{"id":1816,"date":"2009-08-16T19:00:20","date_gmt":"2009-08-16T19:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/?p=1816"},"modified":"2009-08-16T19:00:20","modified_gmt":"2009-08-16T19:00:20","slug":"good-railways-but-lousy-boundaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/good-railways-but-lousy-boundaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Good railways but lousy boundaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><q>This is a border with no boundaries, boasting a frontier town with no frontier<\/q>, said Jason Burke in describing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at Chaman in an article in <cite>The Independent<\/cite> published on 21 January 1999: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/frontline-chaman-pakistaniafghan-frontier--legacy-of-the-raj-fine-railways-and-lousy-borders-1075287.html\">Frontline: Chaman, Pakistan-Afghan frontier &#8211; Legacy of the Raj: fine railways and lousy borders<\/a>. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Even the home secretary in Quetta &#8211; the second-most senior civil servant in the province &#8211; admits the frontier, effectively created as the western boundary of British India, is a farce: &#8220;It is an imaginary border. You Britishers built us good railways but gave us some lousy boundaries.&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a border with no boundaries, boasting a frontier town with no frontier, said Jason Burke in describing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at Chaman in an article in The Independent published on 21 January 1999: Frontline: Chaman, Pakistan-Afghan frontier &#8211; Legacy of the Raj: fine railways and lousy borders. Even the home secretary in Quetta [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[38,134,171],"class_list":["post-1816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistans-railways","tag-chaman","tag-pakistan","tag-the-independent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}