ABSTRACT
In 1884 when the Afghan Boundary Commission was already in the field, Lord Dufferin decided to send out two more missions. Although a Liberal he was distinctly more concerned with foreign policy as it affected the defence of India than his predecessor; he realized that India’s northern frontier from Afghanistan eastwards was in a deplorable state of flux of which there were distinct signs that Russia was going to try to take further advantage. The activities of the Regel and Kostenko missions in the western and eastern Pamir were significant, as were Przhevalskiy’s explorations towards Tibet. Indeed Colonel Kostenko had shown in his map and his report that the Pamir was a no-man’s-land and hence ripe for the taking. Ney Elias had already pointed the situation out in a memorandum dated 1882, probably after reading Kostenko’s report. He had commented that all the territory south and east of the Chinese district of Sarikol as well as Badakhshan, Shughnan and Wakhan were entirely open to the Russians ‘if it suited their convenience or ambition… and that the time when the British red line and the Russian green one shall meet on the map of Central Asia seems within measurable distance’. If that had happened we have only to recall the Russian harassment of Herat to realize how she would have intrigued amongst the Indian hill states on the other side of her border.
