporary arrangement?

"Many of the statements issued in the years following the Durand Agreement indicate that it was a temporary responsibility. And that the British interest was limited to bringing some stability to the area."

................................................................................................

" ... The Government of India writing to the secretary of state for India on 10 July 1894 had recommended, ‘We understand that Her Majesty’s Government concur in this view…that while we emphatically repudiate all intention of annexing tribal territory we desire to bring the tribes whom this settlement concerns further within our influence.’*

"Like Durand’s usage, this paper too was clear in using the term ‘influence’, rather than border. That is how it should have been because the Durand Agreement had, in reality, fixed only ‘the limit of their respective spheres of influence’ rather than being a demarcation of sovereignty."

" ... these observations should be enough to raise serious doubt about how the Durand Agreement has been interpreted, or rather misinterpreted, in the period immediately before the partition of India.

"Since the writers of that time found it convenient not to examine and comment on the issue, it is difficult at this stage to guess the reason for this fudge. But Sir Olaf Caroe, the last governor of Punjab and the writer of a book on the Pathans, may have put his finger on the pulse by this comment, ‘…the British could see a dangerous threat to their empire in the unity of the Pakhtuns.’"

................................................................................................

"The Real Premise

"Unlike Afghanistan’s international boundaries with Russia in the north or Iran in the west that were recognized as such by all parties at the time, the status of the Durand Line remained unclear. This is because the British viewed their negotiations with the Afghans as an internal colonial issue rather than as an international one. Britain was not interested in setting Afghanistan’s southeastern boundary as in reorganizing its own administration of what would later become the NWFP, and is now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. With its capital in Peshawar, the NWFP was designed to provide a separate unit of administration for British India’s Pashtun population. Moving outward from Peshawar, the British mapped out a concentric set of administrative territories, each under proportionately less colonial control."

"On this basis, the Afghans have always claimed that the Agreement never constituted a formal border, but rather an agreed upon frontier between them and the British. At the time, this was a distinction without much meaning in practical terms because Pathans continued to move about freely. But whether the line constitutes a boundary or a frontier still lies at the heart of the continued legal differences between Pakistan and Afghanistan on the issue.

"In legal terms, there is a difference between a boundary and a frontier.

"An international boundary marks a separation (natural or artificial) between two contiguous states. A frontier is the portion of a territory that faces the border of another country, including both the boundary line itself and the land contiguous to it.

"An example each of both forms was in the two documents signed by the Amir with Mortimer Durand on 12 November 1893. The words used in the Durand Agreement merely claimed to limit the states’ ‘respective spheres of influence’. This is to be contrasted with the agreement that Durand signed with the Afghan Amir at exactly the same moment in 1893, regarding the northern border with Russia. Here, the word used was ‘boundary’.

"The historic Afghan position has always been that the formal boundary to its southern frontier has yet to be set. The proponents of Pashtun unity see the Afghan nation extending well beyond Afghanistan itself right up to Indus River to create a Pushtunistan that might or might not be merged with Afghanistan.

"Others draw the boundary at the limits of the settled zones of the NWFP since the Frontier Agencies were never directly administered by the British.

"The contentions vary because when the British packed their bags, they left behind many unresolved issues. In fact, this was the case elsewhere too. Many of the borders that exist today, from the Middle East to India, reflect not any one plan, but a series of opportunistic proposals by competing strategists of colonial powers.

"In most cases, they awarded themselves control over areas in which they had strategic and economic interests. In the case of Sykes-Picot plan for the Middle East, there was at least an attempt to account for the local ethnic, religious or cultural groups. But Durand’s was an arbitrary imposition on the Pashtuns."

" ... Lord Curzon addressed the scholars of Oxford on this very issue in 1907. As was his manner with others, he spoke to the students with a magnificent, late-Victorian confidence about the future of the world’s frontier zones:

"It would be futile to assert that an exact Science of Frontiers has been or is ever likely to be evolved: for no one law can possibly apply to all nations or peoples, to all Governments, all territories, or all climates. The evolution of Frontiers is perhaps an art rather than a science, so plastic and malleable are its forms and manifestations.

"This is a remarkable statement coming from a man of considerable authority.

"Here is a man who, like Queen Victoria and the prime minister of Britain, had celebrated Durand. They had all applauded Mortimer for finalizing the Agreement. The British government, the media and the people had prided themselves on its scientific character. The New Statesman had eulogized Mortimer Durand as the ‘strongest man of Europe’ for this achievement. Yet, in a broader sweep of the subject in Oxford, Lord Curzon was dismissing the concept of scientific frontiers."

