Pashtun history: from the first records to the present

The Pashtuns call themselves Pəx̌tūn (پښتون), plural Pəx̌tānə (پښتانه), and their language Pashto (پښتو), an Iranian language of the north-eastern branch spoken in southern and eastern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. The same word, Pashto, also names their code of conduct. A saying Georg Morgenstierne recorded holds that a Pashtun is the man who has Pashto, and that speaking it is not enough. [1] To Persian and Arabic writers they were Afghans; to Indians they were Pathans, a word Olaf Caroe noted no Pashto speaker used of himself. [1] [6]

Nobody has counted them all. Pakistan's 2023 census found 43,633,946 people whose mother tongue was Pashto, 18.15 per cent of the country. [2] Afghanistan has had no full census for decades; Nancy Hatch Dupree's estimate, written in 1982, was about 4,800,000 Pashtuns living there as farmers and nomads. [3] Since 1893 the two halves of the people have lived on either side of the Durand Line, a border of about 2,250 kilometres. [4] The land itself is described in Pashtun lands, and the people today in Pashtuns today.

The name in the first records

Many writers have tried to find the Pashtuns in Herodotus, who in the fifth century BCE wrote of a Pactyic country on the Indus and a people called Paktues. Morgenstierne rejected the link as phonetically impossible: the Greek letters could not have rendered the Iranian name as it was then pronounced. [1]

The first dated record of the name Afghan is in the Hudud al-Alam, a Persian geography written in 982. It describes Saul, "a pleasant village on a mountain. In it live Afghans", and a king of Ninhar, the later Nangarhar, who had more than thirty wives, "Muslim, Afghan, and Hindi". [5] Its editor Vladimir Minorsky noted that the historian Ibn al-Athir mentions Afghans under the year 976–977. [5] Writing under Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century, al-Biruni and al-Utbi show that the province of Kabul was still not Muslim; Mahmud fought infidel Afghans in the Sulaiman mountains, and in 1192, when Muizz al-Din of Ghor defeated Prithviraj, Afghan horsemen fought on both sides. [6] In 1398 Timur, marching on India, called on Lodis and Sheranis to send him contingents, the first time those tribes appear by name. [6] Babur, who took Kabul in 1504, counted eleven or twelve languages spoken there, among them "Afghānī", and wrote that "to the south are the places of the Afghān tribes". [7]

Qais and the tribal tree

The Pashtuns' own account of their beginnings was first written down in Persian at the Mughal court. In 1609–1611 Khwaja Nimatullah of Herat compiled the Makhzan-i Afghani for the noble Khan Jahan Lodi. In it the Afghans descend from Qais, who went to Medina, accepted Islam from the Prophet and took the name Abdur Rashid (قيس عبد الرشيد); his sons Sarban, Bitan and Ghurghusht fathered the tribes. [8] The hill tribes, among them the Afridi, Khattak, Orakzai and Wazir, were attached to the tree later through the foundling Karlan. [6] The genealogy is set out in Origins of the Pashtuns, with the lines of the Durrani, the Ghilzai and the Gharghasht.

Caroe used al-Biruni and al-Utbi to argue that the story of an early conversion could not be true, since Kabul was not Muslim four centuries after Qais's supposed death. He also insisted that the trees record something real, what the tribes believe about their cousinship, and that every malik knew his own to the last twig. [6]

Afghan sultans of Delhi, 1451–1555

The first large state under Pashtun rulers lay far from their hills. In 1451 the Lodis, part of a wider movement of Afghan tribes into the Punjab and the Ganges plain, took the throne of Delhi from the Sayyid dynasty. [9] Caroe counted the Lodis, and the earlier Khalji sultans, as Ghilzai; M. Jamil Hanifi finds no conclusive evidence tying either dynasty to the Ghilzai. [6] [16] Their founder, Bahlul Lodi (r. 1451–1489), invited every Afghan of Roh, the Pashtun hill country, to take land in his service, and Abbas Khan Sarwani wrote that they came "every day, every month, and every year". [10] Caroe gives the tribes that answered: mostly Lodi, Lohani, Niazi, Marwat and Bhittani, with some Sarbanri and Karlanri. [6]

The Lodi kingdom ended at Panipat. Babur heard that Sultan Ibrahim Lodi had 100,000 men and about 1,000 elephants. On Friday 20 April 1526 the Lodi army attacked Babur's line of 700 carts lashed together with rawhide, was surrounded and broken soon after noon, and Ibrahim's head was brought in that afternoon. Babur first estimated the dead at 15,000 to 16,000, and later heard in Agra that 40,000 or 50,000 may have died. [7]

