{"book":"adl0957","page":22,"text":"The Eastern Boundary: In 1849, after the collapse of the\nSikh power, the British crossed the Indus and occupied the trans-\nIndus Afghan districts under the name of Sikh heritage. At this\ntime there were some prominent English statesmen who did not\nlike to support this imperialistic policy. One of them, Sir G.\nCampbell, M. P., proposed to give these districts back to their\n\"original owners.\" In the words of Mr. Campbell : \"My pro-\nposal in 1849 was to give these extra-Indian districts back to the\nAfghans, establishing our scientific military frontier upon the\nUpper Indus. But that great man (Lord Dalhousie) had a\nweakness; it was perhaps in a disposition to carry annexation\ntoo far, and I venture to think him wrong when he overstepped\nthe natural and ethnographical boundaries of India in going\nbeyond the Indus on one side and into Burma on the other.\"\n\nLater on (November 12, 1893) a new line of demarcation,\nthe so-called Durand Line, was forced upon Amir Abdur Rahman\nKhan. The British according to this new pact excluded from the\nKabul political jurisdiction \"a million Pathans* of military\nage-the cream of the fighting strength of the country.\" This\nline, which excludes over a third of the Afghan people from their\nnational government, has been the basic cause of all frontier\ntroubles since the beginning of the 19th century until this day.\n\nPHYSICAL FEATURES\nAfghanistan is a highland, its average height being three to\nfour thousand feet above sea-level. The general character of the\ncountry is mountainous. It is largely covered by a series of ranges\nrunning in all directions, but generally from north-east to south-\nwest. The north-eastern and central portions of the country form\n\n*There is no real distinction between the Afghan, Pathan or Pashtun.\nThe Afghans, while speaking Pashto, call themselves Pashtuns. The word\nPathan is the corrupted form of Pashtun and is used mostly in India.","chars":1913,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00022.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/22","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/22","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."}}