Pashtunistan
Since 1947 question of the legitimacy of the Durand Line and Pashtun nationalism have been major concerns in Pak-Afghan relations. These controversies spoiled the relations between the two countries whenever Afghanistan excited sub-nationalism of Pashtunistan in Pakistan, as it did in 1948, 1949, 1955, 1961, and 1973. Such actions led to sporadic border clashes.
The words Pashtunistan [55,000 google hits], Pakhtunistan [31,000], Pashtoonistan [11,000], Pakhtoonistan, Pukhtunistan, and Pathanistan are variants of the same word, adopted form the words Pashtun, Pakhtoon, Pukhtun and Pathan. The hard sound is used in the north, whereas the soft one in the south. The word "Pathan" is the Indian variant adopted by the British.
The Pashtunistan shown on some Afghan maps embraces both territory inhabited by Pathans but also the whole of Balochistan south of Quetta. There is a clear and distinct difference between Baluchis and Pashtuns. The inclusion of Balochistan is strange, since its population consists of Baluchis, Brahuis, Jats, as well as some other peoples, none of who are regarded as Pashtuns.
In the original state named Afghanistan, dating back to 1747, the Pashtun ethnic group constituted an overwhelming majority. Until the late nineteenth century, Afghanistan was a fragile confederation of Pashtun tribes, and the word "Afghan" was used as a synonym for Pashtun.
Even while under the Moghul Empire, native Afghan Pashtun tribes were beginning to gain power and exercise influence over increasing areas of the country. In the 18th century, one of these tribal confederations, the Durrani, was granted authority over their homelands around present-day Kandahar. Their leader, Ahmad Shah Durrani, went on to form a Muslim empire in the late 18thcentury that was second in area only to the Turks' Ottoman Empire. After Ahmad Shah's death, the empire was beset by rebellions on the part of local tribal chiefs, causing Ahmad Shah's son Timur tomove the capital from Kandahar to Kabul in 1776. Ahmad Shah's grandson Zaman seized the throne after his father's death in 1793. Zaman was interested in reestablishing power in India, but the British, who were well established in India by this time, persuaded the Shah of Persia to divert Zaman's attention from India by threatening the western side of his empire. The Shah obliged and Zaman hurried back to Afghanistan in 1800 to defend his land. His own brother, who agreed to work with the Shah, defeated him. This kind of struggle for power - tribe against tribe, family against family, brother against brother -characterizes the inter-tribal relationships among the Afghans, and continued as their territory became crucial to the interests of greater powers, most notably the czarist Russians in the north and the British in the south.
Around 1880, Abdurrahman Khan, a Durrani Pashtun and a fine soldier who had learned military strategy from a British mentor, declared himself Emir of Kabul. During the next 10 years, he engaged in a series of battles with tribal leaders, gaining control over area after area until he controlled almostall of modern Afghanistan. Constrained by the competing dictates of powerful Russian and British empires to his north and south, as well as Persia, Abdurrahman concentrated on establishing a single kingdom. To do so, he had to break the power still held by local tribes. He accomplished this in part by forcing movements of enemy Pashtuns to non-Pashtun areas north of the Hindu Kush, where their descendents still live. Another of his strategies to divide the tribes was to establish provincial governorships withboundaries that did not coincide with tribal boundaries.
Two areas -- Pashtunistan and Baluchistan -- have long complicated Afghanistan's relations with Pakistan. Controversies involving these areas date back to the establishment of the Durand Line in 1893 dividing Pashtun and Baluch tribes living in Afghanistan from those living in what later became Pakistan. The Durand Line is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan - an artificial division that the Afghan Government does not recognize. The Durand Line treaty worked by the British was signed in 1893 and was to stay in force for one hundred years. Even if the treaty were ratified by a legal legislative body in Afghanistan, its validity would have been expired in 1993 and there is no record of it ever having been revived.
The Durand Line generally tried to follow tribal boundaries, e.g., by separating those tribes which go to market to Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu, Tank and Quetta from those with economic links with Khurassan, i.e., those having Kabul, Ghazni, and Kandahar as their market towns. Only in two cases, with the Mohmands and the Waziris, were tribes divided by the new border.
During the time of the British occupation of India, the pashtun nomads [kuchi] were still using the lowlands of India as their winter pastures. The increasing presence of a stable government led to a limitation and regulation of the nomad's movements in the area, which led to a reduction in the number of afghan nomads wintering in India. Trade conventions between Afghanistan and British India caused an increase in formal trade to the expense of the more 'informal trade' carried out by the nomads.
In 1901 the British created a new administrative area, the North-West Frontier Province, which they detached from the Punjab. This new province was divided into Settled Districts and Tribal Agencies, with the latter ruled by a British political agent who reported directly to Delhi. In 1934 Britain extended self-government to the North-West Frontier Province. By this time, the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), which many Muslims saw as a predominately Hindu organization, had expanded its political activities to include the province.
In 1921, the Afghans concluded a treaty of friendship with the new Bolshevik regime in the SovietUnion. Afghanistan became one of the first nations to recognize the Soviet government, and a special relationship evolved between the two governments that lasted until December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Amanullah was open to European influence, and pushed for educational reform and the emancipation of women. These proposals infuriated the Muslim religious leaders, and resulted intribal revolts that led to the seizure of Kabul and Amanullah's abdication in 1929.
Over the next 40 years, a series of cautious and moderate governments under the Afghan monarchy brought political stability to the country, and allowed it to make substantial strides toward modernization and national unity. Always, however, there was substantial resistance to any attemptsat social change from the conservative religious elements of the society. While the monarchy wasalways Pashtun, it was the non-Pashtun, Dari-speaking Afghans who provided the more liberal, Western-looking influences in the country.
The idea of Pashtunistan remains strong in Pakistan's secular Pashtun political party, the Awami National Party (ANP). The ANP is led by Asfandyar Wali Khan, and represents the political descendent of the Khudai Khidmatgar ("Red Shirt") movement of the legendary Abdul Ghafar Khan, the "Frontier Ghandi." Abdul Ghafar Khan of the NWFP, fondly called Badshah (King) Khan, organized the Red Shirt Party, also known as the Khudai Khidmatgar Party, which was officially linked to the Indian National Congress Party. Khan filled the stage as the most prominent nationalist Muslim. The Pashtun nationalistic fervor - the "Pashtunistan movement" - was mainly organized by the Khudai Khidmatgars or 'Red Shirts.'
The Pathan (Pashtoons or Pakhtoons) constitute about sixty percent of the total population of Afghanistan which is about 17.6 million. Their major concentrations are in the provinces along the Durand Line. Both the tribal and settled areas along the Durand Line in Pakistan are also largely populated by Pashtoons. The Kabul rulers tried to make political capital out of this. They asserted affinities with Pashtoons in Pakistan and thereby claimed rights in NWFP up to the Indus river and to the south in Baluchistan upto the Makran Coast including the port of Karachi. In a way they wanted to revive the empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani of the 19th century. That would break the geographical compulsion of the landlocked Afghanistan. For the furtherance of this scheme Kabul government found support from two neighbours of Pakistan, that is, India and the Soviet Union.
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