How many Pashtuns live in Afghanistan: estimates and disputes

At a glance

• Afghanistan has never published a count of its people by ethnic group. The one national census, taken in June and July 1979, was incomplete, and the prime minister of the day banned its ethnic question the night before it began. [8]

• Published estimates of the Pashtun share run from about 38 per cent to about 63 per cent, and the number depends on who is counting and when: 50 per cent in a 1986 American handbook, 40 per cent in a later Library of Congress study, 42 per cent in the CIA's World Factbook of 2010, and 40 per cent of the people interviewed in the Asia Foundation's 2015 survey. [4, 9, 10, 13]

• The two sides of the argument have each named a figure. A Pashtun research body, the Wak Foundation, gave 62.63 per cent in 1999. Abdullah Abdullah, later Afghanistan's chief executive, said 38 per cent. [2]

• Almost every Afghan survey is weighted to population estimates that are themselves projections, so a survey cannot settle the question. [4, 5]

• Pashtuns are the largest single group on every estimate. Whether they are a majority is the disputed point. [3, 13, 17]

No count, and why

Amir Sher Ali wanted to know how many households could be taxed, and a first count of Kabul was made in 1876. It recorded each resident's ethnic affiliation, but only the totals survive. [8] Abdur Rahman Khan had governors, judges and clergy count several regions in 1890 and 1891, and Daniel Balland, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, judged that this contributed very little to the demographic history of Afghanistan. [8] In 1970 the population of the country was still reported as somewhere between 7 million and 17 million. [8]

The first national census was planned with United Nations money from 1975. It was meant to take place in September 1978, but the coup of April 1978 delayed it, and it was carried out between 15 June and 4 July 1979, in the middle of the rebellion against the communist government. [8] About 80 of the 10,000 census takers, all teachers, were killed by rebels, and the data sheets for the whole of Badghis province were destroyed. [8] Balland's estimate was that coverage was almost complete in the towns, about 40 per cent complete for the settled rural population and 15 per cent for nomads. It was good in the north and in the Durrani south, mediocre in the north-west and bad in the centre and the east. [8] The published count was 13,051,358 settled people. [8]

The ethnic question never reached the published results. On the night before the count began, Prime Minister Nur Mohammad Taraki went on radio and television and banned it, "probably fearing", Balland writes, "that doubt would be cast on the official claim to preeminence for the Pashtun." [8] Balland also shows official figures running well above the surveyed ones: the government kept claiming 2.5 million nomads and a total of 15,551,000, when the real figures were probably about 1 million nomads and about 14 million people. [8] The census data, he wrote, were out of date before they were published, because of the upheavals of the 1980s. [8]

What the estimates said

Before 1979 nobody had a basis for a percentage, but the figure most often repeated was high. The writer Akhilesh Pillalamarri notes that during the monarchy the Pashtun share was frequently put at about 60 per cent. [16] The American handbook of 1986 said an estimated 50 per cent of Afghans were Pashtuns. For the other groups, about 25 per cent Tajik and about 9 per cent each Uzbek and Hazara, it said "the figures were actually guesses." [9]

The Encyclopaedia Iranica gave two numbers in the same volume in 1983. Its entry on ethnography, written in July 1982, put the Pashtuns living in Afghanistan "as agriculturists, nomads, and semi-nomads" at about 4,800,000, and Georg Morgenstierne's entry on Pashto gave "some eight million" Pashto speakers in Afghanistan, and six million in Pakistan. [11, 12] The first figure leaves out town dwellers and the second counts a language, so neither is a share. The Pakistani figure shows how fast such estimates age. Pakistan's census of 2023 counted 43.6 million Pashto speakers (see Pashtuns today). [15]

The 1990s moved the number down. A later Library of Congress study said that "in 1996, approximately 40 per cent of Afghans were Pashtun", 11.4 per cent of them Durrani and 13.8 per cent Ghilzai, with Tajiks at 25.3 per cent and Hazaras at 18 per cent, and added that "the usual caveat regarding statistics is particularly appropriate here." [10] Pillalamarri points out that the estimates were revised after the Soviet-backed government fell in 1992 to an alliance dominated by northern groups: the World Almanac of 2000 gave Pashtuns 38 per cent, Tajiks 25 and Hazaras 19. [16]

