Kuchi and powinda nomads of Afghanistan

At a glance

• Kuchi is an Afghan Persian word for a person who migrates, from kuch, migration. In Afghanistan it now names all the pastoral nomads, most of them Pashtun. In the south the older Pashtun name is powinda, "grazer". [4, 5]

• Most Pashtuns were never nomads. Richard Tapper, who lived among Durrani herders in the north, wrote that the nomads were Pashtuns from many tribes, "especially from the two great confederations of the Durrani and Ghilji", but that "the vast majority of Pashtuns were not nomads". [5]

• Nobody has an exact count. A ministry guessed 2.4 million nomads in 1960, which the demographer Daniel Balland calls grossly inflated. The preparatory survey of 1978 counted 788,200 people. A national assessment in 2003 and 2004 counted 2,426,304. [4, 8]

• After Abdur Rahman's army crushed the Hazara revolt of 1891 to 1893, Ahmadzai and Mohmand nomads received the right to graze the highland pastures of Hazarajat. Whether that right still stands is the centre of the quarrel between Kuchis and Hazaras. [4, 6, 9]

• Ten seats of the lower house of parliament were reserved for Kuchis by the electoral decree of 2005. The constitution of 2004 names nomads in four articles but does not set those seats. [3, 4]

Two names for one way of life

Richard Tapper, an anthropologist at the School of Oriental and African Studies who did fieldwork in northern Afghanistan between 1968 and 1972, found that few nomads then called themselves Kuchi. Those in the south, west and north said maldar, herd-owner, a word a settled stock-keeper could also use. In the south the specific word for a nomad was powinda, which Tapper says referred to pastoral work and not to movement. [5] Among town-bred Pashtuns, he adds, Kuchi was a slighting word, "rather like 'gypsy' in the UK". [5]

The name has since spread. Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, writing in 2013, says the government and every outside agency now use it for all nomads. [4] He gives the Pashto verb as kuch kawel, and the two ends of the route as qishlaq and yailaq, in Pashto zangura and elband, the winter and the summer quarters. [4] Some nomads do use the Pashto form kuchey of themselves. The anthropologist Gorm Pedersen found it so among the Zala Khan Khel Ahmadzai, whom he studied in 1975 and 1976 and again as refugees in 1986. [5]

The Pashto writer Habibullah Ghamkhor, who says he worked with Kuchis for about seven years, writes the word کوچيان (kuchiyan, Kuchis) and says their great majority are Pashtuns. [1] He answers a Dari writer who had said that nomadism has no long history in Afghanistan and was fostered by despotic governments. His reply sets out the Pashtun case as he sees it: the Kuchis are citizens of the country, the highlands are old Kuchi pasture, and the blame for Afghanistan's insecurity lies elsewhere. [1]

Which tribes

Ghamkhor names Ahmadzai, Taraki, Mullakhel, Nasir, Utmanzai, Sulaiman Khel, Kharoti, Andar, Hotak and Tokhi among the tribes of which millions still live as Kuchis. He divides Pashtun Kuchis into Durrani and Ghilzai and says their way of life does not differ between the two. [1] Radio Free Afghanistan, in a report by the journalist Abubakar Siddique in 2021, describes Kuchis or Pawindas as Pashtun nomads from more than a dozen tribes of the Ghilzai group. [10] Foschini notes that "Powindah" has been used for Durrani and Ghilzai nomads alike, and occasionally for migrating sections of the Mohmand. [4]

The Ghilzai nomads who walked the Gomal and Zhob roads to the Indus plain in winter, Kharoti, Nasir and Sulaiman Khel among them, are told in the Gomal pass, the Zhob valley and the powinda road. The Ahmadzai nomads live and move near Kabul, Tapper says, and Foschini names the Tarakhel and Mullakhel among them. [4, 5]

Durrani nomads belong mostly to the north and west. Tapper's hosts were Durrani Pashtuns in the north whose ancestors had arrived around 1900, and they called themselves maldar and valued their Durrani identity far above nomadism. [5] Foschini, citing Nancy Tapper, says Abdur Rahman moved thousands of Pashtun households from Farah, Helmand and Kandahar to the north-west, many of them herders who then wintered in the lowlands of Badghis, Faryab and Sar-e Pul. [4] In the west, Bernt Glatzer and Michael Casimir wrote in the 1970s that Pashtun nomads "do not consider themselves as a distinct social group", and separated the watani maldar, tied to a winter homeland, from the kuchi maldar, who had no such tie. [5]

