Cut the Durand Knot?

According to legend, Alexander the Great was confronted with a large knot, tied long before by Gordias, for which a prophesy said that anyone who could undo the knot would rule Asia. After being unable to untie it, he just slashed it open with his sword. This "Alexandrian solution" to the Gordian Knot has become a metaphor for solving an intractable problem with a bold stroke that requires thinking "outside the box".

The attack on the United States on 9/11 can be traced directly back to 1893, when Henry Mortimer Durand, then Foreign Secretary of British India, made a border treaty with the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, called the Durand Line, that divided Afghanistan from British India, establishing Afghanistan as a buffer between the Russian and British spheres of influence.

The Durand Curse

What made the Durand Line a source of trouble that continues to this day is that it divided in half the territory dominated by an ethnic group, the Pashtuns, since at least 500 BCE. Indeed, dividing the Pashtuns was one of the objectives of Britain's "divide and rule" policy that drew many other boundaries dividing national groups that also continue to be a source of trouble.

The Afghan Pashtuns asserted dominion over all the territory of what is now Afghanistan. The word "Afghan" is Pashtun, a distinct language. But they were never able to achieve effective control over all of it. Much of the more mountainous areas to the Northeast and through the center of the country remained dominated by ethnic Tajiks, who speak Dari, similar to the Farsi of Iran, and their sometime allies, the Hazaras and Aimaqs, who speak dialects similar to Dari. The territories the various ethnic groups dominate have remained fairly stable for centuries, and the Tajik-led area, which self-identifies as the "Northern Alliance", is sometimes referred to (mainly by outsiders) as "Daristan" (although there is also a town and a mountain with that name). See an ethnolinguistic map of Afghanistan.

Although a reliable census has never been done, the best estimates are that the Pashtuns and Northern Alliance now each comprise about 42% of the population, even though the Pashtuns have been winning national elections and putting a nominal national head of state in Kabul. However, in the last century the Tajiks have pulled ahead of the Pashtuns culturally, and have come to dominate business, the professions, civil service, and most cities, even those in Pashtun areas. They tend to be better educated, more liberal and tolerant, and to be more enlightened about the rights of women, while the Pashtuns have tended to remain less educated, more traditional, and provincial. This linguistic and cultural divide has tended to exacerbate the historic tribal rivalries, such that the two main alliances have a real and persistent animosity toward one another.

Prior to the Soviet invasion, the country was basically just a patchwork of tribal areas, each headed by a warlord, and Kabul, which pretended to be the capital but really governed nothing much beyond the city limits. The Soviet invasion activated the tribes to resist them and fight one another less, but when the Soviets pulled out, the old rivalries erupted into civil war, from which emerged the Pashtun Taliban as an ideological effort to unite the Pashtuns countrywide. That provided a fertile incubator for Al Qaeda. It also united what emerged as the Northern Alliance, which, with the help of 400 U.S. military advisers and U.S. air support, deposed the Taliban and took control of Kabul and other major control points.

U.S. Afghan Doctrine

Our nation-building doctrine has been based on one politically-correct goal of trying to end the conflict among tribal groups by integrating its institutions, extending the governance of Kabul over the countryside, and holding the country together. However, from the beginning the Afghan National Army (ANA) we have been training has been predominantly composed of Northern Alliance Tajiks, and even after trying to impose a quota of at least 30% Pashtun recruits, the percentage of Pashtun recruits has actually been declining and many Pashtuns are deserting or defecting to the Taliban. Our nation-building is indeed working, but not uniformly. It is working well in Northern Alliance areas and not elsewhere. What we are actually doing, without intending to, is setting up a civil war when we leave that will leave the Northern Alliance predominant, at least in its areas, and almost certainly including Kabul and major cities, even some of those in Pashtun areas.

Pashtunistan?

In the meantime, the 1947 partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan left Pakistan, which is dominated by ethnic Punjabis, with a claim on the Pashtun areas on the southeast side of the Durand Line, which it has never been able to effectively govern. It calls a large part of that territory as its "Federally Administered Tribal Areas" (FATA) and makes no attempt to conduct elections there. The Pashtun leadership of Afghanistan had never recognized the Durand Line, and has made no attempt to enforce it, other than recently to keep out the remnants of the Taliban in Pakistan, who also refuse to recognize the line.

Although the Pashtuns might continue to be troublesome on the world stage if they had their own country, we have seen other redrawings of national boundaries to unite members of a single ethnic group that have eventually brought them into peaceful relations with other, formally rival neighbors.

There have long been proposals to draw a line between the Northern Alliance and Pashtun dominated areas of Afghanistan, and to redraw the Durand Line, moving it southeastward to divide Pakistan into Punjabi Industan and create a new nation, or at least an alliance, of Pashtunistan. Not all Pakistani Pashtuns are going to want to be in the new country, because many have become modern and no longer comfortable with the more traditional Pashtuns. That is also true of Pashtuns in Afghanistan. One suspects that Hamid Karzai might find it safer to live in a Daristan than in a Pashtunistan, especially given his history.

Our current negotiations with the Taliban seem aimed at getting them to assume a share of power in the Afghan parliament, the Jirga, and key ministries, but given their known aspirations for total domination, that seems an unpromising aim. A better approach might be to propose the formal division of each of the tribal areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan into new independent nation-states, with elections in each such area, and then help them form loose federations with the potential to unite under central governments as they become comfortable with one another. Existing provinces roughly correspond to such tribal areas, through not perfectly. Switzerland might provide the model for the process. That would be a tough sell, especially with the Pakistanis, but at some point they need to come to the realization that their tribal areas are a liability and a threat, especially to their nuclear weapons. It is in their interest to lose some territory they don't control and gain friendly neighbors.

Mineral economics

It is estimated that Afghanistan has more than $3 trillion in minerals waiting to be extracted. It has long been a major source of minerals, going back to the bronze age when it was the source of tin used in making bronze. The country is laced with mine shafts, used to this day as hiding places for insurgents. However, most of the shallow deposits have already been extracted. What remains is deeper, and will require investments of capital to get them out. The capital won't come as long as the security situation remains bad.

As it happens, most of the minerals are in Northern Alliance dominated areas, and foreign investors are much more likely to invest in mining operations that are controlled by Tajiks. If Afghanistan were partitioned into Daristan and Pashtunistan, that extraction could proceed and build reasonably modern nations. However, the Pashtuns would not be likely to go along with a partition if they lost all that wealth, so part of the deal might be to give then shares in mining companies so they would have a stake in keeping the peace.

Of course the Taliban might not agree, but offering them their own country seems like a more promising negotiating position than a share of power with the Tajiks.

Perhaps it is time for us, like Alexander, to cut the Durand Knot.