Background
In 1893, the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan and the British Indian Foreign Secretary Sir Henry Mortimer Durand signed an agreement in Kabul to delimit “the frontier of Afghanistan on the side of India,” as well as to fix “the limit of their respective sphere of influence.” With the passage of time, the delimited “frontier” is commonly referred to as the Durand Line.

Even though subsequent Afghan rulers such as Amir Habibullah Khan, King Amanullah Khan, and King Nadir Khan renewed the “frontier” agreement with the British, most Afghans have seen the agreement as temporary, and void as soon as the British left.

It is because the line divides families and tribes which were part of Afghanistan in their entirety before the 1893 agreement. Under that impression, in July, 1947 Afghan Prime Minister Shah Mahmoud Khan’s government laid Afghanistan’s first claim over Pashtun territories in British India, which according to the Mountbatten Plan (or 3 June Plan) were destined to become part of Pakistan. Whether Afghanistan’s claim is valid or not is out of the scope of this writing.

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When the Mountbatten Plan was put into action, Pakistan inherited the Durand Line from the British. As such, Afghanistan and Pakistan couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start in their bilateral relations. Few months into Pakistan’s creation, Afghanistan was the only country that cast a “No” vote against Pakistan’s United Nations membership.

Since then, relations between the two countries have been tense (save the Taliban era, which is also debatable). It is worth mentioning that Afghanistan still hasn’t recognised the Durand Line as an international border with Pakistan. To garner domestic support, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai would from time to time bring up the Durand Line issue and Afghanistan’s refusal to accept it as an international border.

India would have replaced Pakistan
With this in mind, if India had not been divided, the post-1947 Indo-Afghan relations would have had the same trajectory as have Afghan-Pak relations since. In other words, India, instead of Pakistan, would have inherited the Durand Line, with all its controversies.

It is tantamount to a fantasy to believe that India would have relinquished control (and sovereignty) of Pashtun-majority areas in India over which Afghanistan has territorial claims. There is evidence for this statement.

A year before India’s partition, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made a tour of the Pashtun tribal belt in northwestern India. In addition to trying to counter Muslim League efforts, Nehru made an attempt to convince tribal Pashtuns to cast their lots with a united India, but to no avail.

Nehru saw in the strategic passes of the Pashtun areas a security insurance in the face of a northern invasion (probably from the Soviet Union). Past these strategic passes and mountains, laid the flat lands of the Punjab and the road to Delhi was open. Under no circumstance Nehru or any other Congress leader would have been prepared to meet Afghanistan’s demands.
According to the British historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, Nehru was not willing to come to terms with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue because of Kashmir’s terrain and strategic mountain passes (see Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of An Empire). After Nehru lost the NWFP in a referendum to Pakistan, he was bent on keeping Kashmir for India.

Consequently, Afghanistan’s relations with an undivided India would have been on a collision course from day one. After losing a greater part of its population and trans-Indus territory to the British in the previous century, Afghanistan would not have been in a position to force India’s hand.

To conceal its weakness vis-à-vis a Hindu-majority India, Afghanistan would have invested in the propaganda machine—exactly what it did against Pakistan. Although the process has been checked lately, stereotyping Hindus is common in many parts of Afghanistan