" ... Yet, long after wielding the unkind knife across Afghanistan, the British were insistent that this arbitrary cut was enforceable by law."

................................................................................................

"Capricious Interpretation

"Which law were they quoting to Afghans? Was it one that had universal application? If that was not so, then a contested Agreement cannot be the foundation of a permanent border.

"Or was it that they had a new and their own unique interpretation of the law? By this, there was one law for the masters, and quite another law for the colonies as per the British whims. Sadly, this seems to have been the case. Capricious interpretation became the law for the governed. Yet Britain was pragmatic enough to throw that same law into the dustbin when it met with a superior force, as in the case of Hong Kong.

"But Afghanistan was, and is, a weak state.

"So the question that remains unanswered is this—are frontiers scientific, or, as Curzon’s celebrated comment asserts, they are malleable because there is no real law on the subject?

"Either way, grave injustice has been done to the Afghans. Can a rough line drawn at the spur of the moment by a man who had no known expertise in cartography be treated as a ‘scientific’ border? Can such a so-called border that disregards traditions, conventions and centuries of living practice be regarded as lawful?"

"There are other countries which were artificially carved up. Experience shows that once a line is drawn between nations, reaching across it becomes difficult. India was partitioned, and many new boundaries were made in the Middle East and Africa. More recently, countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Sudan and Czechoslovakia have splintered to form new states.

"In each of these, there was initial turmoil. In some cases, mass migration and bloodshed had followed. But after the first few bitter months, people settled down to make new lives.

"Only the Pashtuns have remained unreconciled.

"Is it because the Pashtuns were, and are, poor? As Henry Miller said in the American context, ‘We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution and anarchy.’"

"The question that must be asked of heavens is this—why of all the tribes in the world are only the Pathans tormented?"

Dogra exaggerates.

................................................................................................

" ... What has been asked over and over again is this—does the reality of the Durand Agreement sit well with verifiable facts? Can this Agreement stand the legal scrutiny of the present times? Was the Amir fully in control of his mental faculties when he signed the Agreement? Questions like these have troubled succeeding generations of Afghans. That’s why they have never reconciled to the Durand Line."

Again, Dogra exaggerates.

Whether Amir was fully conscious and in control is irrelevant to the Pathans reconciliation to a line dividing their homeland. Such a reconciliation won't come unless they all agree to it, or at least the males amongst them do, and that seems unlikely.

Pakis moreover have since 1947 been evasive, as per Afghan accounts, evading every attempt by Afghanistan to settle this question and telling them that border is irrelevant.

Now, since a year or so ago, when Taliban finally came into possession aided by Pakistan design for decades, tables have turned, and its pakis attempting to put up fences and Afghan regime informing them that they don't recognize the boundary.

................................................................................................

Dogra recounts subsequent lives of everyone present, briefly. It's nothing as dramatic or convincing as those related to excavation in Egypt.

Even the attack against Malala is evidence thereof!

................................................................................................

Does Dogra claim British were fairer to rest of India, or that Pathans deserved special treatment?

"Unfortunately for the Afghans, lone voices in their favour were ignored regularly in London."

Again.

Does Dogra claim British were fairer to rest of India, or that Pathans deserved special treatment?

In fact, while he says there were lone voices occasionally in British Parliament in favour of the subjugated natives, presumably he means only Pathans, not India in general.

"In a debate in the House of Commons on 15 February 1898, Asquith said,

Do Asquith or Dogra opine thereby that India voted for British, or fir that matter, any of the barbarians invading to loot and colonise, with loot the norm and genocides perpetrated routinely?

................................................................................................

"Doubts about the Line

"As secretary of state for foreign affairs, Curzon (by now an Earl) informed the House of Lords,

""The previous Treaties between the Government or Sovereign of Afghanistan and ourselves were cancelled by the act of war, undertaken, as I say, without any provocation, by the Amir. I have already informed your Lordships that under the agreement the subsidy is gone; the arrears of the subsidy are forfeited; the privileges enjoyed by the late Amir in respect of the importation of arms are gone; the guarantees for the protection of the frontiers of Afghanistan against unprovoked attack are gone…*"

"This is categorical. Curzon says unambiguously that all previous treaties ‘were cancelled’. If that was so, it means that the Durand Agreement too was cancelled.

"He does not stop there. Rather, he goes on to scrap most parts of the 1893 treaty. By one stroke of their stronger pen, the British shook off all responsibility that by the treaty they had committed themselves to, since 1893.

