Pakistan, Afghanistan: Why is the ‘Durand Line’ on fire?

“In the Afghan war, enter Sir Mortimer Durand” was the title of a story on 24 October 2012 by Myra MacDonald, then Reuters bureau chief in India. That was nine years before the Taliban took over the country again, and the Afghan-Pakistani border, known as the Durand Line, named after Sir Mortimer Durand, was already heating up, for reasons quite like today’s.

Mollah Fazlullah, head of the Movement for the Enforcement of the Sharia (Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi) had wrought bloody havoc in Pakistan’s Swat valley until the army ousted him along with his fighters in June 2009. Fazlullah fled to the Afghan province of Kunar and from there he would launch regular attacks on that famous Durand Line.

In the same way, the Pakistani Taliban of the TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan), forcefully evicted from Waziristan province in 2014, crossed the Line and joined forces with the Afghan Taliban, helping them regain power in 2021. Job done, they went back to their home ground, on both sides of that Durand Line, where they launch daily attacks on the federal forces’ border posts inside the former tribal areas and throughout the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), but also along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC): there they attack Chinese workers, from the high valley of the Indus, where two big hydro-electric dams are being built, to Gwadar port, also being built by China in Baluchistan on the Sea of Oman.

An explosive combination

But since 2022 the novelty is the ad hoc alliance between the very Islamist TTP and the very secular Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA). In its annual report, “DHAK 2024”, published by The Balochistan Post on 2 January 2025, the BLA declared itself “ready to work with any entity against the common enemy for mutual benefit,” targeting only what it calls the “Pakistani occupation of Baluchistan”, presenting a range of targets it has in common with the TTP: the army, the federal administration, and the CPEC.

In the same report, the BLA declares that it carried out 302 attacks in 2024, causing 545 fatalities in “enemy ranks”. Six of these attacks were carried out by the “fedayin branch” of the TTP – a branch assigned to train volunteers for suicide missions.

All this constitutes an explosive combination which imperils the stability of Pakistan. In 2025, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), terrorism caused 2,356 deaths in KP, 1,534 in Baluchistan and 486 on the Afghan side of the Durand Line, a total of 4,376. The escalation of violence was such that at the end of 2025, Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, accusing Afghanistan of backing the TTP, threatened it with “open war”.

This became reality on 27 February 2026, with simultaneous air strikes on Kabul and the provinces of Nangarhar, Paktika and Kandahar, killing 274 TTP fighters according to the Pakistani army. On 16 March, another strike on Kabul, the fifth in five months, caused over 400 deaths according to the Afghan government, and at least 145 according to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) which also estimates the number of displaced persons  since the end of February at 115,000.

A legacy of the British “Raj”

So we are at the peak of one of the most serious confrontations that Pakistan has known since its inception in 1947. However, it would be a mistake to limit our analysis to the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021, neglecting the deeper causes of these armed clashes which have all revolved around the Durand Line since it was established in 1893 by the British imperial rulers of India (the British Raj).

Take for example the legendary Faqir from the village of Epi (abutting the Line) who fought the British from Khost, his Afghan base, and who proclaimed an independent State of Pashtunistan there in 1938, complete with an official flag and parliament !

After the birth of Pakistan in 1947, he defied the country’s fledgling army for eighteen months. He was supported and financed by the three successive kings of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, Nadir Shah and Zaher Shah, but also by the Pashtun nationalist parties, known as the “Red Shirts”, and on the Pakistani side by the National Awami Party and the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami party, both still active today. There followed countless incidents, such as the campaign launched by Afghan Prime Minister Daoud Khan to recover what he called “the usurped territories”.

When he became President of the Republic (1973-1978), he never ceased to confront the Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971-1977) on the issue of the Durand Line.

Paradoxically, that line became a protection for Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion (1979), since it was on the Pakistani side of the line that the Mujahedin organised their resistance. And it was from that same side that the Taliban came when they entered the Afghan scene in 1994.

Afghan is synonymous with Pashtun

But why was that Durand Line never recognised as an international frontier, neither by the peaceable King Zaher Shah, nor by President Mohammad Daoud Khan, nor by the four successive communist leaders, nor by the Taliban ? The reason is simple enough but its consequences are anything but! The line divided the Pashtun into two uneven groups: two-thirds on the side of the British Raj and only one third on the Afghan side, though the country bears that people’s name: Afghan is synonymous with Pashtun. In fact the whole country, created in 1747, was originally conceived as a confederation of Pashtun tribes.

None of this was of any concern to the Raj, which was interested in creating not a border – by their very nature, empires have no fixed, definitive borders – but a demarcation line in order, as documented in the archives of the India Office in London, “to define the respective spheres of influence of the British Government and the Emir […] The ’Durand Line’ had none of the rigidity of other international borders.”

Afghanistan was already a buffer state between the Raj and the Russian Empire, and the text goes on: “The tribes between the administrative frontier of India and the ’Durand Line’ were buffer to the buffer.” It consisted of tribal areas which would be formally established by the Raj in 1901... and would become the breeding ground for the Taliban in 1994 and for the TTP in 2005.

Hence the existence of a whole array of arguments on the basis of which the Afghan State can claim that the Durand Line was not conceived strictly as an international border: in British English, ’border’ was an international demarcation, whereas ’frontier’ referred rather to the ’edges’ of empire.

