page_title: Durand Line
section_title: Contemporary era
hierarchical_section_title: Durand Line / Contemporary era
caption_attribution_description: English: In clockwise order: Ronald Reagan; Gust Avrakotos; Muhammad Omar Babarakzai; Mohammad Ghafoor Yousefzai; Habib-Ur-Rehman Hashemi; Farida Ahmadi; Mir Niamatullah and Gul Mohammad.Original caption&#58; "C12820-32, President Reagan meeting with Afghan Freedom Fighters to discuss Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan. 2/2/83." — Ronald Reagan Library Present: Mir Ne' Matollag, Habib-Ur-Rehman Hashemi, Gol-Mohammed, Omar Babrakzai, Mohammed Suaffor Yousofzai, Farida Ahmadi Caption: Meeting with a group of Afghan Freedom Fighters, Mujahideen, to discuss Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, especially the September 1982 massacre of 105 Afghan villagers in Lowgar Province.
context_page_description: The Durand Line is the international 2,430-kilometre land border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in South-Central Asia. It was originally established in 1893 as the international border between British India and Afghanistan by Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat of the Indian Civil Service, and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Emir, to fix the limit of their respective spheres of influence and improve diplomatic relations and trade.
  Afghanistan was considered by the British as an independent state at the time although the British controlled its foreign affairs and diplomatic relations. Afghanistan had already ceded the regions of Quetta, Pishin, Harnai, Sibi, Kurram, and Khyber to the British Raj by the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The Durand Line left about half of the Pashtun homeland under British rule. In 1901, the Pashtun-majority North-West Frontier Province was formally created by the British administration on the British side of the Durand Line, although the princely states of Swat, Dir, Chitral, and Amb were allowed to maintain their autonomy under the terms of maintaining friendly ties with the British.
context_section_description: Pakistan's intelligence agency the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been heavily involved in the affairs of Afghanistan since the late 1970s. During Operation Cyclone, the ISI with support and funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States recruited mujahideen militant groups on the Pakistani side of the Durand line to cross into Afghanistan's territory for missions to topple the Soviet-backed Afghan government. Afghanistan KHAD was one of two secret service agencies believed to have been conducting bombings in parts of the North West Frontier (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) during the early 1980s. U.S State Department blamed WAD (a KGB created Afghan secret intelligence agency) for terrorist bombings in Pakistan's cities in 1987 and 1988. It is also believed that Afghanistan's PDPA government supported leftist Al-Zulfiqar organization of Pakistan, the group accused of the 1981 hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines plane from Karachi to Kabul.
  After the collapse of the pro-Soviet Afghan government in 1992, Pakistan, despite Article 2 of the Durand Line Agreement which states "The Government of India will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of Afghanistan," attempted to create a puppet state in Afghanistan prior to Taliban control according to US Special Envoy on Afghanistan Peter Tomsen. According to a summer 2001 report in The Friday Times, even the Taliban leaders challenged the very existence of the Durand Line when former Afghan Interior Minister Abdur Razzaq and a delegation of about 95 Taliban visited Pakistan. The Taliban refused to endorse the Durand Line despite pressure from Islamabad, arguing that there shall be no borders among Muslims. When the Taliban government was removed in late 2001, the Afghan President Hamid Karzai also began resisting the Durand Line, and today the present Government of Afghanistan does not recognize Durand Line as its international border. No Afghan government has recognized the Durand Line as its border since 1947.
  A line of hatred that raised a wall between the two brothers.
  — Hamid Karzai
  The Afghan Geodesy and Cartography Head Office (AGCHO) depicts the line on their maps as a de facto border, including naming the "Durand Line 2310 km (1893)" as an "International Boundary Line" on their home page. However, a map in an article from the "General Secretary of The Government of Balochistan in Exile" extends the border of Afghanistan to the Indus River. The Pashtun dominated Government of Afghanistan not only refuses to recognise the Durand Line as the international border between the two countries, it claims that the Pashtun territories of Pakistan rightly belong to Afghanistan. Durand Line Agreement makes no mention of a time limit suggesting the treaty has no expiration date. In 2004, spokespersons of U.S. State Department's Office of the Geographer and Global Issues and British Foreign and Commonwealth Office also pointed out that the Durand Line Agreement has no mention of an expiration date.
  Recurrent claims that (the) Durand Treaty expired in 1993 are unfounded. Cartographic depictions of boundary conflict with each other, but Treaty depictions are clear.
  — A spokesperson for U.S. State Department's Office of the Geographer and Global Issues
  Because the Durand Line divides the Pashtun and Baloch people, it continues to be a source of tension between the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In August 2007, Pakistani politician and the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Fazal-ur-Rehman, urged Afghanistan to recognise the Durand Line. Press statements from 2005 to 2007 by former Pakistani President Musharraf calling for the building of a fence on the Durand Line have been met with resistance from numerous Pashtun political parties within Afghanistan. Pashtun politicians in Afghanistan strenuously object to even the existence of the Durand Line border.
  
  In 2006 Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned that "Iran and Pakistan and others are not fooling anyone." 
  "If they don't stop, the consequences wil
caption: Afghan mujahideen representatives with President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1983
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