" ... in 1923, a former viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, struck a practical note with almost the same refrain in the House of Lords. Chelmsford was also making a more fundamental point, ‘There are two possible frontier lines which can be advocated or defended on geographical, military, or strategic grounds.’ He said, ‘There is the line of the Indus, and there is the Durand Line.’

"‘ ... As regards the Indus,’ he continued, ‘there are those who say we ought never to have gone beyond the Indus, and that if we had not gone beyond the Indus, we should have been spared much expenditure, both in men and in money…’"

" ... He added, ‘Then we come to the Durand Line…as soon as that Treaty was made, the Amir Abdur Rahman brought the tribes on his side of the line immediately under control and subjection. We took no steps, and except at certain points—the Khyber, the Kurram, and Baluchistan—our frontier does not touch the Durand Line, and does not run up to that line.’"

"‘ ... There are…those who say that we ought to carry our administered territory up to that line, to disarm and control the tribes.’ He continued, ‘But I think it is sufficient answer…to those who advance that view that for thirty years, no Viceroy has ever found himself able to face such a policy. The expenditure in men and money which would be involved…is a reasonable explanation why every Viceroy for the past thirty years has shrunk from attempting to go forward with such a policy. There are two clear possible frontier lines then… There is the backward frontier line geographically, the Indus, and there is the possible frontier line under the Durand Treaty that present line, except at points which I named just now, runs somewhere between those two lines… No one would willingly push further into that terrible welter of hills which forms the frontier unless absolutely forced to do so.’*"

Dogra sums up the British position.

"Unlike the docile Indians, these tribes were ungovernable. ... "

................................................................................................

"ONE COLD MORNING IN NOVEMBER 1853, a British customs officer, Carne, and two of his aides were inspecting the area for the purpose of enforcing the British salt monopoly, when men belonging to the Hasanzai tribe shot the three dead. The archival record drafted by Sir Richard Temple notes that this murder of two British officers and an Indian was in cold blood, because ‘they were infidels, defenceless travellers; with a little property about them… It was evident that the whole tribe [Hasanzais] approved of the murder, and sheltered the murderers…’"

"It was decided that a message of force could be effective only if it was delivered quickly. Ten regiments of the Indian army were mobilized, and dispatched into the hills to punish the Hasanzai tribe for what the British presumed to be their collective guilt. These regiments encountered considerable difficulty in the rough terrain. Moreover, the tribal fighters held ground in what was a very steep and thickly wooded shoulder of the mountain, rising abruptly for nearly a thousand feet. Finding this section impassable, but also worried about routing around lest they leave their flank exposed to counter-attack, Colonel Mackeson and his men found themselves pinned down.

"British forces eventually pushed their way through, when the 1st Artillery Brigade showed up with heavy artillery on 29 December. After defeating the armed resistance, the British troops set about their real work of destroying Hasanzai settlements and property. Working twelve hours a day, the troops began to burn villages and settlements, killing livestock and laying waste to foodstuffs. After four days of such destruction, the officers decided that this ‘had been sufficient punishment for the murder of the two British officers’, and having delivered sufficient message to the Hasanzai tribe, they headed back to Punjab."

................................................................................................

" ... Afghan grudges with their history go back a lot longer in time. Afghan nationalists insist that Peshawar, Afghanistan’s old winter capital, was stolen from them by the Sikhs in 1834. They argue that the country’s nineteenth-century Amirs were a weak lot. They were willing to compromise with the British to maintain their power and therefore allowed the Pashtun nation to become divided rather than fight to defend it. Even today, many Afghan maps do not label the territory across the border as Pakistan, but as Pashtunistan. On such maps, Pakistan (if it appears at all), begins at Punjab. A member of the Council of India, Sir Erskine Perry, records this protest against British arbitrariness, ‘I will only say, as a jurist, that I have been shocked at the doctrine lately put forth by high legal authority, that the main principles of international law are not applicable to the East.’"

Pakistan was free to renegotiate a friendly treaty with a nation they claim a brotherhood bond with, instead of a policy of deception and worse; unlike McMahon Line that is justified along watershed line, Durand Line isn't, and a better solution could've been found, had they been honest.

"If Transvaal was a failure, glory might await the British Empire elsewhere. He advised British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, ‘…an act of vigour to soothe the wounded vanity of the nation was needed. It does not matter which of our many foes we defy but we ought to defy someone.’

"The defiance happened sooner than Mr Chamberlain had expected, and it was not the British who defied. It was the Pathans of the frontier who rose in revolt.

