Pashtunistan
Pashtunistan or Pakhtunistan is a historical region on the crossroads of Central and South Asia, located on the Iranian Plateau, inhabited by the Pashtun people of southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, wherein Pashtun culture, the Pashto language, and identity have been based. Alternative names historically used for the region include Pashtūnkhwā or Pakhtūnkhwā, or simply the Pashtun Belt.
During British rule in India in 1893, Mortimer Durand drew the Durand Line, fixing the limits of the spheres of influence between the Emirate of Afghanistan and British India during the Great Game and leaving about half of historical Pashtun territory under British colonial rule; after the partition of British India, the Durand Line now forms the internationally recognized border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The traditional Pashtun homeland stretches roughly from the areas south of the Amu River in Afghanistan to the areas west of the Indus River in Pakistan; it predominantly comprises the southwestern, eastern and some northern and western districts of Afghanistan, as well as most of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan in Pakistan. The region is bordered by Punjab and Hazara to the east, Balochistan to the south, Kohistan and Chitral to the north, and Hazarajat and Tajik-inhabited territory to the west.
The 16th-century revolutionary Ormur leader Bayazid Pir Roshan of Waziristan and the 17th-century "warrior-poet" Khushal Khan Khattak assembled Pashtun armies to fight against the Mughal Empire in the region. During this time, the eastern parts of Pashtunistan were ruled by the Mughals while the western parts were ruled by Safavid Iran. Pashtunistan first gained an autonomous status in 1709, when Mirwais Hotak successfully revolted against the Safavids in Loy Kandahar. The Pashtuns later achieved unity under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded the Durrani dynasty and established the Afghan Empire in 1747. In the 19th century, however, the Afghan Empire lost large parts of its eastern territory to the Sikh Empire and later the British Empire. Many famous Indian independence activists emerged from the region including Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his anti-colonial Khudai Khidmatgar movement to free the region from British control. In 1969, the autonomous princely states of Swat, Dir, Chitral, and Amb were merged into the Pakistani NWFP. In 2018, the Pashtun-majority Federally Administered Tribal Areas, formerly a federally-controlled buffer zone of Pakistan on the international border with Afghanistan, were merged into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, fully integrating the region with Pakistan proper.
The Pashtuns practice Pashtunwali, the indigenous culture of the Pashtuns, and this remains significant for many Pashtuns. 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. Depending on the source, the ethnic Pashtuns constitute 42-60% of the population of Afghanistan. In neighboring Pakistan they constitute 15.4% percent of over the 241 million population, which includes the Pashtun diaspora in other Pakistani cities and provinces.
Origin of term
The name used for the region during the Middle Ages especially during the High Middle Ages and Late Middle Ages and up until the 20th century was Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a reference to this land by its ethnicity, which were the Afghans, while Pashtunistan is a reference to this land by its language. Mention of this land by the name of Afghanistan predates mention by the name of Pashtunistan, which has been mentioned by Ahmad Shah Durrani in his famous couplet, 14th-century Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta, Mughal Emperor Babur, 16th-century historian Firishta and many others. While mention of Afghans have been mentioned of a community of people, chieftains of tribes of Bactria known as Abgan or Avagana or the exact origin or etymology of the term is not known with some scholars believe it to have been derived with the name Asvakan who were a people living in the Swat valley's then in the regions of Bactria.The Pashto name Pakhtunistan or Pashtunistan evolved originally from the Indian word "Pathanistan", पठानिस्तान ). The concept of Pashtunistan was inspired by the term "Pakhtunkhwa". British Indian leaders, including the Khudai Khidmatgar, started using the word "Pathanistan" to refer to the region, however the word "Pashtunistan" was more popular among Pashtuns.
The native people
The native or indigenous people of Pashtunistan are the Pashtuns, an Iranic ethnic group. Pashtuns are generally mixed with South Asian, Central Asian and European ethnicity. 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. Depending on the region other languages are also spoken such as Dari in Afghanistan and Gujari, Balochi, Hindko, and Urdu in Pakistan.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.
Depending on the source, the ethnic Pashtuns constitute 42-60% of the population of Afghanistan. In neighboring Pakistan they constitute 15.42 percent of the 200 million population, which does not include Pashtun diaspora in other Pakistani cities and provinces. In the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan, Pashto speakers constitute above 73 percent of the population as of 1998.
History
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 age, people of the Western world have nominally explored the area.Arab Muslims arrived in the 7th century and began introducing Islam to the native Pashtun people. The Pashtunistan area later fell to the Turkish Ghaznavids whose main capital was at Ghazni, with Lahore serving as the second power house. The Ghaznavid Empire was then taken over by the Ghorids from today's Ghor, Afghanistan. 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. In the 14th and 15th century, the Timurid dynasty was in control of the nearby cities and towns, until Babur captured Kabul in 1504.
Delhi Sultanate and the Durrani Empire
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 a 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.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, North east Iran, Sindh, Punjab, Baluchistan and Kashmir. 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."
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 was 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.