A2 · Elementary
11 min
historydiplomacyconflictgeopolitics
The Line in the Mountain: Afghanistan and Pakistan's History
La Línea en la Montaña: Historia de Afganistán y Pakistán
This week, representatives from Afghanistan and Pakistan met in Istanbul to talk about peace. But behind that conversation lies more than a hundred years of difficult history.
Esta semana, representantes de Afganistán y Pakistán se reúnen en Estambul para hablar de paz. Pero detrás de esta conversación hay más de cien años de historia difícil.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| frontera | border | La frontera entre los dos países es muy difícil. |
| acuerdo | agreement | Espero que hay un acuerdo de paz. |
| montaña | mountain | Las montañas son muy grandes en Afganistán. |
| paz | peace | Las personas quieren paz en su país. |
| historia | history | La historia de Afganistán y Pakistán es muy complicada. |
| de acuerdo | agreed / okay | Vamos al bar. De acuerdo. |
The British drew a line through the mountains in 1893, handed the pen to a bureaucrat named Mortimer Durand, and the people living in those mountains are still fighting about it today.
Sí.
Yes.
Esta semana hay conversaciones en Estambul.
This week there are talks in Istanbul.
Afganistán y Pakistán hablan.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are talking.
Right.
Diplomats from the Taliban government in Kabul and officials from Islamabad, sitting down together in Istanbul under what they're calling a Track 1.5 format.
Which is a very diplomatic way of saying: official enough to matter, unofficial enough to deny it later.
La frontera entre los dos países es muy vieja.
The border between the two countries is very old.
Y muy difícil.
And very difficult.
That's the understatement of the century.
The border is called the Durand Line, and to understand why these two countries are in a room together in Istanbul trying to stop shooting at each other, you basically have to start there.
Durand es un nombre inglés.
Durand is an English name.
No es un nombre afgano.
It's not an Afghan name.
Exactly, and that's the whole point.
Sir Mortimer Durand was the Foreign Secretary of British India.
In 1893 he negotiated an agreement with the Afghan Emir, Abdur Rahman Khan, that drew a line through the Pashtun tribal territories.
Roughly 2,700 kilometers, cutting right through families, through villages, through centuries of culture.
Los pastunes son un pueblo grande.
The Pashtuns are a large people.
Viven en Afganistán.
They live in Afghanistan.
Viven en Pakistán también.
They live in Pakistan too.
Around forty to fifty million Pashtuns, split by that line.
In Afghanistan they're the dominant ethnic group.
In Pakistan there are something like thirty million of them, mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the tribal areas along the border.
The British cut right through the middle of them.
Afganistán no acepta esa frontera.
Afghanistan does not accept that border.
No la acepta ahora.
It doesn't accept it now.
No la acepta antes tampoco.
It didn't accept it before either.
This is crucial.
Afghanistan is the only country in the world that voted against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations in 1947, and the reason was the Durand Line.
Kabul's position has always been that the agreement was extracted under colonial pressure, that it expires, that it's not legitimate.
Pakistan says it absolutely is the permanent international border.
That disagreement has never been resolved.
La línea está en las montañas.
The line is in the mountains.
Las montañas son muy grandes.
The mountains are very big.
La gente cruza.
People cross.
They've always crossed.
And the Pakistani state has never really controlled those border territories fully.
The British didn't either, for that matter.
The Pashtun tribes in those areas operated under their own codes, their own justice systems, their own loyalties.
The great powers come and go;
the tribes remain.
En los años noventa, Pakistán ayuda a los talibanes.
In the nineties, Pakistan helps the Taliban.
Los talibanes son amigos de Pakistán.
The Taliban are friends with Pakistan.
That's one of the great dark ironies of the last thirty years.
Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, essentially helped create and sustain the Taliban as a strategic asset.
The thinking was: a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would be friendly to Islamabad, would give Pakistan strategic depth against India, and would stop Afghan nationalism from inflaming the Pashtuns inside Pakistan.
Pero ahora los dos países tienen problemas.
But now the two countries have problems.
Ahora no son amigos.
Now they are not friends.
The relationship completely inverted, and here's how.
After 2001, when the Americans came in and pushed the Taliban out, there was a Pakistani Taliban movement, the TTP, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.
A different organization but deeply connected to the Afghan Taliban.
And when the Afghan Taliban retook power in 2021, the TTP started using Afghan territory to launch attacks inside Pakistan.
Pakistán dice: para los ataques.
Pakistan says: stop the attacks.
Los talibanes dicen: no es nuestro problema.
The Taliban say: that's not our problem.
Which is an extraordinary reversal.
Pakistan spent decades using Afghan territory as a strategic playground, funding militant groups, and now they're on the receiving end of exactly that same dynamic.
I'm not going to say they didn't see this coming, because some Pakistani analysts absolutely did.
En 2024, Pakistán ataca Afganistán.
In 2024, Pakistan attacks Afghanistan.
Hay bombas.
There are bombs.
Hay muertos.
There are deaths.
Pakistani airstrikes inside Afghan territory, targeting TTP positions.
The Taliban government condemned them furiously.
And then you had armed clashes along the border itself, soldiers from both sides firing at each other across that line Mortimer Durand drew in 1893.
The whole thing came very close to a serious military confrontation.
Los dos países tienen armas.
The two countries have weapons.
Pakistán tiene bombas nucleares.
Pakistan has nuclear bombs.
Hay mucho miedo.
There is a lot of fear.
That's the thing that makes this more than a regional dispute.
Pakistan is a nuclear power.
Afghanistan is not, but a destabilized Pakistan has implications that go well beyond South Asia.
