Comment by Riaz Haq on May 25, 2015 at 8:31pm

Reuters Op Ed by Raffaello Pantucci:

The China-India-Pakistan trilateral relationship is a complicated one. All three need each other to succeed, but do not believe this to be the case, remaining fiercely independent in their outlooks and jealous when the other two appear to be moving closer together. On the one hand, China has the potential to act as an honest broker, offering economic investment to all while trying to help offer a platform for discussions. But in reality, China wants no part of a situation where it ends being responsible for brokering peace in such a fractious part of the world, and it continues to take advantage of opportunities to assert its dominance over its Asian neighbours. For India and Pakistan, history continues to be stuck in the legacies of partition.

Yet this is a trio of countries that together account for about a third of the world’s population and where future prosperity is likely to come from. The danger at the moment is the assumption that economic development and prosperity will resolve everything and is the goal that needs to be achieved for regional stability. In reality, all three powers need to shed their historical legacies, and find ways of ending the paranoid tensions that underlie their global outlooks. Until this has been achieved, the CPEC, BCIM and any other regional economic framework will be undermined and no long-term stability will be found in the heart of South Asia.

http://blogs.reuters.com/india-expertzone/2015/05/25/untangling-the...

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2016 at 12:46pm

Durand Line: Myths and Facts
By: Shah Zalmay Khan
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Durand Line is the 2200+ km border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, from Wakhan-GB-Xinjiang Confluence (where Pakistan, Afghanistan and China meet) in the North to Chagai-Nimroz-Zahedan confluence in the South (where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran meet). The border was jointly drawn up in the 1890s between the Govt of British India (predecessor of Pakistan) and the Ameer of Afghanistan, according the provisions of the Durand Line Agreement.
The Durand Line Agreement was inked between Sir Henry Mortimer Durand (on behalf of British Indian Govt) and Ameer Abdul Rahman (Ameer/King of Afghanistan) on 12 November 1893 at Kabul, Afghanistan.
Ever since the independence of Pakistan in 1947, the Afghan govt has time and again announced that it doesn’t recognize the Durand Line as an international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For their part, the Afghan side presents several arguments to support their view on the issue. Here we examine each of these arguments critically and on the basis of FACTS.
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Argument # 1) Durand Line Agreement had a life of 100 years, so it expired in 1993.
FACT: This is simply not true. Text of the original ‘Durand Line Agreement’ is attached here. It does not have any clause that makes it time-barred.

Argument # 2) Durand Line Agreement was signed by Ameer Abdul Rahman Khan against his will (under duress & British army pressure) and without consulting the other Afghan govt functionaries.
FACT: Durand Line Agreement was signed on 12 November 1893 but it was actually a brief ‘principal document’ with a few paragraphs (without any detailed surveys and real-time demarcation of the 2200+ km long border). The actual demarcation was carried out by four commissions constituted for the purpose jointly by the British Indian govt and Ameer of Afghanistan:-


Argument # 3) Durand Line Agreement was a ‘short term’ agreement made by Ameer Abdul Rahman with the British govt and it expired with his death in 1901.
FACT: As appealing as this argument sounds to the Afghans, facts in this respect are different. Durand Line Agreement was ratified by successive Afghan rulers after Ameer Abdul Rahman, as under:-
After death of Ameer Abdul Rahman, his son Ameer Habibullah Khan and British representative Sir Louis Dane reaffirmed the agreement by signing ‘The Treaty of the Mole’ (also known as Dane-Habibullah agreement), on 21 March 1905, at Kabul.
After 3rd Anglo-Afghan War, Afghan govt mission led by Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Khan signed the ‘Rawalpindi Agreement’ on 8 August 1919 which reaffirmed the Durand Line Agreement. Incidentally, it was first time that the Afghan Govt (not Ameer in personal capacity) ratified the Durand Line Agreement.

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Argument # 4) Durand Line Agreement was between British India and Afghanistan. With the division of British India in 1947 (into Pakistan and India), the said agreement also expired.
FACT: The “Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of Treaties (VCSSRT)” deals with issues pertaining to succession of states. Article 11 of this convention clearly states that succession of states cannot impact
International border agreed upon in result of an agreement, and
Rights and obligations concerning international border created through an agreement.


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Point to ponder: Afghanistan’s borders with Central Asia (then Russia), China and Iran were demarcated by the British (not even by Afghans themselves). How come Afghanistan’s Establishment circles (historically led by Tajiks / Uzbeks / Hazaras) only have issue with the Pakistan border (demarcated with Afghan rulers’ consent) and are perfectly okay with all other borders in which Afghans had no say at all? Why does the Afghan Establishment pitch the Pashtun population of Afghanistan against their Pukhtoon counterparts in Pakistan, on such clumsy myths as those deconstructed above? This is a point for Afghanistan’s Pashtuns to ponder. I rest my case.

http://zalmayx.blogspot.com/2016/06/durand-line-myths-and-facts.htm...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 5, 2020 at 4:10pm

Jaswant Singh, India’s former foreign minister, who died on September 27 after six years in a coma from a fall at his home, was carrying a history-making sheaf of typed papers in his briefcase on July 16, 2001, in Agra, papers of immeasurable importance to the future history of South Asia.


https://scroll.in/article/974874/what-if-jaswant-singh-had-been-all...

So powerful were the contents in Jaswant Singh’s draft he had agreed with his Pakistan counterpart that it had the potential to forestall any future war between India and Pakistan. Singh’s far-right colleague and home minister LK Advani torpedoed the draft pact moments before Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf were to accept it.

The sabotaged Agra summit could have saved India and Pakistan an endless need to procure military hardware at prohibitive costs to their poverty-stricken masses. Had history not played truant that day in Agra, there would be a hoard of money available for healthcare and education for both countries – saved from scandal-tainted Rafale jets in India, for example – which in turn would have enabled both to better fight the coronavirus menace, and perhaps even spare precious resources for the less endowed neighbours.

The French Rafales were meant to deal with the military contingency in Ladakh with China, one might argue. Yes and no. Jaswant Singh’s peace deal carried the power, in fact, to vacate the need for even India and China to think of war or to send hapless men to inhospitable climes for guarding their ill-defined frontiers. There would be perhaps no deaths from frostbite or avalanches in Siachen either. There would be no need to interdict the Karakoram Highway.

There is a humanitarian catastrophe brewing in Jammu and Kashmir. An Agra pact would have made unnecessary the subjugation of Jammu and Kashmir last year. True, there were howls of protest from Hindutva nationalists when Jaswant Singh proposed in a subsequent TV interview that India could accept the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as a hard border and thus end a core dispute with Pakistan.

The protests had less to do with the logic of peace between nuclear rivals, rather they were needed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its assiduously nurtured hatred for Pakistan. A worried Arun Jaitley, the late partisan of the RSS, told the Americans in as many words, according to WikiLeaks, that good relations with Pakistan were detrimental to Hindutva’s political constituency in northern India. The instructive core of such an argument can imply that the December 2001 terror attack on the Indian parliament or the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai harmed India but helped the BJP. The logic again came into play with the Pulwama attack last year.

To loosely translate an Indian saying, the horse cannot befriend the grass. That is a likelier reason for the failure of the Agra summit – because peace with Pakistan would destroy the BJP’s plank to win votes. It goes to the credit of Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh that they did not see their politics through the prism of perpetual communal hostility.

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