By Soraab Balkhi

 On the fateful day of November 12, 1893, Amir Abdul Rahman Khan of Afghanistan and Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the British Indian government both agreed and signed upon the Durand Line Treaty, setting up the border between Afghanistan and then British India/present-day Pakistan.  The nationalist Pashtuns have always resented this Line.  When the country has more important issues to worry about, certain groups of ethno-centric Pashtuns refuse to let go of the Durand Line issue.  This, of course, is just another way for them to further their own agendas in Afghanistan.

 

Politically-driven motives and agendas serve the interests of specific parties while harming everyone else involved—there is nothing new or even controversial about this statement.  History as an overview is a record of these politically-driven agendas and the world today is nothing more than the outcomes of post-colonialism with the victors on one end and the defeated on the other.  Artificially created states are the residues of the former colonialists being the fact that the state system was mostly a European creation, so to speak.  Playing a game of geo-political hop-scotch, the European colonists set up states and upon leaving, they left successors and, in most cases, unpopular and unrepresentative regimes that ran each state.  All of the states that were set up were multi-ethnic countries.  In Afghanistan, every ethnic group is a minority whereas other states like Turkey, the leading ethnicity, Turks, made up about 70% of the country with the Kurds making up the minority.  In Turkey, the Turks are the ruling class just like how the Arabs are the ruling class among countries like Iraq, Syria, etc. and like the Hindus in India, the Persians in Iran, and Punjabis in Pakistan. 

          تاجیک ها حاملان اصلی فرهنگ و ادب فارسی در آسیای مرکزی هستند.  گذشتۀ تاریخ ایشان این نکته را به خوبی روشن می سازد.  تاجیک ها در منطقۀ آسیای مرکزی، بخشی از افغانستان و شمال شرق خراسان بزرگ و ماوراء النهر سکنت داشته و دارند.