East Pakistan broke away with Indian support to form the state of
Bangladesh (Cloughley, 1999: 144–238), having endured a geno-
cide at the hands of elements of the Pakistan Army. This trauma
was by no means the only one to wrack the body politic of
Pakistan. Its sense of identity suffered in two other spheres. One
related to the position of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state
adjoining Pakistan whose Hindu ruler opted for integration with
India in October 1947 (Ganguly, 1997). The Kashmir situation led
to war between India and Pakistan in 1948 and 1965, and to
serious clashes in the so-called Kargil conflict in 1999. The
Kashmir dispute has poisoned Indo–Pakistan relations, and con-
tributed to a high degree of paranoia in Pakistani military circles.
It is also part of the context of relations between Pakistan and
Afghanistan. For while each of these states has an overwhelmingly
Muslim population, Afghanistan before 1978 was far closer to
Indiathan Pakistan, having even voted against the admission of
Pakistan to the United Nations. The reason for this was another
poisonous territorial dispute, this time between Afghanistan and
Pakistan, and known as the ‘Pushtunistan dispute’.
Avoiding any revival of the Pushtunistan dispute was a core
Pakistani interest as Islamabad contemplated its future relations
with the Afghan resistance. Pakistan’s support for groups such as
Hekmatyar’s Hezb, and the Taliban, makes far more sense when
one takes into account Pakistan’s hostility to the ancien régimein
Kabul as a result of this dispute. The conflict dated from the
demarcation in 1893 of a boundary between Afghanistan and
British India by Sir Mortimer Durand – the so-called ‘Durand
Line’. The effect of this exercise in boundary-drawing was to split
the Pushtun ethnic group, with some in Afghanistan but others in
the Northwest Frontier region of India. For a decade before parti-
tion, Jinnah and the Muslim League had been opposed by the
Pushtun separatist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (‘The Frontier
Gandhi’) and his followers, who were close to Mohandas K.
Gandhi and the Indian Congress. The cause of Pushtun separatism,
reflected in the demand for an independent ‘Pushtunistan’, was
supported by a string of Afghan rulers, most strikingly Daoud
68 The Afghanistan Wars