The recent passage of the Shariat Bill by Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) assembly has once again brought forth contradictions and tensions simmering in Pakistan’s ethno-sectarian mosaic. There is a natural concern about the increasing Talibanisation of Pakistan’s key frontier province adjoining Afghanistan.But the NWFP bill may have many more dimensions than that of wanting to be ruled by the shariat. The key to that secret lies in the Durand Line, the non-existent line denoting the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that lost even its notional status 10 years ago.To go back in history, northwest India, especially the area lying between the Kabul-Kandahar line and the plains of Punjab had always been a zone of turbulence. India was secure from invasions from the northwest only when its rulers set the strategic frontier beyond this region. This was the case with the Mauryas, the Mughal empire (till Aurangzeb), the 19th century Sikh kingdom, and the British Indian empire later on.Maharaja Ranjit Singh decided to exercise (lose) control in the forward reaches of the foothills while controlling the passes, especially at Khyber. Ranjit Singh’s de facto border is what became the officially agreed border — named after Sir Mortimer Durand — between Afghanistan and British India in November 1893. The agreement was for the next 100 years.But the Durand Line also divided the Pushtun population of the region. Today an estimated 13 million Pushtun are in Afghanistan and another 14 million in Pakistan, east of the Durand Line. These Pushto speakers make up eight percent of Pakistan and continue to be ruled more by tribal laws and customs than any constitutional provisions of the nation they officially belong to.No Afghan regime since 1893 has accepted the validity of the Durand Line. In June 1949, Afghanistan’s parliament cancelled all treaties that former governments had entered into with British India. As far as the Pushtun-controlled Afghanistan was concerned, the Durand Line was dead.If the situation was not aggravated beyond the formal repudiation, it was because of free movement across this border. Islamabad’s writ hardly ran in the Pushtun areas. The best it could do was to insist on the Durand Line as the legal border and co-opt as many Pushtun into the ruling establishment as possible.Nevertheless Islamabad could not claim the validity of the Durand Line after 1993. Afghans were not willing to renegotiate it even under the Pakistan-friendly Taliban.There is a deep sense of vulnerability that characterises Pakistan in its north. If Jammu and Kashmir was to be part of India, then — as Major General Akbar Khan, architect of the 1947 invasion of the state, argues in his autobiography, Raiders in Kashmir — the state’s accession to India would place the Indian army on its western borders, permanently threatening most key cities of Punjab (read Pakistan) and controlling the water for irrigation of Punjab’s plains.At the same time the Pushtun-majority NWFP political leaders had not accepted the idea of Partition. Any secession of the Pushtun areas would drastically truncate the country, taking away a strategicaly critical province. And Pushtun desire for their own homeland has always been strong.Pakistan, which sees itself as the successor state to the Mughal empire, therefore, has attempted to move beyond the defunct Durand Line while simultaneously insisting on its validity.Two decades before the Durand agreement was to end, then Pakistani prime minister Z.A. Bhutto launched the first missile. He sent move by sending Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and his mujahideen into Afghanistan to stir up a rebellion. Such efforts continued through the 1970s, till Moscow over-reacted in 1979 and sent in the Red Army.Islamic jihad was harnessed by the United States to wage war against the Soviet Union. Most of the mujahideen were Pushtun. The Soviet withdrawal saw the ethnic factor return, the internal struggles among mujahideen resume.In order to exercise control over Afghanistan so that it could protect the NWFP, Pakistani army brass invented the euphemism of “strategic depth” in the late 1980s. But the post-Soviet mujahideen regime in Kabul, installed by Pakistan with US support, was not willing to formalise the Durand Line as the official border. The line technically disappeared in 1993. Islamabad had achieved no progress in formalising its western border. So the Taliban was created to oust the mujahideen regime. But even the essentially Pushtun Taliban would not agree to a renewal of the Durand pact. Now, of course, the Taliban regime is history. So is the official border. When American marines pursue Al Qaeda-Taliban operatives into Pakistan, strictly speaking they cross no international frontier.Meanwhile, as the NWFP shariat bill makes explicit, the region’s Islamist passions have not disappeared; they have only migrated east, from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Well, the Pushtun never did recognise the Durand Line, did they.
