Arabic → English transcript

A colonial legacy threatens peace between Pakistan and Afghanistan And

ignites bloody clashes and crises that have defied solution for decades.

The land border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A crisis that began in one thousand eight hundred and ninety- three,

during the British occupation. Colonialism arbitrarily drew the dividing

border In an agreement signed by the British

military governor Henry Durand And the ruler of Afghanistan at the time,

Abdur Rahman Khan.

The line, whose length exceeds two thousand six hundred kilometers

Geographically divided millions of Pashtun people into two states And did

not provide details for the mountain borders and highlands And ignored the

extensive overlap of lands and their rough terrain.

This ignited a long dispute between the two countries over many areas.

Each side tried to seize a strategic point. The Afghans accuse the

Pakistanis of exploiting the war for twenty years And pushing forty

kilometers deep into Afghan territory. And after the Taliban took power in

Afghanistan in two thousand twenty- one He reopened the file of those lands,

which triggered clashes with Pakistan. Especially after Islamabad built a three-

meter- high border fence to prevent the flow of illegal refugees into its territory,

something the Kabul government rejects. Pakistan, the United States,

and NATO recognize the Durand Line as an international border between Pakistan and

Afghanistan.

But successive Kabul governments refuse to recognize

the British- drawn line and believe that the agreement involved

cutting off large parts of Afghan territory in areas inhabited by Pashtun tribes in

the south and southwest of Afghanistan, which were annexed to Britain’s colonies in

India and which today lie in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and

Balochistan provinces. The dispute turned into military

confrontations more than once over two years, because of what Kabul describes

as Pakistan’s mistreatment of

Afghan refugees and its imposition

of a visa requirement for their entry,

an unprecedented move that Afghans see as a provocation.