"In 1897, Amir Abdur Rahman convened a meeting of radical Pathan mullahs in Kabul. After the meeting, they went back with Afghan guns and ammunition.

"The resentment against the British had been brewing ever since the demarcation process had started in the frontier area. In fact, the uprising of 1897 was caused by a combination of three factors. First, there was a sense of distrust and increasing uneasiness among the tribesmen over the Durand Line Agreement. When the actual demarcation process began, it was viewed by the tribesmen as annexation of their country. The second cause was the propaganda of mullahs, who incited the people against the foreigner. The third factor was the expectation of support from the Amir, which emboldened the tribesmen to rise against the British. But British authorities mainly held the mullahs and their activities responsible for this large-scale uprising."

" ... When the demarcation of the Durand Line started, the tribals saw the British officers giving bribes to their Pathan leaders, marching troops through their lands, surveying and mapping their hills and erecting boundaries of stones along the Afghan side of their hinterlands. Their natural reaction was resentment and resistance.

"The Pathans did not want nosey foreigners regulating their life and imposing their laws on them. Liberalism and liberty, for them, meant the ability to live life according to their customs."

................................................................................................

"Jihad of 1897

"The 1897 jihad was but the start of a Pashtun challenge to the frontier that has continued with few interruptions ever since.

"Pashtun children still sing verses that commemorate the battles of 1897. One of the most haunting celebrates a warrior called Beram Khan, and imagines the words of his wife ... "

"There is no doubt that it also shook the foundation of the British Empire in India. Despite that huge shock, the British admired the professionalism and the fighting spirit of the tribesmen."

"One immediate result of the uprising was the British decision to separate the Pakhtun land from the rest of Punjab and the formation of a new province: the North-West Frontier Province in 1901.

Again Dogra sums up halfway -

................................................................................................

"Another Misinterpretation

"But this was a mischievous interpretation.

"In his rejoinder, Amir Habibullah questioned the British logic, ‘if the deal (with Amir Abdur Rahman) was personal then would it mean that the Durand Line Agreement stands invalid?’"

................................................................................................

"Third Anglo–Afghan War

Which was until British advent the historical pattern of wars inflicted by Afghanistan on India.

"One likely reason was that the Amir was trying to assert independence, both as an end in itself and due to domestic political considerations.

So this served as rehearsal for WWI, even though the latter was begun by Germany.

"After Curzon’s statement in the British Parliament, this was the second time Britain was authoritatively stating that ‘all previous treaties stood cancelled.’"

................................................................................................

"WHEN AN INVADER PACKS HIS bags, he leaves behind crucial issues unresolved. The Durand Line must rank very near the top of any such list. To complicate matters further, Pakistan’s school of negotiations was muscular. This aggression was a carefully crafted strategy to keep Afghanistan weak and off balance. These Pakistani tactics delivered results and because of that critics blame the Afghan government. They say it did not press the Afghan case hard enough to get back the frontier territories. This criticism also maintains that Afghanistan let its case go by default by being inactive when it should have agitated vigorously.

"This is unfair.

"A case can get fair hearing if the judge is impartial. But what do you do if the judge is biased? Worse still, what can you do if the judge has a stake in the case? Unfortunately, that was so and Britain did not disguise the fact that it was an interested party.

"It is a long story but let us begin with the immediate triggers. And who better to begin with than Winston Churchill, who, for some reason had taken an intense dislike to India and who still smarted from the rough time the Pashtuns had given to the British army in 1897.

Dogra doesn't discuss what exactly Churchill meant; he meant, of course, partition, keeping a military base for use of West against USSR, disguised as a new country.

................................................................................................

" ... Pakistan was essential to the British project because through it, the UK could control the main artery leading into Central Asia."

Dogra gets to the raison d'etre of partition, finally, and hopefully connects it to why Durand Line where it is.

" ... For Britain, Pakistan was, as the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton put it, central to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s ambition to organize ‘the middle of the planet’.

"Closer to the Partition, the British army’s chief of staff, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, recommended in a top-secret memo in 1947: ‘The area of Pakistan is strategically the most important in the continent of India and the majority of our strategic requirements could be met…by an agreement with Pakistan alone. We do not therefore consider the failure to obtain an agreement with India would cause us to modify any of our requirements.’"

Touching how the British world thinks he was important, while Patton had the opposite opinion, calling him Prima Donna; as for military achievements, watch A Bridge Too Far.

