A History of India, Pakistan and Osama Bin Laden’s Whereabouts
Imperial Overreach
During the 19th century, Britain ruled India, but Her Majesty’s agents in central Asia had a problem. Czarist Russia was starting to creep down into the region from the northwest. Well aware that many past invasions of India had come from that direction, the British decided to extend their imperial influence northwestward into Afghanistan – to create a buffer between their Raj and the Russians.
But Afghanistan proved easier to overrun than to run. British soldiers achieved Pyrrhic victories in two wars (1839-42 and 1878-80), but they never established control over the region – and they never subdued the fiercely independent Pashtun peoples living in the highlands around what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Let’s Make a Deal
Eventually, the British just made a deal with Abd al-Rahman Khan, the emir of Kabul, who had gained influence over Afghanistan’s various ethnic, tribal, and subtribal groups. In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand met with al-Rahman to establish who owned which turf. Durand drew a line on a map – since called the Durand Line – that cut right through Pashtun tribes and villages. Though al-Rahman and the Afghans protested almost immediately, it effectively (or ineffectively) became the border between Afghanistan and British India.
Then as now, Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line were united by language (Pashto), tribal traditions, ethnicity, a strict brand of Islam, and a code of behavior that emphasizes honor, dignity, hospitality, and the relentless pursuit of vengeance when wronged. They were also famously fierce fighters – so fierce that the British decided to “live and let live” with the tribes on their side of the border. As long as tribal elders maintained some semblance of order, and paid minimal respects to the British viceroy at Delhi, the British left them alone to handle their own affairs.
Let’s Make a Deal, Part II
In 1946, with the British already committed to leaving India, civil war erupted between India’s Hindu and Muslim populations. To the British, partitioning Muslims from Hindus seemed the best choice. So, in 1947, India got self-rule, but so did Pakistan – a “land of the pure” cartographically created out of Muslim-majority provinces in British India.
As a bouncing baby nation-state, Pakistan was in no position to change the convenient arrangement the British had created with the Pashtun tribes. So it didn’t. Instead, it carved “Federally Administered Tribal Areas” out of its North-West Frontier Province. To this day, Pakistani courts and police have no jurisdiction in the tribal areas, and Pakistani troops looking for terrorists – like, say, Osama bin Laden – practically have to attack to get in.