Fourteen years later an Afghan was back on the throne. Sher Shah Suri, whose grandfather had come from the Gomal in Bahlul's time, beat Humayun in 1539 and 1540 and drove him out of India. [10] [11] Sarwani describes Sher Shah questioning new recruits in Pashto at the muster and paying more to men who answered well and drew a bow well, saying, "I reckon the Afghan tongue as a friend." [10] The Sur kingdom lasted ten years after his death in 1545; the Mughals returned in 1555. [11] A century later Khushal Khan Khattak looked back on it in a poem Caroe translated:

I hear the story of Bahlol and Sher Shah That in days gone by Pathans were Kings in Hind; For six or seven generations theirs was the Kingdom, And all the world wondered at them! [6]

The hills against the Mughals

While Afghans ruled in Delhi, the tribes at home were moving. The Yusufzai, by their own chronicles, left the Kabul country after the Timurid prince Ulugh Beg killed most of their maliks at a feast between 1480 and 1490, and took the Peshawar valley from the Dilazak; Caroe dates the deciding battle, at Katlang, to about 1525. [6] Babur already found Yusufzai in Swat in 1519 and asked for Bibi Mubarika, the daughter of one of their chiefs, in marriage "to conciliate the Yūsuf-zāī horde". [7] Akbar's army, under his courtier Raja Birbal, was trapped by the Yusufzai in the passes of Buner in 1586, and Birbal and about 8,000 men were killed. [6] See the Yusufzai.

Religion divided the tribes in the same years. Bayazid Ansari, born at Jalandhar in 1525 to a family from Kaniguram in Waziristan, called himself Pir Roshan, "the apostle of light", and drew Afridi, Orakzai, Mohmand and Bangash followers in Tirah. [6] His Khayr al-Bayan is, in Mikhail Pelevin's words, "the oldest of all the works in Pashto preserved up to the present day". [12] His son Jalala took Ghazni in 1599, and his grandson Ihdad held the Sampagha pass against the Mughals until he was killed; his head was sent to Jahangir in 1626. [6] For the tribes of Tirah, see the Orakzai.

The largest rising came in 1672. That spring the Afridi, Mohmand, Shinwari and Safi blocked the Khyber at the edge of the Loargai plateau and destroyed the army of the Mughal governor of Kabul, Muhammad Amin Khan; Caroe names the Afridi chiefs Aimal Khan and Darya Khan as its leaders. [6] Khushal Khan Khattak (1613–1689), chief of the Khattaks and a Mughal officer until then, joined the rebels, and Aurangzeb came north to Attock to direct the war himself. [13] Khushal's best-known line comes from those years:

د افغان په ننګ مې وتړله توره

I girded on the sword for the honour of the Afghans. [14] [13]

The war is told in the Afridi and the Khyber Pass. Its younger contemporary in verse was Rahman Baba, a Mohmand of the Ghoriah Khel at Hazar Khani near Peshawar, who with the poet Hamid wrote on the deaths of Gul Khan and Jamal Khan, which H. G. Raverty dated to 1711. [15] The written tradition as a whole is traced in Pashto literature and oral poetry.

The Hotaks and the Durrani empire, 1709–1793

In the west the Pashtuns lived between the Safavids and the Mughals, who took Kandahar from each other several times. The Abdali backed Persia and the Ghilzai opposed it, and after Shah Abbas I moved Abdali families to Herat, the Hotak tribe of the Ghilzai became the strongest group around the city. [16] Its chief, Mir Wais, was Kandahar's kalantar and ran the caravan traffic between Iran and India for the Safavids. In 1709 he killed the Georgian governor Gorgin Khan, and a Ghilzai rising freed southern Afghanistan from Safavid control. [17] [19] His son Mahmud invaded Persia, beat the Safavid army at Gulnabad on 8 March 1722 and took Isfahan on 23 October after a six-month siege, by which time its people were eating bark and leaves. [18] Nadir Shah drove the Afghans out of Persia in 1729 and took Kandahar from the last Hotak ruler, Shah Husayn, in 1738, deporting him and many Ghilzai to Mazandaran. [16] The story is told in the Hotak dynasty.

