{"book":"adl0957","page":21,"text":"8\nKashmir, and from the Oxus to the Satlej and the Arabian Sea.\nThe country suffered great diminution, first when the grandsons\nof Ahmad Shah Durrani contested for supremacy, and secondly\nwhen it came into conflict with the two great rival imperialistic\nEuropean powers—England and Tsarist Russia. The existing\nboundaries, especially those in the south and east, are mostly\nartificial, and have been forced upon the country from time to\ntime, irrespective of geographical, historical or ethnical con-\nsiderations.\n\nThe present boundary line between Afghanistan and Russia\n(USSR) is over seven hundred miles long. Starting from the\nnorth-east corner of Afghanistan, where the Oxus leaves its high\nmountain cradle in the Pamir, it follows the course of the Oxus\nor Amu Derya as far as the post of Kham-i-Ab (River Bend) in\nthe extreme north. From here the boundary leaves the Oxus and\ntakes a south-westerly direction till it reaches the post of Tor-\nGhundi opposite Kushkinski, the terminus of the Russian Trans-\nCaspian Railway. From this point the border line takes a north-\nwesterly direction until it reaches the Zulfikar Pass, the trijunc-\ntion point between Afghanistan, Iran and Turkmanistan. From\nKham-i-Ab to Zulfikar the boundary is laid through an open and\nsparsely populated desert with occasional pasturage. It follows\nno natural features and would be undefinable but for the pillars\nset up by the boundary commissions.\n\nFrom the Zulfikar Pass down to Siah Koh, the border line\nbetween Afghanistan and Iran remained uncertain for many\nyears and was always the cause of friction and complaint between\nthe two neighbouring countries. Finally in 1934, a Turkish\nGeneral of repute, Fakhruddin Altai, was appointed arbitrator\nby the countries concerned. His decisions were accepted by the\nGovernments of Afghanistan and Iran.","chars":1832,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00021.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/21","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/21","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}