"With such overwhelming endorsement, all that remained was an approving nod from the media. ... "

It's unclear that Brits really cared.

" ... The Times provided it on the day of Partition, 15 August 1947 ... "

Dogra shocks with that faux pas!

Partition was the day before. It's pakis that separated.

15th August was day of Independence of India.

"With such overwhelming endorsement, all that remained was an approving nod from the media. The Times provided it on the day of Partition, 15 August 1947:

How was Times this wrong? Were they writing fraudulently? They surely had to have known importance of oil as long ago as since or before WWI, if even Upton Sinclair wrote it into his works!

"Those who made such ringing endorsements in favour of Pakistan, and by implication against India and Afghanistan, are all dead. But institutions live on. Will the media at least introspect now? If The Times were to revisit that editorial opinion, will it wonder what happened to its grand scheme stretching from Morocco to Indonesia? Will it now repeat some of the superlatives that it had written about Pakistan?

"In a manner of speaking, it could be said that the high hopes The Times spoke of have materialized. But they have mutated into a phenomenon called terror. Was it for this that Britain sliced India and cheated Afghanistan out of its frontier areas?

"The world would certainly have been terror-free with a united India. ... "

" ... But as far as the Afghanistan government was concerned, it was not lethargic. Rather, it was quick to take up its case."

................................................................................................

"Quick on its Feet

No, that's not what is said; those two alternatives are pointed out as also necessary to offer the people of the Frontier Province, not as the only ones as Dogra puts it.

................................................................................................

"Caroe’s Last Act

"Unfortunately, the damage had already been done and one of Caroe’s last acts was to come out openly in support of the emerging Pakistan. His recommendation to the viceroy was,

Wonder if the idiocy was checked post the shock after first year - and three quarters - of new millennium.

No, those are definitely not the reasons why, and Dogra can't be this silly!

Yes, this shows the crooked nature of partition plans, and exposes the fraud of those who claim British did not wish to break India.

Was Gandhi party to a crooked trick played against NWFP by British? Why did Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan ask his followers to boycott, knowing his opponents would vote for Pakistan?

"This was not the only departure from the norm.

"The British terms of referendum were unfair as well. By all standards of justice, the departing British should have handed the frontier areas back to Afghanistan because it was never meant to be annexed by them. Failing which, the least that they should have done was to include Afghanistan as a choice in the referendum. But the British wanted to anticipate a new Great Game. Therefore, a bespoke referendum was set in motion."

................................................................................................

"JINNAH HAD PREPARED WELL FOR all contingencies. He had even arranged for storm troopers who were primed for violence. They gave an early demonstration of their capabilities when Nehru began a tour of NWFP in October 1946. Olaf Caroe was the governor of NWFP at that time. It is odd that Caroe’s police should not have anticipated a gathering mob of protestors, and that his forces should not have been able to check violent demonstrations against Nehru."

Did they plan an assassination, hoping Jinnah would get India?

"The protests started from the time Nehru landed at the Peshawar airport, but he regarded the mob at the airport and its aggression towards him as an aberration. So he bravely decided to carry on with his tour. But even he had to give up when, at the next stop, a shower of glass and stones were aimed at him.

"Nehru had been warned of the organized hostility, but he chose to carry on without a plan to counter it. Jinnah, on the other hand, had prepared multiple plans to achieve his objective in NWFP. As Wali Khan writes in his book Facts are Facts: The Untold Story of India’s Partition:

""Jinnah told Iskandar Mirza that he was not going to get Pakistan unless some serious trouble was created and the best place to do this was NWFP and the adjacent tribal areas… Jinnah wanted him to resign from the [Government] service and go into the tribal areas to start a Jehad."

"Unlike Jinnah, violence was never a part of Mahatma Gandhi’s political lexicon, or that of the Congress leadership. Their preferred instrument was the power of speech. But at every step, Jinnah’s tactics anticipated their argumentative resistance and on each major demand of the Congress party, he was able to trump them. After all, he was a celebrated lawyer and a politician with the agenda of a fundamentalist. The British, both in London and in Delhi, were generally well-inclined, even partial to his demands. Though Mountbatten disliked him and his aggressive ways, yet he allowed himself to be bullied by Jinnah repeatedly.

"Consequently, the odds were loaded against the Congress leadership. Still they did not wish to give up the cause of the Pathans.

"Therefore, with the encouragement of many in the Congress party and with the strong backing of Mahatma Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan issued a statement on 24 June 1947,

""…it was pointed out to the Viceroy that it would be necessary to provide an opportunity for us to vote in the referendum for a free Pathan State. The Viceroy said he was unable to change the procedure laid down except with the consent of the parties. I consulted the leaders of Congress and they assured me they were perfectly willing for this opportunity to be given to us."