While the Indian Empire managed happily with such vagueness, the same cannot be said of Pakistan which, as a state, needed fixed borders and thus as soon as it came into existence adopted the Durand Line, citing the legacy of treaties. A complex case in international law, but “it is a no-question”, as Pakistani officials are in the habit of responding when anyone tries to question them on the subject.

Indeed for Islamabad, questioning its borders encourages Pashtun and Baluch separatism and threatens the integrity of the country. After all, an international border can only play its role if it is recognised by the two countries which share it. This is not the case here.

The very name of Mortimer Durand seems to be taboo, for fear that evoking it might awaken the elephant in the room. And this is exactly what is happening today. A few examples: “The issue of the ’Durand Line’ still remains to be settled,” (Zabulla Mujahid, Afghan Information Minister, Dawn, 4 January 2022); “The Durand Line is an imaginary line,” (Nabi Omari, Afghan Deputy Minister of Interior Affairs, Afghanistan International, 15 October 2025); and Omari again, three days later, on Ariana News:

“The historic territories of Afghanistan [have] remained on the Pakistani side of the so-called line drawn between us: Allah the all-powerful will create the means to bring them back again to our homeland.”

“The Taliban are our own product”

Which explains why Pakistan practically created the Taliban movement in 1994. Khawaja Asif, the present Defence Minister, admits it frankly: “Taliban are in fact our own product. We created, nurtured and developed them… "(Amu TV, 14 October 2025). The strategy was quite simple and General Naseerullah Babar, Interior Minister in Benazir Bhutto’s government, was blunt about it: the Taliban are all Pashtuns. By installing them in Kabul in 1996 and making sure their power would last, Islamabad expected to get them to recognise the Durand Line as the border between the two countries.

Yet despite this unwavering support, the Taliban resisted this demand until the fall of their regime brought about by the intervention of the United States and their allies in 2001. They took to the hills again, while the TTP made their appearance in 2005, originally quite separate from the “historic” Taliban.

The latter is a conglomerate of some twenty groups: rebel Pashtun tribes, among them the Mehsud tribe, terrorist organisations banished in 2002 by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, as well as ancillary al-Qaida armed groups, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Islamic Party of East Turkestan (Uighurs ).

From 2007 to 2014, the TTP plunged Pakistan into unprecedented violence, aimed at high-level political and military officials, the main army headquarters, naval bases and NATO convoys. It claimed responsibility for assassinating Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. The SATP counts 12,000 killed by bomb attacks and reprisal air strikes by the army between December 2007 and December 2008, i.e. 35 deaths per day.

In 2014, Pakistan mounted the Zarb-e-Azb operation, with a force of 30,000 soldiers which drove the TTP out of Waziristan, so that it joined the Afghan Taliban in their Jihad against the armies of occupation. All the ingredients were in place for the present conflagration.

The US withdrawal

In order to understand this, we must go back to the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan”, known as the Doha Accords, between the United States and the Taliban, signed on 29 February 2020, a few months before the latter took over their country again. They did not commit themselves to much except to break off all connections with terrorist groups likely to threaten the security of the United States, which had painful memories of 9/11.

By inviting the TTP to go back to where it belonged in the tribal areas on the border, the Taliban hoped to distance themselves from al-Qaida since all of the latter’s cells belong to the conglomerate, and thus be able to claim they were respecting their commitments to the United States.

But nothing happened according to plan. The head of TTP, Nur Wali Mehsud, encouraged by the victory of the Afghan Taliban over the world’s most powerful military coalition (38 countries), was convinced that he in turn could bring Pakistan to its knees and immediately began fighting on the Durand Line.

The NGO Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies (PIPS) recorded a 61 % increase in attacks between August 2021 and August 2022. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Afghan Interior Minister, offered his services as mediator. But the ceasefire concluded in June 2022 was broken five months later, because TTP’s demands amounted to a Pakistani capitulation, in other words a return to the status quo ante in the tribal areas which would be managed by the TTP in the form of a “mini-emirate”.

As for the Afghan Taliban, they say they don’t want to go against their “brothers in arms”. But, reading all their statements, it would appear that their support for the TTP amounts rather to a proxy relationship and that they are not prepared to relinquish their hold over the Pashtun border zones. In an interview with Tolo News on 7 March 2026, the Defence Minister, Maulawi Yaqoob – son of Mullah Omar, former head of the Taliban from 1994 until his death which probably took place in 2013 – warns Pakistan:

“We have a long experience of war, and while we do not have the technology to reply to your air strikes, we have always won our wars on the ground.”

We are witnessing a new episode in that old story: “Enter Sir Mortimer Durand..." So there is nothing very new here apart from the unprecedented magnitude of the present war which is breaking out again in a regional environment which doesn’t inspire optimism.

India’s relations with Pakistan are still very tense, while they are better than ever with Afghanistan. It has recently invested $120m in the development of the Iranian port of Chabahar, a gateway for its trade with central Asia, a route competing with the CPEC and bypassing Pakistan. It’s hard to predict how the situation will evolve, both in Iran and between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As for Mortimer Durand syndrome, perhaps we can still hope that one day the two neighbouring countries will understand that they are both victims of the same poisoned legacy bequeathed by the Raj in 1947. That would be a calming prelude to negotiation between two nations which are neither responsible nor to blame for this disastrous situation – better than locking horns for 79 years and producing nothing but death.

Translated from French by Noël Burch.

This article was originally published by our partners at Orient XXI.

Georges Lefeuvre is a former diplomat, anthropologist, specialist in Pakistan and Afghanistan, researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS).

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.