Pashtuns today: cities, migration, diaspora and media

A people on the move

Many Pashtuns today live far from the mountain valleys usually pictured as their home. Over the past half-century, work and conflict have drawn people to the cities of Pakistan, to the Gulf states and further afield. Numbers are hard to pin down: censuses usually count language rather than ethnic identity, migrants move back and forth, and estimates vary widely. Every figure below is attributed to its source and should be read as an estimate. [1] [2] [4]

Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, has one of the largest urban Pashtun populations anywhere. In a 2018 analysis for Dawn, Azfar-ul-Ashfaque reported that the 1998 census had recorded Pakhtuns as the city's third-largest ethnic group, at 12 per cent, with roughly 1.2 million Pashto speakers in a population of 9.86 million. [1]

The same article put Karachi's Pakhtun population at approximately three million, and gave a rough estimate of 2.4 to 3 million Pashto speakers, based on the 2017 census total of 16.05 million for Karachi division. For comparison, it gave the population of Peshawar as 1.9 million. Dawn also noted a widespread belief that displacement and insecurity in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had made Pakhtuns Karachi's second-largest group, which the available figures could not confirm. [1]

Labour migration to the Gulf

Since the oil boom of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has been the main destination for Pakistani migrant workers. A 2024 doctoral study at the University of Edinburgh by Ismail Khan, based on twelve months of fieldwork among the Pukhtuns of Dir, found that migration there, known locally as musafari (مسافري), is circular and undertaken only by men, many of whom work in construction in Saudi Arabia. [3]

Khan describes how the kafala sponsorship system ties workers to a sponsor, the kafeel, and how the so-called "free visa", which sits in a legal grey area, leaves men open to insecurity and deportation. Earnings are often invested at home in property and vehicles, which in turn reshapes tribal and class hierarchies in the home villages. [3]

Refugees since 1979

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 began what the UN-backed news service IRIN called, in 2012, the world's most protracted refugee crisis. According to IRIN's timeline, at least one million Afghans are estimated to have reached Pakistan by the end of 1979, and by 1980 a total of 3.3 million had fled to Pakistan and Iran. Official Pakistani figures recorded two million registered refugees by 1981 and 3.2 million by 1990, plus an estimated 500,000 unregistered. [2]

As the influx continued, 334 official camps were established in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Punjab. New arrivals followed the fighting of the 1990s and the events of 2001, and by then around five million Afghans had crossed into Pakistan since 1979. Not all were Pashtuns: most of the 30,000 who arrived in 1999, for example, were Hazaras. Between 2002 and 2007 UNHCR helped 2.7 million Afghans return from Pakistan, and an estimated 1.1 million more went home without its help. [2]

Pashto speakers in Britain

Diaspora figures are especially uncertain. The census of England and Wales asks about main language, not ethnic identity. In the 2021 census, Office for National Statistics data show about 48,700 usual residents aged three and over who gave Pashto as their main language. The largest local group was in Birmingham, at almost 7,000, followed by Bradford, Barnet and Harrow. [4]

This is a count of Pashto as a main language, so it leaves out people whose main language is English, including many British-born Pashtuns, and it includes Pashto speakers with roots in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is best read as a lower bound for the community rather than a measure of its size. [4]

Pashto media and the language online

International broadcasting has long served Pashto audiences. The BBC's Pashto service says on its own website that it began broadcasting in August 1982 and soon found large audiences in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf. It began with news and current affairs and later added weekly programmes for young people and women, and on sport, science, literature and music. In 2003 Dari programmes were combined with the Pashto service for Afghan audiences. [5]

The service's website began in a limited way in 1996, offering some programmes in audio only. By the BBC's account, it became in 2001 the first Pashto website in the world to give news summaries in text, and it was expanded in 2004 and again from March 2010, with separate sections on Afghanistan, the world and sport. [5]