"Badshah Khan, as Abdul Ghaffar was popularly known, was not opposing the referendum, he was objecting to its terms. He wanted that the referendum should also have the option for people to vote for a ‘free Pathan State’. His statement also clarified that the Congress party was perfectly willing for this option to be given in the referendum.

"But the viceroy was unwilling to approach Jinnah in the matter. And Pandit Nehru had other ideas."

................................................................................................

"Nehru’s Prejudice

"The line which Nehru had decided to pursue was at variance with that of Mahatma Gandhi and his Congress colleagues. Perhaps it was the ferocity of his reception in NWFP that had worried Nehru. The British desire to settle matters quickly may also have been a factor in Nehru’s choice.

"Nehru was then a member and the vice president of the Viceroy’s Executive Council for External Affairs in the Interim Government. He made it known that he was incensed at the Afghan propaganda. He said bluntly at a meeting of the Cabinet on 4 July, in the presence of Muslim League’s Liaquat Ali Khan, that,

""…about a month ago the press and the Radio in Afghanistan had started a campaign giving prominence to Afghanistan’s interests in the North-West Frontier and the claim was made that Pathans were Afghans rather than Indians and they should have the utmost freedom to decide their own future and should not be debarred, as the proposed referendum would appear to do, from deciding either to form a separate free State or to re-join their mother-land, viz Afghanistan."

" ... he went on to add,

""‘These claims had later been taken up on an official level with H.M.G. and the Government of India. The Government of India had refuted this irredentist claim of Afghanistan to the area lying between the Durand line and the Indus River, and had pointed out that the issue regarding an independent Pathan State was a matter entirely for the Government of India and the Afghan Government had no locus standi. H.M.G.’s Minister at Kabul had mentioned the possibility that the Afghan Government’s object might be to divert public attention in Afghanistan from the internal economic situation which was precarious.’"

"Jinnah’s reaction to this statement is not a matter of known record. However, it must have given him enough confidence to call off the jihad in NWFP. ‘There is no need for it now.’ He told Iskandar Mirza.

"But Afghanistan was not to be deterred. Regardless of Nehru’s views, Jinnah’s machinations and British stonewalling, Afghanistan kept pressing its claim.

"This time, it responded to a bureaucratically minded London with a note on 10 July 1947,

""In the Treaty of 1921 or in the previous treaties concluded between the Afghan Government and the British Government, there is no phrase or a small sentence to denote that the Afghan Government or Afghan Governments have ever recognized the Independent Frontier Belt or the Settled Districts inhabited by the Afghan race of British nationality as an integral part of India. The Treaty of 1921 was executed only between the British Government and the Afghan Government and not with any National Government in India."

"Afghanistan was making a clear distinction here and pointing out that its treaty was with the British Government. And it rebutted Nehru forcefully on the role of the Government of India. It presses this aspect further in this manner,

""No National Government in India has, by force or Policy cut adrift from Afghanistan any part of the territories situated on that side of the Durand Line and stretching right up to (Rivers) Jhelum and Indus. If the British Government or the British Rule in India was a national Government or National Rule in India, then what was the significance of all these struggles put forward by the Indian nation against England, or what is the meaning of the Indian independence in these days? From the time of Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India right up to the Third Anglo–Afghan War, it was the British Government—and not India—who constantly indulged in aggressive acts against Afghanistan.""

"In contrast, Jinnah had dealt himself a winning hand by inciting the Afridi and Mehsud tribals to a jihad in Kashmir.

"By diverting these fierce fighters away from their home base, he had reduced the chance of a rebellion in the frontier areas against the newly independent Pakistan. Through this single stratagem, Jinnah had outwitted Badshah Khan and India as well. India, in particular, had been dealt a double blow because the tribals backed by Pakistani army succeeded in getting 78,000 square kilometres of Jammu & Kashmir territory for Pakistan."

Dogra indices Nehru regarding fate of NWFP, but he's being shortsighted there. Surely he cannot imagine that Nehru wanted Partition? Yet it happened. There's no reason to assume Nehru was given any importance by Brits, except as a decorative cover for them to push their agenda through. Had he argued for NWFP to be given freedom to choose independence or return to Afghanistan, his fate might have been decided otherwise, but not that of India, and Brits needed a Pakistan.