The CIA's World Factbook page of December 2010 gave 42 per cent Pashtun, 27 Tajik, 9 Hazara, 9 Uzbek, 4 Aimak, 3 Turkmen and 2 Baloch. [13] The same Factbook page, in 2010, cut its population figure for the country from 33,609,937 to 29,121,286, explaining that the earlier number had been extrapolated from the unfinished census of 1979. [13] Katharine Adeney, a political scientist, took the 42 per cent as a plurality in 2008 and recorded that the CIA put the population at almost 33 million while Afghanistan's own Central Statistics Office had reported 22 million in 2002. [3] A report by the American broadcaster NPR in 2013 gave "between 40 percent and 50 percent". [17]

By 2021 the Factbook had stopped giving percentages for ethnic groups at all. Its entry says that "current, reliable statistical data on ethnicity in Afghanistan are not available." [14] For languages it gave Dari 77 per cent and Pashto 48 per cent (2020 estimate). Those add to more than 100 because they count everyone who speaks each language. [14] Pillalamarri, who reads the language figures as a guide to the people, says Persian is the mother tongue of perhaps 32 per cent, though up to 77 per cent can speak it, and that about half of Afghans have Pashto as a native language, which would mean 22 to 25 million Pashtuns. [16]

The estimates for the whole country move as well. In July 2026 the Taliban's National Statistics and Information Authority said Afghanistan had 37.2 million people, while the United Nations mission projected 48.6 million. [20] Neither is a headcount. A Pashtun share of 40 per cent is about 15 million people on one and 19 million on the other.

What a survey can and cannot show

The Asia Foundation's annual Survey of the Afghan People records each respondent's ethnic group. Of 8,912 respondents in 2015, 40 per cent said they were Pashtun, 34 Tajik, 11 Hazara and 8 Uzbek. [4] The survey weights its results to the 2015 and 2016 population data of the Central Statistics Organization, so it starts from the government's own estimates of how many people live in each place. [4]

The same holds for its 2019 disability survey, which interviewed 14,290 households. Its sample was 37.8 per cent Pashtun, 36.6 per cent Tajik, 10.8 per cent Hazara and 8.7 per cent Uzbek, weighted to the national statistics authority's estimates of 2018 and 2019. [5] A survey weighted to estimates repeats their assumptions. It can show how groups differ from each other, and it cannot show what share of the nation each is.

Language and ethnicity are different questions too. The Library of Congress study said of the Pashtun that "some also speak Dari." [10] A count of mother tongues, like the Factbook's, measures speech. A count of ethnic groups, like the one planned for 1979, depends on what each person says they are. Pashtun identity also rests on tribe and on the code of Pashtunwali, which no question on a form captures.

The numbers in politics

The 2004 constitution chose not to say how many of each there are. Article 4 lists the peoples of the nation: "Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkman, Baluch, Pachaie, Nuristani, Aymaq, Arab, Qirghiz, Qizilbash, Gujur, Brahwui and other tribes", and adds that "the word Afghan shall apply to every citizen of Afghanistan." [1] Article 16 makes Pashto and Dari the official languages, and lets any of six other languages be a third official language where most people speak it. [1] Article 61 gives the presidency to the candidate who wins "more than fifty percent of votes cast", with a second round between the top two if no one does. [1] Adeney observes that the constitution rejected formal ethnic representation in state institutions. [3]

A census was planned to follow. In 2008 it was postponed to 2010, and Adeney records that enumerators would not have asked about ethnicity, race or language. In 2003 Mohammad Ali Watan Yar, the head of the Central Statistics Department, had said: "We are all considered one nation." [3] The argument inside this decision was stated by two politicians of opposite sides. Amrullah Saleh, a Tajik and former head of the intelligence service, wrote that the real issue was fear of a census that would disclose the numerical strength of ethnic groups. [7] Karim Khalili, the Hazara leader of Hezb-e Wahdat, said in 2021: "Afghanistan is a country of minorities and no ethnic group can form a majority." [19]

Conrad Schetter of the Center for Development Studies at the University of Bonn described how it worked in the aftermath of the Bonn conference of 2001. He noted that a study by a Pashtun non-governmental body, the Wak Foundation for Afghanistan (1999), had found 62.63 per cent Pashtuns, and that Abdullah Abdullah, appointed foreign minister of the transitional government at Bonn, had countered that Pashtuns were only 38 per cent. [2] Schetter wrote that "the road into a war of numbers is prognosticated." [2] He argued for diminishing the role of ethnicity in public life, and warned that quotas by group would make every post a question of numbers. [2]

Pashtuns do not speak with one voice either. Bilqees Roshan, a Pashtun senator from Farah, told NPR in 2013 that putting ethnicity on the new identity card would be "very harmful": "In the past 30 years, ethnicity has been misused by people trying to gain more power in the government." [17] Mohammad Alam Ezedayar, a Tajik senator from Panjshir, took the opposite view: "It's the right of all Afghans to have their ethnicity listed on the card. Ethnicity is mentioned in the constitution and in the national anthem, so it should be on the card too." [17]

