Escalation on the Durand Line

On Iran’s eastern flank, far from the Gulf states now in the crosshairs, another conflict continues to grow. Pakistan has declared what it now calls an “open war” with Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities, striking Kabul, Kandahar and eastern provinces. As it happens, the Durand Line between them was never just a boundary.

It was an arrogant gesture of empire. A straight ruler drawn across a relief map in 1893, slicing through mountains the colour of ash and oxidised copper, through river valleys that flare into the most beautiful and drowsy of greens for a few weeks each spring—truly—through tribes and trading routes older than the states presently trying to outstare—and worse—across it.

It is a spectacular part of the world. Way too beautiful for man’s inhumanity to man. In winter, the wind combs the ridges clean before snow is laid down like a vast cold white duvet. In summer, dust rises in amber veils. Silence, though, is always brief. I remember being told about a dozen species of lark while ordnance thumped in the background.

Kabul has never formally recognised the line as an international border. Islamabad treats it as settled fact. The argument long predates the governments now trading artillery fire. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president when I made four later trips there, once declared Afghanistan would “never” accept the border as legitimate. Pakistan, meanwhile, has spent years fencing and fortifying it—stringing barbed wire along knife-edge crests, blasting tracks into occasionally lithium shale, posting thousands of Frontier Corps troops to lonely hilltop forts of sandbags and corrugated iron.

I may have been smuggled across the Durand Line in the early 1980s, the only Westerner with a tight group of Abdul Haq’s Mujahideen, but I was in awe of the people inhabiting this region. Even then it felt less like crossing a border than stepping between rival certainties.

Now the Taliban authorities in Kabul retaliate against Pakistani positions along that same frontier, describing their actions as responses to sustained air and artillery strikes. Afghanistan accuses Islamabad of repeated provocations. Pakistan’s efficient information ministry replies that its forces are responding to cross-border fire in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. As ever, each side casts itself as defensive and reluctant and compelled.

Recent Pakistani air operations targeted what Islamabad called militant infrastructure inside Afghanistan. United Nations officials report increasing civilian casualties, including children, in eastern provinces. Compounds are regularly damaged. Families flee towards Torkham and Chaman, unsure where the next strike might hit.

Afghan officials say many civilians are among the dead. Homes, a mosque and a madrassa have already been reportedly hit. Human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, have urged transparent investigations into cross-border strikes in the recent past, warning—accurately—how air power reverberates lethally in tight valleys where compounds cluster along irrigation channels and children move with obvious innocence between courtyards at dusk.

In truth, independent verification is scarce. While attention remains fixed on the illegal war in the Middle East, access to these high passes and folded ravines stay limited. Afghan authorities claim to have captured between 15 and 17 Pakistani border posts. Islamabad denies any such loss. Casualty figures—some running into the hundreds—circulate freely now, again none independently confirmed. As already said, Pakistani officials now speak openly of war. Afghan officials reject this term, though not its intensity. Even counting the dead becomes like contested ground.

Pakistani units field as a matter of course G3s and M4 variants, backed by mortars and artillery dug fairly dramatically, even when camouflaged, into epic terraced slopes. Across the line, Taliban border forces present a more irregular silhouette—camouflage or shalwar kameez under tactical vests, American rifles slung over shoulders, repurposed Humvees left behind in 2021. They say that Taliban flags now mark checkpoints that did not exist five years ago. What was once an insurgent frontier, in other words, increasingly resembles a conventional front line.

In Bajaur, near the Afghan border, a suicide vehicle bombing and armed assault reportedly killed several Pakistani security personnel and a child. Islamabad blamed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), distinct from but ideologically aligned with the Afghan Taliban, and long accused of operating from Afghan soil. It is this allegation of sanctuary—denied in Kabul, repeated in Islamabad—that has turned a disputed colonial line into a platform for air power.

The word “sanctuary” haunts every communiqué. Just as it once explained the presence in Afghanistan and later Pakistan of Osama bin Laden. Pakistani officials, some prone to implicating India, argue that cross-border militancy leaves them little choice. Afghan authorities counter that Pakistani strikes violate sovereignty and inflame an already fragile region.

For traders on both sides, border closures are no abstractions. The line is an artery. When cut, livelihoods die. Trucks will certainly be idling for miles in the dust. This was where Western forces once paid the Taliban to protect fuel convoys meant to fight the Taliban. (Go figure.) Drivers will be brewing tea on small stoves beneath trailers, waiting for decisions made far away. The closures will be doing more than inconveniencing them. They will be jolting supply chains stretching into Central Asia and straining already brittle diplomacy.

Even the reporting bears geopolitical fingerprints. For example, early accounts of heavy fighting in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa travelled via Kurdish outlets such as Rudaw, a reminder of how conflict narratives now circulate far from the ground they describe.

What remains clear, however, is the tempo. Airstrikes, artillery exchanges, posts claimed and denied, civilians caught in accelerated fighting. What remains unclear is where it ends. The Durand Line has seen empires withdraw and insurgencies rise and fall. It has been fenced, mined, patrolled, photographed from satellites you think at first are shooting stars. It has never been reconciled.

For years the border has simmered—tense, theatrical, contained within the oddly fetching grammar of skirmish and denial. That grammar now seems broken. Actual air power over provincial capitals? Massive artillery duels across entrenched heights? Official language invoking war? The frontier has clearly shifted from friction to confrontation.

In the high passes where Pakistan ends and Afghanistan begins—or does not—the old imperial line is once again being argued with heavier weapons, under a landscape so stark and beautiful it appears almost indifferent to the men fighting across it.

The Afghan–Pakistani escalation and the American and Israeli strikes on Iran are not separate dramas but adjacent pressures within the very same political geography. Pakistani demonstrators from Shia organisations in Karachi at the weekend broke barricades and entered the US Consulate grounds, protesting against the recent US-Israeli airstrikes on neighbouring Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Washington’s support for Pakistan and its confrontation with Tehran may be tactically distinct, but each action most certainly raises the temperature across the region.

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