THE TRIBESMEN outside the Pakistani embassy in Kabul huddle into their woollen shawls and wait. A few years ago, grumble Abdul Haq Barakzai and his friends, a trip to Pakistan for medical treatment was as straightforward as slipping a border guard a few hundred rupees. As well as the main crossing at Torkham, a rich choice of tracks led across the mountainous frontier. No paperwork was needed to cross. Now he must stand in line with a bundle of doctors’ notes to obtain a visa.
The 2,600km boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan was marked out in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand as the limit of British India (see map). The arbitrary frontier has long been ignored by tribesmen, traders and guerrillas on either side. Ihsanullah Shinwari, a businessman in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, describes how he and his friends used to nip across to eat fried fish in the Afghan city of Jalalabad: “It wasn’t like going to a different country.”
This porousness has loomed large in world affairs. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, America funnelled weapons over the border to rebels. When America invaded Afghanistan, in turn, in 2001, the Taliban flitted back and forth from havens in Pakistan. And for decades a large share of the world’s supply of heroin was spirited across to Pakistan.
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