Amir Latif Arain
01 February 2024•Update: 01 February 2024
KARACHI, Pakistan
Pakistan on Thursday said it has an “internationally recognized” border with neighboring Afghanistan, and that “there is absolutely no point in debating this aspect.”
“First of all, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is internationally recognized. It has legal validity and it is a reality that the international community accepts,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mumtaz Zehra Baloch said at a weekly news briefing in the capital Islamabad.
Any other ideas about the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, she said, are a “reflection of a fanciful imagination which is not grounded in reality.”
Her remarks come days after the acting Afghan Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs Noorullah Noori claimed that the border between Islamabad and Kabul is “still unclear” and that the two countries have "imaginary lines."
According to Baloch, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, commonly known as the “Durand Line” and “its validity has never been on the agenda between Pakistan and Afghanistan and will never be.”
Afghanistan does not recognize the Durand Line – the de facto border region between the two countries – on the grounds that it was created by a British colonial regime “to divide ethnic Pashtuns.”
The 2,640-kilometer (1,640-mile) border was established in 1893 as part of an agreement between India under British colonial rule and Abdur Rahman Khan, the then-ruler of Afghanistan.
Pakistan and Afghanistan share 18 crossing points and the most frequently used for trade and people movement are Torkham and Chaman, which connect Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province to Kandahar, Afghanistan's southern province.
Earlier in 2017, the Pakistani military began fencing the border with Afghanistan under the pretext of containing terrorist cross-border movement, a move that Kabul condemned.
Pakistan has seen a surge in terrorist attacks since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Kabul in Aug. 2021.
Islamabad accuses Afghanistan's interim Taliban government of sheltering members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a conglomerate of several Pakistani militant groups that frequently attack Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban have consistently denied these charges.