Nadir trusted the Abdali and gave them the Ghilzai lands. When he was murdered on 9 June 1747, the commander of his Pashtun contingent of 4,000 men, Ahmad Khan of the Sadozai, was chosen king by a jirga of Pashtun chiefs and crowned near Kandahar in October. [19] In Ganda Singh's account the chiefs met eight times without agreeing, until a darvesh, Sabir Shah, spoke for the youngest and quietest candidate and put barley shoots in his turban as a royal plume. [20] Ahmad took the title Durr-i Durran, pearl of pearls, and the Abdali became the Durrani. [19] Afghans still call him Ahmad Shah Baba (احمد شاه بابا). [20]

Balland dates the definite appearance of an Afghan state, independent of both Persia and the Mughals, to 1747. [19] At its height it ran from the Amu Darya to the Sea of Oman and from Khorasan to the Ganges plain; Ahmad Shah took Delhi in 1757 and, on 14 January 1761, beat the Maratha army at Panipat, where 28,000 bodies were counted the next morning. [19] [20] He lost Lahore to the Sikhs in 1765 and died on 16 October 1772. His son Timur moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul in 1775, and after Timur's death in 1793 his sons fought over the throne for half a century. [19] See Ahmad Shah and the Durrani state and Kandahar.

Barakzai amirs and British wars, 1826–1901

The Sadozai lost the throne to the Barakzai, another Durrani tribe. Dost Mohammad Khan took effective control of Kabul in 1826. [21] By then Ranjit Singh's Sikh kingdom had taken Multan, Kashmir and the Derajat, and in May 1834 it annexed Peshawar, the Durrani winter capital. [19] [6] On 30 April 1837 Dost Mohammad's son Akbar Khan attacked the new Sikh fort at Jamrud, at the mouth of the Khyber, and the Sikh governor Hari Singh was mortally wounded. [6]

Britain, allied to Ranjit Singh and worried about Russia, invaded Afghanistan to restore the Sadozai Shah Shuja. [27] Kandahar fell without a fight on 25 April 1839 and Kabul on 7 August. [19] The occupation lasted until a rising in Kabul in November 1841. On 6 January 1842 the Kabul garrison of 4,500 British and Indian soldiers marched out with about 12,000 camp followers, and the column was destroyed on the road to Jalalabad. [23] [19] M. Jamil Hanifi identifies the Jabar Khel Ghilzai as the men who inflicted the heaviest losses. [16] Dost Mohammad came back to rule, and when he died at Herat on 9 June 1863 he had brought most of present-day Afghanistan under one government. [21] The wars are told in the Anglo-Afghan wars and the city at the end of the retreat in Jalalabad.

The second war began on 21 November 1878, after a British mission was turned back in the Khyber. [22] The Treaty of Gandamak of 26 May 1879 gave Britain control of Afghan foreign relations and the Khyber, Kurram and Pishin. [24] On 27 July 1880 Ayub Khan's army destroyed a British brigade at Maiwand, west of Kandahar. [22] Afghan tradition holds that a young woman, Malalai, took up a fallen standard and shouted landays at the faltering ranks; William Dalrymple notes that she "does not appear in any British account of the Battle of Maiwand". [25]

The British settled on Abdur Rahman, Dost Mohammad's grandson, as amir in July 1880. [22] Abdur Rahman Khan spent his reign crushing revolts. The Ghilzai rising lasted until 1887 and ended with large numbers of Ghilzai forced to settle in the north. [19] [16] Hasan Kawun Kakar records that, by the amir's own reckoning, more than 100,000 people were killed under his rule. [26]

The Durand Line and the Frontier, 1893–1947

On 12 November 1893 Sir Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary of the Government of India, and Abdur Rahman agreed "the frontier of Afghanistan on the side of India". [27] In the amir's own summary he received Wakhan, Kafiristan, Asmar and part of Waziristan, and gave up his claims to lands that included Kurram, the Afridi country, Bajaur, Swat, Buner, Dir, Chitral and the rest of Waziristan, and his British subsidy rose from 12 to 18 lakhs of rupees a year. [28] Before the talks he had warned the viceroy that cutting away "these frontier tribes who are people of my nationality and my religion" would weaken him in his subjects' eyes. [28] James Norris notes that Afghans tend to describe the line as the product of unequal treaties. [27]