Not that he thought this or knew this. He said eat he thought, and was as usual influenced by British when not so by Gandhi.

................................................................................................

"In 1925, an official British army publication, the Military Report on Afghanistan, stated that,

"The Simon Commission repeated the same point in 1928: ‘British India stops at the boundary of the administered area.’

"All these statements made it clear that Britain had no intention of annexing the territory up to the Durand Line; rather its goal was to administer this territory and treat it as a sphere of influence. Its basic interest was to protect Punjab from tribal raids.

"Despite this, some British politicians, for reasons of their own, supported Pakistan’s point of view. Prominent among them was Noel Baker, a well-known India baiter and an equally well-known supporter of the Pakistani cause. A secret British Foreign Office document of 28 April 1949 had stated clearly, ‘these areas neither belonged to Pakistan nor to Afghanistan’.

"Yet a year later, Baker, as secretary of state for Commonwealth Relations, rose in the British House of Commons on 30 June 1950 to assert quite the opposite, ‘In His Majesty’s Government’s opinion Pakistan is, in the light of international law, the successor of rights and duties of the former Government of India and His Majesty’s Government towards those territories, and the Durand Line is an international boundary.’"

" ... Noel Baker was giving an altogether new twist to a vexed question in 1950, when Britain was no longer a colonial power and had no authority over India, Pakistan or Afghanistan. In fact, he was turning the colonial British policy on its head by claiming (a) Pakistan is the successor of rights and duties of the former Government of India and His Majesty’s Government towards those territories; and (b) the Durand Line is an international boundary.

"How should we interpret this about-turn in the British policy? Was the secret foreign office document in error or Noel Baker? And if Noel Baker was right, then all the others starting from various viceroys, MPs and foreign secretaries to the Simon Commission must have been wrong? Suddenly, from an area of influence Noel Baker had decided to designate the Durand Line as an international boundary! The issue is not just the bias of one man, but the arbitrariness of the British.

"In their whimsy, the British were going against the precedent that they had themselves set while parting from Ireland.

"Moreover, Baker was also going against the opinion given by the United Nations (UN)."

................................................................................................

"UN Decides against Pakistan

"A legal opinion of 8 August 1947 by UN’s Assistant Secretary General for Legal Affairs (and approved by the Secretary General) maintained, ‘…Pakistan will be a new State; it will not have the treaty rights and obligations of the old State and it will not, of course, have membership in the United Nations.’

"After the Partition, Pakistan put up its case again. It claimed that as a successor state it was automatically a member of the UN. The UN Secretariat examined the Pakistani demand and expressed the following opinion rejecting Pakistan’s claim:

""From the viewpoint of International Law, the situation is one in which part of an existing State breaks off and becomes a new State. On this analysis there is no change in the international status of India; it continues as a State with all treaty rights and obligations, and consequently with all rights and obligations of membership in the United Nations. The territory which breaks off—Pakistan—will be a new State. It will not have the treaty rights and obligations of the old State and will not, of course, have membership in the United Nations. In International Law the situation is analogous to the separation of the Irish Free State from Britain, and Belgium from the Netherlands. In these cases the portion which separated was considered a new State, and the remaining portion continued as an existing State with all the rights and duties which it had before."

"The UN’s verdict was clear; Pakistan was not a successor state. It was a new state."

"And as Farhana Razzak writes in her paper on state succession, ‘…it seems to be accepted that India is the same legal entity as British India and Pakistan is a totally new state. Yugoslavia was generally regarded as the successor state to Serbia, and Israel as a completely different being from British mandated Palestine.’

"Moreover, if Pakistan was a successor to someone or something, it should have accepted some of that predecessor’s debt, which it refused to do. As a result, India shouldered all the debt of British India. Or to put it in other words, if Pakistan was a new state, how could it be a successor state as well?c

................................................................................................

"British Whims Set Rules

"Now in retrospect, it seems that the entire case was a falsehood perpetrated against Afghanistan by Noel Baker and others in London. Among the reasons for this bias was the fact that by 1947, British military chiefs of staff had become enthusiastic proponents of Pakistan. They saw in its creation, several possibilities, including obtaining air bases in the new territory. ‘The area of Pakistan,’ the chiefs noted, ‘is strategically the most important in the continent of India and the majority of our strategic requirements could be met.’

"This was combined with a false hope that somehow Pakistan would ensure unhindered access for Britain and its allies to the oil riches of Arabia. On its part, Pakistan did nothing to disabuse Britain of this impression. ... "

How did they think Pakistan would do that? Obviously, hubris of racism makes Europe forget that other can be, as Arabs and Chinese are, just as racist or more so, holding themselves above all others. Pakistan has little or no locus standi elsewhere except as cheap manual labour, not at expert or intellectual level.

