{"book":"adl1197","page":81,"text":"-68-\nHe further added that the river Indus was a deep and definite\nartery of water, most suitable for a boundry line; in place of an\nindefinite thin line along the foothills. Also that the Indus river\nconstituted a shorter boundry line, and in the expense in its defence\nwould be much less than for any other land boundry. Under these\ncircumstances, Lord Lawrence advised the Government of India to\ngive back the territories of Kohat and Peshawar to Afghanistan.\n\nThere is no doubt that some of the English men did not\nsee eye te eye with Lawrence's suggestions; so thet his suggestions\nwere made nul and void. Lawrence, howeve, stuck to his views.\nAs his views were not accepted by Lord Canning, he (Lawrence)\nslightly modified his views: and he added that if the river Abasin\ncould not be taken as the natural boundry line in regards to\ngeography and history of India; we should atleast not put a\nsingle foot forward beyond those foothills formed the boundry\nline of the Sikhs; because beyond that area lie high mountains,\ndeep valleys and many turning and twisting passes; which would\nbe difficult to defend, whereas a line along the foothills would be\nmore secure and the mountains in front of the line would be\na source of defence and strength.\n\nThis line which running along the course of the river Indus,\nand touching the foothills of the Sulaiman range and Kaiser Ghor,\nwas the same boundry line which marked the line, where Ranjit\nSingh with English incitement had extended his territory during\nthe internecine wars of the Barakzai Brothers and the Saduzais.\nThe tribal territory, however, was entirly beyond it. This\nboudry line was adopted by the English from the Sikhs in the\nyear 1849. A. D. It was, too, the line, which according to Lord\nLawrence should be a definite line beyond the English should not\nproceed westwards. But as the historical records show, most reg-\nretfully due to the military minded officers of the English, bent\non imperial expension, did not accept the wise advice of their\nbetter minds and impelled by the theme Forward Policy proceded\nforward into the tribal regions of mountais; and from 1879. A.\nD. entered into a policy of aggrersion. Their hidden desire, of\ncourse, was the boundry line should terminate at Kabul, Ghazni","chars":2263,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00081.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/81","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/81","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_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."}}