Pashtunistan (Pashto: پښتونستان) is a historical region inhabited by the indigenous Pashtun people of modern-day Afghanistan and western Pakistan, wherein Pashtun culture, the Pashto language, and Pashtun national identity all comes under Pashtunistan.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
Alternative names historically used for the region include Pashtunkhwa (پښتونخوا), Pakhtunistan or Pathanistan.
BORDERS
Pashtunistan borders the geographical regions of Turkestan to the north, Kashmir to the northeast, Punjab to the east, and Balochistan to the south.
NATIVES
The native or indigenous people of Pashtunistan are the Pashtuns (also known as Pakhtuns, Pathans and historically as ethnic Afghans), an Iranic ethnic group.
They are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan. The Pashtuns are concentrated mainly in the south and east of Afghanistan but also exist in northern and western parts of the country as a minority group. In Pakistan they are concentrated in the west and north-west, inhabiting mainly Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan.
In addition, communities of Pashtuns are found in other parts of Pakistan such as Sindh, Punjab, Gilgit-Baltistan and in the nation’s capital, Islamabad.
The main language spoken in the delineated Pashtunistan region is Pashto followed by others such as Balochi, Hindko, Gojri, and Urdu.
The Pashtuns practice Pashtunwali, the indigenous culture of the Pashtuns, and this pre-Islamic identity remains significant for many Pashtuns and is one of the factors that have kept the Pashtunistan issue alive. Although the Pashtuns are politically separated by the Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan, many Pashtun tribes from the FATA area and the adjacent regions of Afghanistan, tend to ignore the border and cross back and forth with relative ease to attend weddings, family functions, and take part in the joint tribal councils known as jirgas.
Though this was common before the war on terror but after several military operations conducted in FATA, this cross-border movement is checked via military and has become much less common in comparison to the past.
Let’s find out about the history of Pashtunistan which includes:
PRE-ISLAMIC ERA
Since the 2nd millennium BC, the region now inhabited by the native Pashtun people had been conquered by Ancient Iranian peoples, the Medes, Achaemenids, Greeks, Mauryas, Kushans, Hephthalites, Sasanians, Arab Muslims, Turks, Mughals, and others. In recent ages, people of the Western world have nominally explored the area.
ARRIVAL OF ARABS
Arab Muslims arrived in the 7th century and began introducing Islam to the native Pashtun people.
GHAZNAVIDS
The Pashtunistan area later fell to the Turkish Ghaznavids whose main capital was at Ghazni, with Lahore serving as the second power house.
GHORIDS
The Ghaznavid Empire was then taken over by the Ghorids from today’s Ghor, Afghanistan.
DEFEAT OF GENGHIS KHAN BY KHILJIS
The army of Genghis Khan arrived in the 13th century and began destroying cities in the north while the Pashtun territory was defended by the Khalji dynasty of Delhi.
TIMURIDS
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Timurid dynasty was in control of the nearby cities and towns, until Babur captured Kabul in 1504.
MUGHAL EMPIRE AND PASHTUNISTAN
During the Delhi Sultanate era, the region was ruled by mainly Afghan and various, largely Sunni, Hanafi-jurisprudential-driven Turkic dynasties from Delhi, India.
An early Pashtun nationalist was the “Warrior-poet” Khushal Khan Khattak, who was imprisoned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for trying to incite the Pashtuns to rebel against the rule of the Mughals.
However, despite sharing a common language and believing in common ancestry, the Pashtuns first achieved unity in the 18th century.
The eastern parts of Pashtunistan were ruled by the Mughal Empire, while the western parts were ruled by the Persian Safavids as their easternmost provinces.
During the early 18th century, Pashtun tribes led by Mirwais Hotak successfully revolted against the Safavids in the city of Kandahar. In a chain of events, he declared Kandahar and other parts of what is now southern Afghanistan independent.
By 1738 the Mughal Empire had been crushingly defeated and their capital sacked and looted by forces of a new Iranian ruler; the military genius and commander Nader Shah. Besides Persian, Turkmen, and Caucasian forces, Nader was also accompanied by the young Ahmad Shah Durrani, and 4,000 well-trained Abdali Pashtun troops from what is now Afghanistan.
