Pashtunistan

Etymology and name

The name derived from the Hindustani "Pathan"-based term. The 16th-century Persian historian Firishta wrote that the Pashtuns called their region Afghanistan while the peoples of India called it Pathanistan. The modern Pashto "Pakhtunkhwa" appears in a couplet of Ahmad Shah Durrani, and activists of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement began using the term for the region during the Indian independence struggle.

The Durand Line and partition

The 1893 Durand Line between British India and Afghanistan left much of the Pashtun-inhabited territory under British rule, and in 1901 the North-West Frontier Province and the tribal areas (FATA) were created. During the First World War a firman from Ottoman minister Kazim Bey addressed to "the residents of Pashtunistan" was delivered, but Amir Habibullah Khan kept Afghanistan neutral. On the eve of the 1947 partition Mirzali Khan and Abdul Ghaffar Khan issued the Bannu Resolution demanding that Pashtuns be given the option of an independent state; the British Raj refused. The Khudai Khidmatgar movement boycotted the NWFP referendum, and Afghanistan was the only country to vote against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations.

Pashtunistan policy and bilateral relations

In 1960 and 1961 Afghan Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan sent the Afghan army across the border into Bajaur to press the Pashtunistan issue, without success; Pakistan closed the border. Pakistan retaliated by supporting Afghan Islamist insurgents including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud. In 1976 Daoud recognised the Durand Line as an international border, was overthrown by a coup in 1978, and the People's Democratic Party government revived the issue. On 31 March 2010 Pakistan renamed the NWFP Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Conditions of Pashtun nationalism and competing mobilisations

Pakistan integrated Pashtuns into its army and bureaucracy, weakening separatism, while Pashtun politics shifted to the provincial autonomy demanded by the Awami National Party. After 2007 the Pakistani Taliban movement declared the independence of Waziristan from Pakistan, and the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement continued to campaign against state violence after the tribal areas were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018. In 2008 Harrison projected that a fusion of Pashtun nationalism and Islamism could produce an "Islamic Pashtunistan"; this is one analyst's projection, not a settled outcome.