nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47pan-nationalists, who even today denounce it as ‘poorly marked’, ‘illegal’
or ‘imaginary’. 37
According to this discourse, the Durand Agreement did not have the
legal status of a treaty. Over the ensuing years a variety of arguments have
been advanced to justify setting it aside, including a claim that Durand
deliberately deceived ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan about the actual line of the
frontier, despite the fact that a map was attached to the agreement; that the
Amir signed the protocol under duress; that he never actually signed it; or
that he only signed the English and not the Persian text. Others assert the
Amir only surrendered his right to influence over the tribes and not sover-
eignty. Some argue for a semantic and legal difference between ‘boundary’
and ‘frontier’, claiming that the former appears in the Durand Agreement,
but the latter does not. In fact ‘boundary’, ‘frontier’ and ‘frontier line’ are
used almost synonymously in the text of the Durand Agreement. 38 In the
1990s it was commonplace among Afghan refugees in Pakistan to assert
that the Durand Agreement was only binding for a hundred years and
hence after November 1993 the frontier was no longer legal under inter-
national law. This, too, is not the case for the text makes no limitations on
the agreement. 39
Such arguments are at the best disingenuous and at the worst a deliber-
ate distortion of historical facts. ‘Convention’, ‘Agreement’ and ‘Protocol’ are
all terms employed in legally binding international agreements concluded
between sovereign states and as such the Durand Agreement, also known
as the Kabul Convention, had full legal status under international law.
Since the Amir personally conducted the negotiations, the claim that he
was duped or misled is frankly absurd. The Amir even called a darbar
where both he and Durand explained the terms and implications of the
treaty to an assembly of Pushtun tribal and religious leaders. Copies of
their speeches were then distributed to every delegate, and each one was
required to set his seal on the Amir’s speech. The Amir clearly knew exactly
what the Durand Agreement meant, and though he was not happy with
some of the concessions he made, his view was that the alliance with
Britain, which brought him regular infusions of cash and arms, was more
important than token sovereignty over regions that he called Yaghistan,
the unruly, or ungovernable, land.
In his autobiography ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan wrote of the Durand
Agreement:
The misunderstandings and disputes which were arising about
these frontier matters were put to an end, and after the boundary