On the British side the tribes kept their own country. In August 1897 the Afridi took the Khyber posts and sacked the serai at Landi Kotal, and Sir William Lockhart led an army into Tirah. [29] In 1901 Peshawar became the capital of a new North-West Frontier Province. [29] Cases of blood feud and honour could be sent under the Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1872 to a jirga (جرګه) of elders, which Caroe called "a sort of tribal jury". [6]

In Kabul, Amanullah Khan took the throne in February 1919 and declared Afghanistan independent; the third war with Britain followed in May, and the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919 ended what Balland calls Britain's forty-year protectorate. [22] [19] Amanullah's reforms set off a revolt, and he abdicated on 14 January 1929. When he marched back from Kandahar, a Ghilzai attack turned him back at Ghazni on 19 April 1929, and Balland reads his fall as a resurgence of the old rivalry between the two great confederations. [19]

Across the line, Bacha Khan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan of Utmanzai, started the Pashto journal Pakhtun in May 1928. [30] In November 1929 his followers formed the Khudai Khidmatgar (خدايي خدمتګار), the Servants of God, a movement sworn to nonviolence and known in English as the Red Shirts. [31] On 23 April 1930 troops fired on a crowd in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar; the British figure was 179 dead and injured, against independent estimates of about 400 killed. [32]

Partition and the Pashtunistan dispute, 1947–1978

In 1947 the Frontier Province voted in a referendum on whether to join India or Pakistan. Ghaffar Khan had asked for the question to be "Pakhtunistan or Pakistan?", and when that was refused his movement boycotted the vote; he later wrote that the Muslim League still won only half the votes, with police and soldiers casting forged ballots. [30] Caroe, governor of the province in 1946–47, wrote that the Frontier Province became part of Pakistan on 15 August 1947 "with every sign of enthusiasm", and that the tribes up to the Durand Line followed in November, declaring their loyalty in open jirga. [6] On 12 August 1948 police fired on Khudai Khidmatgar marchers at Babra in Charsadda; Khan Shehram Eusufzye puts the dead at about 600. [33]

Kabul then claimed that the Durand Line had lapsed with British rule. Caroe described the claim moving from a demand that the Pashtun country up to the Indus revert to Afghanistan to a call for a separate Pathan state, Pakhtunistan, carved out of Pakistan, while Kabul said nothing about the Pashto-speaking lands inside Afghanistan. [6] Afghanistan kept demanding a referendum on the status of "Pashtunistan" after 1947. Under Mohammad Daud, prime minister from 1953, the dispute grew until in 1961 the two countries broke off relations and closed the border, and Afghan trade had to be rerouted, mostly through the Soviet Union. Daud fell over it on 3 March 1963, and came back as president of a republic after a coup on 17 July 1973. [19]

War since 1978

On 27 April 1978 a communist coup killed Daud and his family and put Nur Mohammad Taraki at the head of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Balland describes Taraki as a Ghilzai of rural and provincial background. [19] Three of the four presidents after 1978 were Ghilzai: Taraki, Hafizullah Amin and Najibullah. [16] Amin had Taraki killed in September 1979, and on 27 December 1979 the Soviet army intervened. [19] By the end of 1979 at least a million Afghans had reached Pakistan, and by 1990 Pakistan counted 3.2 million registered refugees, many of them in 334 camps in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Punjab. [34]

The last Soviet troops left in 1989, and Najibullah's government fell in 1992. [35] In Kandahar the mujahidin commanders who took over in 1992 ran what Antonio Giustozzi calls Afghanistan's worst-administered province, with bandits on the roads and the schools closed. [36] The Taliban took the city in 1994 and Kabul in 1996. [36] [35] Their leader, Mullah Omar, elected commander of the faithful by an assembly of ulama in April 1996, stayed in Kandahar, and key decisions were taken there. [36] After the American bombing that began in October 2001, Kandahar was the last city the Taliban gave up. [35] [36] On 15 August 2021 Taliban fighters entered Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country; Jalalabad had surrendered to them without a fight. [37]

The borderland since 2010

In April 2010 Pakistan's parliament passed the 18th amendment to the constitution, which renamed the North-West Frontier Province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [38] In the 2023 census 81 per cent of its people gave Pashto as their mother tongue. [40] The tribal agencies along the Durand Line stayed under separate rule until President Mamnoon Hussain signed the 25th Constitution Amendment on 31 May 2018, merging the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [39] Under the amendment the National Assembly fell from 342 seats to 336, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's share rose from 43 to 45, and the Senate was to shrink from 104 members to 96 when the eight senators of the tribal areas retired in 2024. [39]