The year on the road

A Kuchi year runs between low winter ground and high summer ground. Haji Abdul Manan, a 70-year-old tribal leader whose family settled in Ghazni about ten years before, remembers the bells on the camels and goats as the caravan moved up from the plains of Kandahar and Helmand to the mountain meadows of Ghazni, several hundred kilometres each year. [10] Foschini writes that groups with winter quarters in Nangarhar and Laghman took the summer road to Hazarajat and Panjshir. [4]

Ghamkhor says the highlands were Kuchi pasture long before the quarrels, and says so in Pashto:

د افغانستان مرکزي سيمه او د هندوکش لمني له لرغونو زمانو راهيسي د کوچيانو د دوبي څړځايونه او ورشوګاني وې.

Da Afghanistan markazi sema aw da Hindukush lamne la laghuno zamano rahisi da kuchiyano da dobi tsardzaayuna aw warshogani we.

The central region of Afghanistan and the foothills of the Hindu Kush have been the Kuchis' summer pastures since ancient times. [1]

Kuchis live in black goat-hair tents. Foschini gives the Pashto as kegdey. In parts of the north-east, he says, the Maldar build huts or houses at both ends of their route and the Kuchis use tents at least on the summer pastures, which is why the Kuchis need camels and the Maldar own few. [4] Tapper quotes Thomas Barfield that near Kandahar they are also called powindahs, "literally grazers". [5]

Mohammad Siddiq, a Kuchi, told Siddique that a typical herd was 50 camels and about 400 sheep and goats, which in good years gave a sizeable profit and plenty of milk, cheese, meat and wool. [10] The milk side of the herd is told in qurut and the dairy of the herders.

Trade and credit

The nomads carried goods as well as flocks. Foschini says that until the years before the Soviet invasion of 1979 trade was a main part of Afghan nomadism, run by big merchants who had given up herding and by herders doing small trade along the route. [4] The winter camps on the Indus plain were a market: the nomads sold surplus livestock, wool and hair, horses, fur, fruit and carpets, and bought salt, tea, sugar, second-hand clothes, cheap ironware and kerosene. The Afghan state rarely taxed this trade. British India taxed it, with some success. [4]

In Hazarajat the trade became credit. The nomads were often the only people with cash. Foschini says they paid in advance for a share of the coming harvest and acted as moneylenders, and when a debtor could not pay they took his land and leased it back to him for a share of the crop, so that some families became large landowners. [4] Pedersen wrote that well-armed nomads had a government-sanctioned predominance that made "the exploitation of the Hazara in trade relations even easier". [4]

The border broke the trade. Foschini says the Pakistani market was finally lost when the frontier was sealed between 1961 and 1963 over the Pashtunistan question. Lorries then carried town merchants' goods into the highlands, and the government closed or taxed the nomads' summer bazaars, so that nomad trade declined from the mid-1960s. [4]

The grants in Hazarajat

The Hazara uprising of 1891 to 1893 is the hinge of the story. Abdur Rahman wrote in his memoirs that other Afghan chiefs had asked more than once to raise a force of country people at their own expense against the Hazaras, "whom they looked upon as enemies to their country and religion", that he had refused until then, and that he then gave a general order allowing anyone to go and help in "the punishment of the rebels". He puts the armed forces and volunteers together at between 30,000 and 40,000 fighting men. [2]

The Danish anthropologist Klaus Ferdinand recorded how Ahmadzai nomads remembered it. One old Ahmadzai khan told him that Abdur Rahman asked the Mohmand and Ahmadzai to fight the Hazaras with the words "Heads will be mine, and all property will be yours", and that afterwards a qazi, Yaqub Ali, divided the grazing lands among the Kuchi chiefs, who "got as much land as they wanted, grazing lands as well as farmlands". [6] Ferdinand's own reading is that the highest parts were divided among the Pashtun nomads and the warmer valleys among settled Afghans. [6] The Norwegian country-information service Landinfo, drawing on Ferdinand's book of 2006, says it was mainly Mohmand and Ahmadzai who received these rights in Behsud. [9]

