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Decision on Durand Line Belongs to Afghans, Faizi Says
[Tolo News] President Hamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtun face on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
's front man on Wednesday said the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan and Pakistain is a matter for the Afghan people to decide, dismissing statements by American officials on what the demarcation means under US policy.

Aimal Faizi said the comments of foreigners on the Durand Line will not have any effect on the verdict of the Afghan people, to whom the decision belongs.

"Whatever their position is, it will not affect the Afghan people and government. The Durand Line is a historic matter and it is up to the people of Afghanistan to decide about this," Faizi said at a presser in Kabul.
The Pashtuns and the various Taliban and smuggling gangs will ignore the border as if it didn't exist, Pakistan will not send the regular army over to conquer, and the Afghan army is a generation or more from being able to wage war, so formalizing the border really doesn't matter at the moment.
The Durand Line Agreement was drawn up by the British in 1893 to divide the Pashtun region between what was then British India and the Kingdom of Afghanistan.

Pakistain inherited the agreement after its partition from the British Raj in 1947 but there has never been an official ratification of the line between Islamabad and Kabul.

Faizi's statement comes US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistain Marc Grossman triggered a renewed debate on the demarcation with his comments in an interview on a private television network in Kabul on Sunday.

"Our policy is that border is the international border," Grossman said on October 21. "I think it is time to lift everybody's vision here to a regional conception of what the region could be."

US State Department spokesperson Victora Nuland reiterated Grossman's statement on Tuesday in the US after she was asked by a news hound about the matter.

"Well, our policy on this has not changed. It was correctly stated by Ambassador Grossman that we see this as the internationally recognised boundary," she said.

The Afghan government has already responded to Grossman's comment with a statement on Tuesday from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying it "rejects and considers irrelevant any statement by anyone about the legal status of this line.
Posted by: trailing wife 2012-10-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=354637