Journey
The frontier — the Durand Line and the Pashtun century
A line was drawn across Pashtun country in November 1893 by a British negotiator and an Afghan amir, as a limit of imperial responsibility rather than a division of peoples, and everything here is either the machinery built to hold it or the answer given to that machinery. The machinery was passes, forts, tunnels, subsidised tribal levies, political agents and punitive columns, and a legal exception — the Frontier Crimes Regulation — that put the whole belt outside ordinary law until 2018. The answers were incompatible with each other and came from the same districts at the same moment: the century's most disciplined nonviolent movement, a hundred thousand strong, and its most persistent insurgency, run by a man with a few hundred fighters who was never caught. Afghanistan has never recognised the line.
Stops (14)
- Khushāl Khān Khattak · the 1670s
The precedent, two centuries early. Khushāl Khān Khattak served Shāh Jahān, was imprisoned by Aurangzeb at Delhi and Ranthambore, and on release spent the 1670s trying to weld the Pashtun tribes into a single force against the empire — writing as he fought, some forty-five thousand couplets of battle poetry, satire and unsparing argument that the tribes' inability to combine was their own doing. Aurangzeb came north himself and spent a year and a half managing the frontier, which is the measure of what the attempt cost.
- Khyber Pass · the road, then the boundary
The pass between Kabul and the Indus, used for as long as there have been roads, and the one every army took: Bābur down, the Durrānis down, three British armies up and one destroyed coming back in 1842. Everything the Raj built in the north-west was arranged around holding it — Jamrud and Ali Masjid, the forts along the defile, the subsidies paid to the Afridis whose country it runs through, and finally a railway.
- Torkham & the Durand Line · 12 November 1893
The agreement signed at Kabul between Mortimer Durand and Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān runs twenty-six hundred kilometres from the Wakhan to the Iranian frontier, and it cuts through Mohmand, Afridi, Shinwari and Waziri territory and through villages. It was drawn to fix the limit of British responsibility, not to divide a people, and Afghanistan has never formally recognised it. Torkham, at the Khyber's western mouth, is the busiest point on it; the line was only fenced and properly documented in the 2010s.
- Nuristan (Kāfiristān) · 1895–96
What the line did within two years of being drawn. Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān conquered Kāfiristān and converted it by force, renaming the province Nuristan, the land of light; the wooden ancestor effigies and altars of its old religion survive mainly in museums. The related valleys on the British side of the 1893 boundary — the Kalash valleys in Chitral — were beyond his reach and were taxed but not converted, which is the entire reason a pre-Islamic religion of the Hindu Kush is still practised.
- Chitral · 1895
Forty-six days under siege in the fort below Tirich Mir, relieved by two columns, one of which crossed the Shandur in snow — one of the set-piece episodes of the Great Game, happening while the boundary settlement that created the Wakhan corridor was being negotiated. Chitral's northern passes lead over to Badakhshan, which is why a small Khowar-speaking principality mattered to two empires at once. The Mehtars ruled it until 1969.
- Malakand · July–August 1897
The pass into Swat, garrisoned in 1895 and besieged in the general rising of 1897 — the largest tribal mobilisation the British faced in the north-west, running the length of the frontier. The relief and the punitive campaign afterwards were reported by a twenty-two-year-old subaltern who had attached himself to the column, and Winston Churchill's The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published the following year, was his first book and paid better than his commission.
- The Khyber Pass Railway · 1920–25
Forty-two kilometres from Jamrud to Landi Kotal to put artillery at the head of the Khyber: thirty-four tunnels, ninety-odd bridges and culverts, a six-hundred-metre climb, and a pair of reversing zig-zags at Changai where the train runs into a dead-end spur and backs up the next incline because the gradient defeated a curve. It was never extended into Afghanistan. With the Khojak tunnel it is the most expensive thing the Raj built here, and both were built to be ready rather than used.
- Darra Ādam Khel · the legal exception
A single bazaar in the Kohat pass where Afridi gunsmiths copied any firearm brought to them — Lee-Enfields, Mausers, later Kalashnikovs — by hand and by eye, with no drawings, and sold them openly a few hours from a colonial and then a national capital. It existed because the Frontier Crimes Regulation left the tribal belt outside ordinary law. When the tribal districts were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018 the exception ended, licensing arrived, and the trade contracted sharply.
- Abdul Ghaffār Khān (Bāchā Khān) · from 1929
The least likely fact about the twentieth-century frontier: a disciplined nonviolent movement of around a hundred thousand Pashtuns. Bāchā Khān started with schools at Utmānzai in Charsadda, on the conviction that the problem was illiteracy rather than the British, and built the Khudai Khidmatgār out of that work. He allied with the Congress, opposed Partition, and spent roughly thirty years in prison — under the British, and then under Pakistan.
- Qissa Khwāni Bazaar, Peshawar · 23 April 1930
The event that ended the disbelief. Bāchā Khān had been arrested days before; his unarmed volunteers filled the storytellers' bazaar in Peshawar and troops fired on them. Two platoons of Garhwali soldiers refused the order and were court-martialled, which was remembered as widely as the killing, because it was the first serious sign that the army might not hold. Official returns give about twenty dead and Khudai Khidmatgār accounts several times that.
- The Faqīr of Ipi (Mīrzālī Khān) · 1936–1947
The other answer, from the same people at the same time. A Tori Khel Wazir who took up the Islam Bibi conversion case in 1936 and turned the quarrel into an insurgency that ran eleven years: a few hundred fighters, no fixed base, bombed from the air repeatedly, never caught, and tying down more British Indian troops than any other internal commitment in India while the war in Europe began. Afterwards he rejected Pakistan and called for Pashtunistan until his death in 1960.
- Gomal Pass · the traders' pass
The third great pass, and the one nobody fortified. The Gomal runs from the Ghazni uplands down to the Indus at Dera Ismāʿīl Khān, and it was left to the tribes who held it and took the tolls, because it was too long and waterless for an army and perfectly workable for a caravan. So while the Khyber was garrisoned and railed, the Gomal stayed commercial — which is what made the Povindah system possible for as long as it lasted.
- The Povindah caravans · autumn and spring
Every autumn Lohāni, Nāsir and Kharoti nomads brought camel caravans of thousands of animals down the Gomal, wintered in the Indus plains, dispersed across northern India as far as Bengal selling dried fruit, horses, wool and cloth and lending money, and went back up in spring. The kafilas were armed and moved under their own law. The system was older than any border it crossed and ended after 1947, when the new frontier closed the pass to seasonal migration.
- Attari · 1947, and after
The comparison that shows what kind of line the Durand is. Radcliffe's boundary of 1947 was drawn to divide peoples and did so in six weeks; it is recognised by both states and is very nearly shut. The Durand Line was drawn to limit an empire's liabilities, is rejected by the state on its far side, and was crossed daily as local custom for a century. Both cut through one agricultural society, and only one of them has a ceremony at the gate.