This is why people in Washington and Beijing and Riyadh pay very close attention to what happens along that border.
Y Turquía organiza las conversaciones.
And Turkey organizes the talks.
Turquía no es amiga especial de ninguno.
Turkey is not a special friend to either one.
That's exactly why Turkey works as a venue.
Ankara has built this peculiar diplomatic niche for itself, hosting conversations between parties who won't talk to each other directly.
They did it with Russia and Ukraine on grain exports.
They've done it across the Muslim world.
Erdogan sees this as Turkey's role, the indispensable convener.
La historia de Turquía es también muy importante aquí.
The history of Turkey is also very important here.
El Imperio Otomano es grande antes.
The Ottoman Empire is big before.
That's a thread I want to pull on.
The Ottoman Empire at its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries controlled enormous territories across three continents.
Afghanistan was never truly under Ottoman control, but the Ottomans had influence across the broader Muslim world, and Turkey today still trades on that historical prestige in ways that are very conscious and very deliberate.
¿Y la Línea Durand?
And the Durand Line?
¿Hay una solución para ese problema?
Is there a solution to that problem?
Honestly, probably not in any formal sense.
No Afghan government has ever ratified the Durand Line as a permanent border.
Not the monarchy, not the communists, not the mujahideen, not Karzai, not Ghani, and certainly not the Taliban.
Pakistan fences it, patrols it, insists on it.
But the underlying claim never goes away.
Las fronteras son políticas.
Borders are political.
Pero las montañas son naturales.
But the mountains are natural.
Las montañas no cambian.
The mountains do not change.
That's beautifully put.
The Hindu Kush doesn't care about Mortimer Durand.
The passes that traders and armies have used for three thousand years are still there.
And the people on both sides of that line have more in common with each other than they do with the capitals that claim to govern them.
Yo visito Islamabad una vez.
I visit Islamabad once.
La ciudad es nueva.
The city is new.
Muy moderna.
Very modern.
Pero el norte es muy diferente.
But the north is very different.
That contrast is striking every time.
Islamabad was purpose-built in the sixties as a clean-slate capital, completely planned, completely modern, completely unlike the rest of Pakistan.
And then you drive a few hours north toward Peshawar, toward the tribal belt, and you're in a world where the Pakistani state is a fairly recent and fairly negotiated presence.
Yo veo mucho de esto en España también.
I see much of this in Spain too.
Las regiones son muy diferentes.
The regions are very different.
La historia es complicada.
The history is complicated.
That parallel is actually worth staying with for a moment.
Spain understands viscerally what it means when borders drawn by distant powers cut through living cultures.
Catalonia, the Basque Country, even the old kingdoms of Aragon and Castile.
Nation-states are relatively new inventions, and they don't always fit the human geography underneath them.
Sí.
Yes.
Las conversaciones en Estambul son pequeñas.
The talks in Istanbul are small.
Pero son importantes.
But they are important.
Son un paso.
They are a step.
Track 1.5 is interesting precisely because it's not the full diplomatic theater of a formal summit.
It's academics, former officials, think-tank people, sitting down without the full weight of state commitment.
It gives both governments the flexibility to test ideas without staking their credibility on them.
That can actually be where the real work happens.
La historia no termina.
History does not end.
La historia continúa.
History continues.
Esto es difícil para todos.
This is difficult for everyone.
You know, I spent time in Islamabad in 2009, embedded with a NATO mission, and I remember talking to a Pakistani general who said something I've never quite shaken.
He said: we created a monster to fight someone else's war, and now we have to live with it.
He was talking about the jihadist networks the ISI had cultivated.
But he could have been talking about the Durand Line itself.
La guerra es muy mala para la gente normal.
War is very bad for ordinary people.
Las personas quieren vivir.
People want to live.
Quieren paz.
They want peace.
Always.
And that's what makes Istanbul meaningful even if it produces nothing formal.
Two governments that have been shelling each other's territory sending representatives to the same room is not nothing.
It's something.
Whether it becomes something larger depends on whether the political will exists on both sides to actually acknowledge what the history has done to both of them.
Yo espero que hay un acuerdo.
I hope there is an agreement.
Un buen acuerdo entre los dos países.
A good agreement between the two countries.
Actually, you just used a word I want to ask you about.
Acuerdo.
You said espero que hay un acuerdo, which I'm reading as 'I hope there is an agreement.' But I've also heard de acuerdo used completely differently, like 'okay' or 'agreed.' How does one word do both those things?
Bueno, acuerdo es un sustantivo.
Well, acuerdo is a noun.
Un acuerdo es un pacto.
An acuerdo is a pact.
De acuerdo es una frase.
De acuerdo is a phrase.
Significa 'sí, estoy de acuerdo contigo'.
It means 'yes, I agree with you'.
So 'de acuerdo' is literally something like 'in accordance' or 'in agreement,' and it collapsed into everyday yes-language the same way English speakers say 'agreed' when they just mean 'sure.' That's actually a very clean parallel.
Sí.
Yes.
Por ejemplo: 'Vamos al bar.' 'De acuerdo.' Es simple.
For example: 'Let's go to the bar.' 'Agreed.' It's simple.
Es natural.
It's natural.
And if I said 'un acuerdo de paz,' that would be 'a peace agreement.' The noun and the phrase sharing the same root but working in completely different registers.
Spanish does this thing where one word carries a lot of weight quietly.
I find that genuinely hard to track.
Fletcher, tú entiendes bien.
Fletcher, you understand well.
Para ser americano, claro.
For an American, of course.
I'll take it.
De acuerdo, Octavio.
De acuerdo.