" ... In contrast, Afghanistan was weak and of little interest to big powers. As a result, self-interest rather than law and justice shaped Britain’s view on Pakistan as a successor state. So, even as Pakistan was being rewarded for its strategic location, Afghanistan was being punished for it."

No, there Dogra is wrong. Without NWFP Pakistan might have not survived as a viable state, and west needed a military base disguised as a new country. It wasn't about welfare or rights of Pakistan but about propping up a stage.

................................................................................................

"There is serious doubt that the Durand Agreement was signed in perpetuity. Let’s consider the issue differently and ask if Mortimer Durand had carried with him the authority to bind the British government in perpetuity? Could he, for instance, have parcelled out British land, or parts of India, to Afghanistan as a part of his grand bargain? And did he carry with him the Queen’s or the viceroy’s authority letter for the purpose? The fact is that the 1893 Agreement was legally deficient.

"That’s not the only Afghan complaint. There are a series of other sore points with them. The British quote the Anglo–Afghan treaty of 1921 to assert that it had validated the Durand Agreement. However, that is not the entire truth. Actually, the 1921 treaty stated that both states had the right to repudiate it within three years after a one-year notice.

"How could a treaty which has a termination period written into it, validate the alleged permanence of the Durand Agreement? What is more, the 1921 treaty contained a supplementary letter specifically recognizing the Afghan interest in the trans-border tribes. This again contradicted the terms of the Durand Agreement. If all these are taken together and if you recall Curzon’s statement scrapping many provisions of the Durand Agreement, then there is nothing left of that paper and its seven clauses."

"Although Hong Kong Island and Kowloon had been ceded to the UK in perpetuity, the control on the New Territories was on a ninety-nine-year lease.

"China regarded these as unequal treaties that needed to be revised by communist China as the successor state. Under pressure from it, the UK agreed to first contact on the issue in the late 1970s. Since the talks were inconclusive, matters came to a head during British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s visit to China in September 1982. At their meeting in Beijing, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping told her bluntly that China could easily take Hong Kong by force, ‘I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon.’

"It did not take long for Britain to accept the inevitable. The transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong and Kowloon to China took place on 1 July 1997.

"A principle had been established; that an unjust treaty cannot be cited as justification for sovereignty. And that ‘perpetuity’ is a relative term. After this example of Hong Kong, one could cynically say that force is all-important in international law."

" ... as foreign secretary and as a professional diplomat, Durand could not pretend that he was new to the ways of writing documents. If the Durand Agreement was to be valid in perpetuity, Mortimer Durand would have made sure that a clause specifying it was inserted in the Agreement. But that was not done because the Agreement had only earmarked areas of influence, and that is a transitory arrangement."

" ... Britain had invariably made the validity of treaties and agreements it signed dependent upon ratification. This was the case with all important treaties it had signed with Afghanistan, before and after the one in 1893. And the Durand Agreement was certainly the most important document signed by Britain with Afghanistan. Yet, the clause for ratification or approval by the viceroy was missing here.

"Why was the clause regarding the Agreement entering into force only after its approval by the viceroy not included in this particular document? Why was Mortimer Durand keen that it should come into force immediately? What was he apprehensive about? And why, when all other treaties of importance had an expiry date and an exit clause, were these elements missing in the Durand Agreement?"

" ... The Afghan–Russian boundary Agreement was signed at the same time. Neither Russia nor Afghanistan ever raised objection or any doubt about the boundary settled between them. Russia did not feel the need to sign a subsequent treaty to reaffirm its clauses and reconfirm the Agreement signed in 1893. But Britain felt it necessary to reaffirm the Durand Agreement repeatedly through treaties signed in 1895, 1905, 1919, 1921 and 1930. Did these five reaffirmations reflect a sense of British insecurity?

"If the 1893 Agreement was to be in perpetuity, what was the need for obtaining the seal of approval from every new Amir?

" ... The first point that strikes observers is the huge confidence with which the British used to assert their view; as if whatever they had said was and had to be absolutely the last word on the subject. If they said a treaty was in perpetuity, it had to be so. If they considered a treaty immutable, there was no way anyone could argue about it. Yet, when they wanted to, they could change the terms of the treaty and cancel clauses selectively. They could also renege on commitments and interpret the same clause entirely differently. British convenience moulded the law."