Afghanistan occupies a strategic crossroads in Central Asia, long traversed by empires yet resistant to lasting external control. Its modern frontiers did not arise from endogenous processes of state formation but from the cartographic imperatives of late nineteenth-century imperial rivalry—a technology of rule imposed without Afghan agency. Within the geopolitical theater of the “Great Game,” Britain and Russia reconstituted Afghanistan as a buffer state, inscribing linear boundaries through successive commissions and treaties. The most consequential was the Durand Line of 1893, an Anglo-Afghan agreement that divided the Pashtun homeland between Afghanistan and British India. Conceived as a defensive frontier for the British Raj, it fractured tribal and ethnic continuities, producing enduring instability. Inheriting the line in 1947, Pakistan found itself tied to the same contested border. The Durand Line remains unrecognized by successive Afghan regimes, exemplifying how colonial cartographies created not neutral boundaries but lasting sources of tension that continue to shape sovereignty, insurgency, and regional geopolitics.