The grants did not stay as they were. The same khan told Ferdinand that under Habibullah (1901 to 1919) the Ahmadzai told the government they could not cultivate the land at that altitude, and the government let the Hazaras return. Under Amanullah the old decrees were withdrawn from the Ahmadzai and Mohmand and replaced by vaguer ones that gave the nomads only the high ground above the cultivated valleys. The nomads held that those later decrees were still in force. [6]

The two sides read this differently, and Landinfo sets the readings side by side. The Kuchis say they have been nomads there for more than 300 years and that the decrees only confirmed what they already did. The Hazaras say the decrees are invalid, among other reasons because they were annulled under Habibullah. [9] A Kuchi tribal chief, Qalai Qalan, told Agence France-Presse in 2008: "this land belongs to us. It was given to us more than 130 years ago by the king -- we have documents to prove it." [11] Foschini's Hazara informants draw a line between land the Kuchis bought, which they would recognise, and the pastures, and they do not accept Abdur Rahman's decrees, which they see as part of a campaign of conquest. [4]

Counting the nomads

The numbers have always been argued. A national survey of 1960 added a ministry of the interior estimate of 2.4 million nomads, which Balland, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, calls grossly inflated. A survey among nomads in 1974 gave a preliminary 1.2 million, half the official guess, and its detailed results were never released. [8]

The best figures come from the preparatory survey of 1978. It counted 140,760 nomad households, which at 5.6 people each is 788,200 people. The Afghan authorities refused to recognise it. Balland's critical reading is that it was fairly accurate, undercounting nomads by about 5 per cent and semi-nomads by about 25 per cent, and that the absolute maximum was about 1 million. The government kept claiming 2.5 million, and cut the claim to 1.5 million from 1984. [8]

After the wars the National Multi-Sectoral Assessment on Kuchi of 2003 and 2004 counted 2,426,304 Kuchis, or 2,588,719 with those then in Pakistan. It put 52 per cent as long-range migrants, 33 per cent as short-range and 15 per cent as settled. Foschini calls its figures far more realistic than the seven million given by the Independent Directorate of Kuchi Affairs and the Kuchi parliamentary commission. [4] Tapper judged the Ministry of Tribal Affairs's claim of over 16 per cent of the population exaggerated at least twice over. [5] Radio Free Afghanistan gave 1.5 million in 2021 and said only about a third still live as nomads. [10]

War, drought and settlement

Foschini writes that nomads suffered badly in the war that followed the communist coup of 1978. Frontlines cut their routes, air strikes and landmines killed flocks, and the arming of the countryside made them easy prey for local commanders. By the mid-1980s many nomad households had gone to Pakistan. [4] Kuchis told him they lost animals in the refugee camps, where they could not move to the summer pastures. [4]

The drought of 1999 to 2001 finished much of the herd. Foschini cites estimates by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization that the country's sheep and goats fell from 31 million in 1995 to under 5 million in 2001, and says Kuchis owned perhaps over a third of them. [4] The 2003 assessment found about 50 sheep and goats per Kuchi household, half the 100 that Foschini's experts say a household needs, and loss of livestock was the commonest reason given, at 79 per cent, for not going to the summer pastures. [4] Many families moved to the edges of cities. Deh Sabz, east of Kabul, once a halt on the spring route, is now occupied all year by Kuchi families. [4]

Siddiq told Radio Free Afghanistan that repeated droughts forced Kuchis to sell camels and buy tractors, which keep them to roads. [10] Haji Gulmiran, a Kuchi leader in Nangarhar, said: "We lost access to pastures on the other side of the fence [in Pakistan] while here we have lost meadows and grasslands to housing and farming." Pakistan's fence is over 2,500 kilometres long. [10]

Seats and ministries

The constitution of 2004 mentions nomads in four places. Article 14 says the state shall design programmes for the "nomads' livelihood", Article 44 for their education, Article 84 has the president appoint two nomads among the members of the House of Elders, and Article 140 leaves their part in local councils to law. [3] It does not set aside seats in the lower house. Those come from the electoral decree of 2005, repeated in 2010, which reserves ten seats in the Wolesi Jirga, filled from one nationwide Kuchi constituency. Tapper counts three of the ten as women's seats. [4, 5]

