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. Ihsa-nullah 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."
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