The identity card, 2013 to 2021

The identity card became the arena. The Population Registration Act, sometimes called the census law, set out what the new electronic card, the e-tazkera, would show. In June 2013 the Wolesi Jirga agreed all of it except article 6, on what to print on the card. The split followed ethnic lines, the Afghanistan Analysts Network reported: Uzbek members wanted ethnicity added, Pashtun members wanted nationality, written as "Afghan", and most Tajik and Hazara members wanted neither. [7] The vote on 15 July 2013 ended in a walkout, and the version that passed named neither. [6]

Behind the card was the meaning of one word. "Afghan", the analysts wrote, has been used interchangeably with "Pashtun", and both meanings appear in the Oxford English and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, the ethnic one as the less common. Pashtun leaders founded the country and its name would once have meant the land of the Pashtuns, but since the Second World War the word has increasingly meant a citizen, as article 4 says. [7] Many supporters, in Kandahar and in Kabul civil society, backed a card that carried "Afghan". [7] A protest in Nangarhar in September 2015 demanded that "Afghan" and religion be printed on it. [6] Opponents did not accept the argument. A front formed by Tajik movements in December 2017 declared that "'Afghan' is one of the names of the respected Pashto-speaking ethnic group of the country and generalizing it to other ethnic groups means distorting the identity of others." [7]

The debate took a harsher turn in November 2013, when General Abdul Wahid Taqat, a political commentator, insisted on television that "Pashtun" and "Afghan" meant the same and that Afghanistan was the land of the Pashtuns. He was arrested on 12 December 2013 and apologised on television. [6] In March 2017 President Ashraf Ghani, himself a Pashtun, endorsed amendments adding both ethnicity and nationality to the law. The Wolesi Jirga rejected them in October 2017 and a joint commission of both houses approved them in December, in a vote that some members said was invalid. [7] On 15 February 2018 Ghani and his wife applied for the new card. The Afghanistan Central Civil Registration Authority said it would print each person's religion, ethnicity and nationality. [7]

The president launched the cards formally on 3 May 2018. Abdullah Abdullah, then chief executive, boycotted the ceremony, saying the process "lacks legitimacy and support from the Afghan people". He added that he was not among those questioning the word "Afghan": "I as an Afghan am proud of my identity as a Muslim and Afghan." [18] Ghani defended the card as one that represents every ethnic group. [18] The plan to use the cards in the October 2018 parliamentary election was abandoned. [18]

The dispute was not over in 2021. The authority added 54 non-Pashtun sub-tribes and small identity groups to the ethnicity list in the card's database, at the request, it said, of local elders, and quoted the constitution and a Supreme Court order. Abdullah Abdullah, by then head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, said the authority must correct a mistake that divided the country, and the Speaker of parliament called it a plot to divide groups at village and district level. [19] By March 2021 the authority had issued 2,916,910 cards. [19]

Refugees, returnees and the headcount

War has moved the population as much as it has hidden it. The American handbook of 1986 reported that perhaps one third of the people had fled since April 1978, and that "reportedly over 50 percent of the refugees" were Pashtuns. [9] Most refugees in Pakistan settled in its Pashtun districts, as the article on the Soviet war and the refugees explains. Surveys of the refugees in Pakistan were carried out in the 1980s, Balland notes, "though with uncertain results." [8]

The movement ran the other way after 2001, and again from 2023. Pakistan's census of that year counted 1,923,453 Afghan nationals, and by June 2025 UNHCR had recorded over a million returns since the repatriation plan began (see Pashtuns today). [15] Pillalamarri counts more than 1.9 million people expelled from Pakistan and Iran into Afghanistan in 2025 alone. [16] Pakistan's census and the return counts are of Afghan nationals, not of ethnic groups. Without a count by group, the returns cannot be turned into a change in the Pashtun share. The political setting of those years is in the Afghan republic and Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.

What can be said

Pashtuns are the largest group in Afghanistan on every estimate quoted here. Most of those since 1990 put them between about 38 and about 50 per cent of the people. The highest figures come from before 1992 and from a Pashtun research body, the Wak Foundation, and the lowest from the World Almanac of 2000 and from Abdullah Abdullah. Neither side's number rests on a count. At 40 per cent of 37 to 49 million people, the Pashtuns of Afghanistan would number between about 15 and 19 million, and the real number is not known. Until a census asks the question, and the people it counts accept the answer, that remains the position.