There was an earlier quota. During the "Decade of Democracy" of 1964 to 1973 Kuchis had five representatives in the elected lower house, according to Louis Dupree as Foschini cites him. [4] Ghamkhor says that the parliament under Najibullah's government also had Kuchi seats, nearly twenty by his count, and that narrow-minded objectors opposed him then too. [1]

Critics say the single constituency creates a block of votes held by allies of the government, and some non-Pashtun politicians say the ten seats are in effect reserved for Pashtuns, since all ten Kuchis elected in 2005 and 2010 were Pashtun. [4] When the lower house voted in May 2013 to split the constituency, by 67 votes to 56, the Kuchi MPs walked out and threatened a boycott. [4]

Against the charge that Kuchis pay no tax, Ghamkhor says that in Abdur Rahman's last years Kuchi leaders were summoned to Kabul and ordered to pay zakat on their herds, fourteen mounted officers were appointed to count the powinda herds, and an office called shakh shumari, literally horn-counting, was created. [1]

The pastures dispute since 2004

After 2001 the highlands were closed to most Kuchis. Foschini says the first incidents over pasture and water, with the first deaths, were reported in 2004 in Jaghatu in Ghazni and Behsud in Wardak, and that from 2007 the tension often became open conflict each May and June as Kuchis pressed on the edge of Hazarajat. [4]

Agence France-Presse reported from Behsud in August 2008. Abdul Raza Razahi, a Hazara member of parliament for Wardak, told the agency: "The area does not have the capacity for more than the people who already live here", and said that when Kuchis and their hundreds of thousands of sheep came down "logically fights and looting happens". He said seven people had been killed that year and 1,500 homes abandoned. Hazara villagers there said Taliban men had come with the Kuchis. A Kuchi chief at the camp replied that the Hazaras had attacked first. [11]

In 2009, an election year, the government paid Kuchi leaders to keep the nomads away from Hazarajat, Foschini says. In spring 2010 between 500 and 1,000 armed Kuchis entered the Hazara half of Daimirdad, most of the population left, and more than 2,500 families were displaced. [4] The Hazara leader Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq said in 2010 that he would go on hunger strike unless the Kuchis were removed. Alam Gul Kuchi, a Kuchi member of parliament, is quoted as answering that the Hazaras "started the dispute and now that they are defeated they are complaining", and that "I will reclaim the [land] as it is a right given by God". [9] In 2011 elders of both sides agreed that Kuchis could pass if they kept out of villages and fields, but another Hazara faction opposed the deal. [4]

In 1998 and 1999 armed nomads led by Naim Khan, then a Taliban official, entered Hazarajat, collected arrears from former tenants and made debtors sign over land, until Mullah Omar recalled them after Hazara delegations complained. [4]

Since 2021

The Afghanistan Analysts Network reported in December 2022 that in 2022, for the first time since 2001, the route to Hazarajat lay open and more Kuchis than in any earlier year moved in. Hazaras said 1,600 Kuchi families entered the two Behsud districts, while a Kuchi leader gave a figure of more than 300 families for Behsud 1 alone. About 380 armed men went to Panjab, accompanied by the Taliban governor of Bamyan. Kuchis demanded back rent from Hazara tenants, in one case 52,000 afghanis for three years in Waras, and some pressed old debts with interest. [7] Kuchi members of the Taliban's mediation commissions complained that claims based on royal decrees were left undecided, and were told to wait. Foschini says the widespread view among Hazaras is that the authorities largely identify with the Kuchi side. [7]

A report of 2 September 2026 from Behsud says a commission for disputes between Kuchis and settled residents ordered Kuchis to pay 120,000 afghanis to three villagers they were said to have beaten, and ordered a villager to pay 80,000 afghanis to the Kuchis he fought. It also records that a young Hazara farmer was shot dead on 29 July when he confronted armed Kuchis whose animals had entered his field. Residents say Kuchis damage their fields, and Kuchis say they travel by long-held grazing rights. [12]

Nangyalai Lawang, a Kuchi member of the Wolesi Jirga, told Radio Free Afghanistan in 2021 that meetings on helping nomads brought no progress. Noor Jamal Kuchi, a government worker in Ghazni, said: "The last century saw the Kuchis lose whatever they had gained during the past 1,000 years." [10]