Henry Durand, who will be discussed, is known as Mortimer Durand, since his father, Marion Durand, also bore the first personal name of Henry.
Mortimer was born in 1850 in India, in the town of Sehor, a western suburb of Bhopal, in the family of Sir Henry Marion Durand, a British resident in the city of Vadorada.
After leaving school in Blackheath and Tonbridge, Mortimer Durand entered the civil service in British India in 1873. During the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880), Durand was the political secretary in Kabul. From 1884 to 1894 he served as Foreign Secretary of British India.
In 1894, Durand was appointed ambassador to Tehran, where, although he was an Iranian and owned Farsi, Durand did not make much of an impression on either the Persian government or his superiors in London. After leaving Persia in 1900, Durand served as British Ambassador to Spain from 1900 to 1903, and from 1903 to 1906 as Ambassador to the United States.
Henry Mortimer Durand died in Quetta, present-day Pakistan, in 1924.
As you can see, we have before us the biography of an ordinary British diplomat. However, in his life there was something that immortalized his name for centuries, namely, the so-called "Durand line".
On the map, this is a conventional outline, on the ground corresponding to a length of about 2,670 km, which became the border established in the Hindu Kush in 1893, that is, when Durand was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of British India. The line was drawn through the lands of the tribes living between Afghanistan and British India, dividing the spheres of influence of the latter. Nowadays, it marks the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The adoption of this line, named after Sir Mortimer Durand, who persuaded Abdurrahman Khan, Emir of Afghanistan in 1880-1901, to agree to such a border outline, one might say, solved the problem of the Indo-Afghan border for the remainder of the period of British rule in India, that is up to 1947.
The problem of delimitation was that after the British conquered the Punjab in 1849, they invaded the undivided Sikh territory west of the Indus River, leaving between themselves and the Afghans a strip of land inhabited by various Pashtun tribes, the so-called tribal territory. Management and defense issues have made this area problematic. Some of the British wanted to leave for India, while others sought to advance the line from Kabul through Ghazni to Kandahar. The second Anglo-Afghan war finally discredited the British, and the territory of the tribes was divided into approximately equal spheres of influence. The British established their rule by indirect rule up to the "Durand Line" through a series of clashes with the tribes. The Afghans have left their side untouched.
In the middle of the 20th century, the territory on both sides of the border became the subject of the movement for the independence of the Pashtuns and the creation of the independent state of Pashtunistan.
It is believed that it was the "Durand Line" that caused the brutal reprisal against Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah in 1996. This is shown most reliably in the book by VN Plastun and VV Andrianov “Najibullah. Afghanistan in the grip of geopolitics "(M., 1998, pp. 115-116):
“In Kabul, a well-known in international circles connected with Afghan politics (Pakistani -) General Aslam Bek appeared. At one time, he headed the General Staff of the Ground Forces (Pakistan.-), then held senior positions in Pakistani military intelligence, carrying out the most delicate assignments since the time of the former president of this country, Zia-ul-Haq. He was accompanied by his brother, also a career intelligence officer, a group of officers. They had a document forged in the depths of the Pakistani special services on the letterhead of Najibullah's office seized in the presidential palace. The text written on it, dated from the period of Najibullah's tenure in power, was an agreement on the official recognition by the President and the Government of Afghanistan of the "Durand Line" as the official and permanent border between this country and Pakistan. This was the main goal of the Pakistani military group - at any cost to force Najibullah to do what no Pashtun would ever do - to sign this "treaty."
Najibullah has been betrayed many times. But in his most terrible hour, he found the strength not to betray either Afghanistan, or his people, or himself. Using his remarkable strength, thanks to which the nickname "Bull" was entrenched in him from his youth, he managed to disperse the guards, take away a pistol from one of the officers and kill (or seriously injure) his brother Aslam Bek.
What followed was a nightmare. He endured terrible torture, but was not broken. A terrible execution that shocked even his enemies, angered all Afghans, no matter on which side of the barricades they were, drew a line under his life, under the devilish plan of Islamabad and, by and large, under the political course of Pakistan north of the "Durand Line".
