Critical Triangle continues......

Come independence in August 1947, another fissure opened
up in Pakistan’s Pashtun region, the North-West Frontier Province.
The Afghan Government claimed that the Durand Line which
legitimised the annexation of large parts of Afghanistan in the
1800s had been signed with the British Government of India and
not with the independent government of Pakistan. Afghanistan
promptly reignited its territorial claims and opposed Pakistan’s
entry into the United Nations demanding that “the natural and legal rights of freedom of the North-West Frontier people and the
9 free tribes along the borders may also be established.” This was
compounded by the Afghan government’s demands for a
Pashtunistan, an independent state comprising most of the
NWFP. This was perhaps the first and most serious ideological
challenge the Pakistan government faced, a fact that seems to have
been forgotten, since in those days Afghanistan was a viable state.

The Afghan government posed a threat to the very idea of
Pakistan far more potently than India did. If Pakistan had been
given freedom on the basis of identity, in this case religion, then
identity (ethnicity) should also extend to sub-nationalities within
Pakistan. This was critical to Afghanistan’s need for an identity
separate from Pakistan. A Pan-Islamist role, envisaged by
Pakistan’s new leaders, and Afghanistan’s overwhelming
10 dependence on Pakistani trade routes for access to the sea, meant
they could not afford to get gobbled up based on the trans-border
nature of the Pashtun population. Unlike the Indian threat to
Pakistan’s nationhood, which was more rhetorical, Afghan
opposition was real, tangible, undermined Pakistan’s new found
11 independence, and its ideology. The argument that Pakistan was
not a successor state to British India again attacked its identity.
Later, the arguments put forward by Afghanistan against Pakistan
would prove to be the single biggest ideological negation of the
claims Pakistan would advance for its Kashmir plans. Afghanistan’s
claims were, amongst other reasons, based on the fact that these
lands had been seized from them by the application of duress and so
their ceding was illegal—a claim that Pakistan would also use to
12 dispute the instrument of Kashmir’s accession to India.

to be continues.....