Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [221]
For according to most standard models of modern nationalism the Pathans, like the Somalis, are a paradox or anomaly. They are an ethno-linguistic group with a very strong consciousness of common ethnic culture and identity, and with an ancient ethnic code of behaviour (the pashtunwali) to which most Pathans still subscribe, at least rhetorically. As in Somalia, all the elements would seem to be in place to create a modern ethno-linguistic nation-state; and yet the Pathans like the Somalis have never generated a modern state-building nationalism; and have indeed played a leading part in tearing to pieces whatever states have been created on their territory.
There are thought to be somewhere between 35 and 40 million Pathans in the world today, of whom considerably more than half live in Pakistan. This gives the Pakistani state a vital interest in what happens to the Pathans of Afghanistan. As Pakistani officials and officers have argued to me, it also means that the Pakistani state simply cannot afford to take a line on Afghanistan (for example, actively helping the US presence there) with which a majority of Pathans strongly disagree.
The vagueness of the figures on Pathan numbers illustrates the fact that no reliable Afghan national census has ever taken place, precisely because the issue of ethnic percentages is so explosive. Thus most educated Afghan (and Pakistani) Pathans with whom I have spoken have put the Pathan proportion of the Afghan population at 60 – 70 per cent. Non-Pathan Afghans have put it at 30 – 40 per cent. A Pakistani Pathan army officer described this to me as ‘statistical genocide’ on the part of the other Afghan nationalities – who say the same thing about Pathan figures.
Pathans have always regarded Afghanistan as an essentially Pathan state, and they have some reason. The dynasty which created the Afghan state was indisputably Pathan, and ‘Afghan’ is simply the Persian word for ‘Pathan’. As Tajuddin Khan, General Secretary of the ANP, put it, ‘Every Pakhtun is an Afghan, though not every Afghan is a Pakhtun.’ Throughout modern Afghan history, until the overthrow of the Communists in 1992, the central state and army were almost always dominated by Pathans – and the shock of the four years from 1992 – 6 when non-Pathans dominated Kabul was indeed one factor in generating mass support for the Taleban among Pathans.
And yet the Pathan claim to Afghanistan was always shot through with ambiguities, which have helped cripple Pathan nationalism as a state-building force. The Pathan ruling dynasty in fact spoke a dialect of Persian (Dari), as did the army and bureaucracy. Dari, not Pashto (or Pakhto), was the lingua franca of Afghanistan both formally and informally. As far as the great majority of rural Pathans (i.e. the great majority of Pathans in general) were concerned, loyalty to family, clan and tribe always took precedence over loyalty to the Afghan state.
The tribes could be rallied for a time behind jihads against alien invaders of Afghanistan (or earlier, behind campaigns to conquer and plunder parts of India or Iran); but equally, Pathan tribes repeatedly rose in revolt against Pathan rulers of Afghanistan in the name of Islam and tribal freedom, and those rulers in response carried out some of their most savage repressions in Pathan areas.
Above all, from the early nineteenth century on, the Afghan monarchy never came anywhere near making good its claim to rule over all or even most Pathans. This was due first and foremost to the way in which first the Sikh rulers of Punjab in the first half of the nineteenth century, and then their British successors, had conquered extensive Pathan territories (and especially the most fertile and heavily populated of them all, the Peshawar valley).
It is also because Afghanistan has always been much poorer either than British India or than Pakistan, and since the late 1970s has also been