AHMAD SHAH DURRANI’S ERA
After the death of Nader Shah in 1747 and the disintegration of his massive empire, Ahmad Shah Durrani created his own large and powerful Durrani Empire, which included all of modern-day Afghanistan, Northeast Iran, Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan, and Kashmir.
FAMOUS COUPMET OF ABDALI
The famous couplet by Ahmad Shah Durrani describes the association the people have with the regional city of Kandahar: “Da Dili takht herauma cheh rayad kam zama da khkule Pukhtunkhwa da ghre saroona”
Translation: “I forget the throne of Delhi when I recall the mountain peaks of my beautiful Pukhtunkhwa.”
DURRANI EMPIRE
The last Afghan Empire was established in 1747 and united all the different Pashtun tribes as well as many other ethnic groups. Parts of the Pashtunistan region around Peshawar were invaded by Ranjit Singh and his Sikh army in the early part of the 19th century, but a few years later they were defeated by the British Raj, the new powerful empire which reached the Pashtunistan region from the east.
BARAKZAI DYNASTY
Following the decline of the Durrani dynasty and the establishment of the new Barakzai dynasty in Afghanistan, the Pashtun domains began to shrink as they lost control over other parts of South Asia to the British, such as the Punjab region and the Balochistan region.
ANGLO-AFGHAN WARS
The Anglo-Afghan Wars were fought as part of the overall imperialistic Great Game that was waged between the Russian Empire and the British.
Poor and landlocked, newly-born Afghanistan was able to defend its territory and keep both sides at bay by using them against each other.
DURAND LINE
In 1893, as part of a way for fixing the limit of their respective spheres of influence, the Durand Line Agreement was signed between Afghan “Iron” Amir Abdur Rahman and British Viceroy Mortimer Durand.
In 1905, the North-West Frontier Province (today’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) was created and roughly corresponded to Pashtun majority regions within the British domain.
The FATA area was created to further placate the Pashtun tribesmen who never fully accepted British rule and were prone to rebellions, while the city of Peshawar was directly administered as part of a British protectorate state with full integration into the federal rule of law with the establishment of civic amenities and the construction of the railway, road infrastructure as well as educational institutes to bring the region at par with the developed world.
KHUDAI KHIDMATGARS AND BACHA KHAN
The Khudai Khidmatgars (also known as the “Red Shirts”) were members of a civil rights movement.
Its leader Bacha Khan claimed to have been inspired by the Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi. While the Red Shirts were willing to work with the Indian National Congress from a political point of view, the Pashtuns living in the NWFP desired independence from India. However, the Bacha Khan wanted the Pashtuns areas in British India to remain part of United India instead of gaining independence.
BANNU RESOLUTION
In June 1947, Mirzali Khan (Faqir of Ipi), Bacha Khan, and other Khudai Khidmatgars declared the Bannu Resolution, demanding that the Pashtuns be given a choice to have an independent state of Pashtunistan composing all Pashtun majority territories of British India, instead of being made to join the new state of Pakistan. However, the British Raj refused to comply with the demand of this resolution.
NAMES AFTER PARTITION
Prominent 20th-century proponents of the Pashtunistan cause have included Khan Abdul Wali Khan and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
Ghaffar Khan stated in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in 1948 that he simply wanted “the renaming of his province as Pashtunistan same like Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan are the names of provinces of Pakistan as ethnolinguistic names.
Another name mentioned is Afghania where the initial “A” in Choudhary Rahmat Ali Khan’s theory stated in the “Now or Never” pamphlet stands for the second letter in “Pakistan”. However, this name has failed to capture political support in the province.
There was support, however, to rename North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) as Pakhtunkhwa (which translates as “area of Pashtuns”).
Nasim Wali Khan (the wife of Khan Abdul Wali Khan) declared in an interview: “I want an identity. I want the name to change so that Pathans may be identified on the map of Pakistan.”
On 31 March 2010, Pakistan’s Constitutional Reform Committee agreed that the province is named and recognized as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. This is now the official name for the former NWFP.
