Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [222]
Until the nineteenth century, the Pathans had also never been united under one effective state, but had rather owed a vague and qualified allegiance to a variety of different dynasties, ruling from India, Kabul and sometimes Iran. Equally, however, they had never been divided between different effective states with real frontiers, let alone ruled by non-Muslim infidels. That began to change with the rise of Sikh power in Punjab in succession to the collapsing Mughal empire, and the fall of Peshawar to the Sikhs in 1823.
In the late 1830s the British appeared on the scene. In an effort to create an Afghan client state to resist Russian expansion in Central Asia, the government of British India sent a military expedition to overthrow the then Afghan ruler and replace him with a British puppet. This led to the memorable Afghan victory of 1842, when a British army attempting to retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad in midwinter was completely destroyed. The memory of Sir Alexander Burnes, a British official whose arrogance was held by both Afghans and British to have contributed to the disaster (and who paid for it with his life), is still commemorated in a Pathan phrase used to someone who is getting above himself: ‘Who do you think you are, Lati [Lord] Barness?’
After a second costly war in Afghanistan in 1878 – 80, the British gave up any ambition to establish a permanent military presence in Afghanistan. Instead, they chose to build up a former Afghan enemy from the Durrani clan, Abdurrahman Khan, as Emir of Afghanistan and bulwark against Russia. A mixture of Abdurrahman’s ruthless ability and British guns and money then consolidated a rudimentary modern Afghan state within the borders Afghanistan occupies today – borders imposed by and agreed between the British and Russian empires.
Meanwhile, the British defeated the Sikhs and incorporated their territories into the Indian empire, and then gradually pushed forward their military power into the Pathan territories lying between Afghanistan and British India. After a variety of experiments (some of them bloody failures), the British opted for a dual approach. The Peshawar valley and certain other ‘settled’ areas were incorporated into districts of British India. In 1901 the Pathan districts of Punjab were grouped in a chief commissioner’s division; and in 1932 this was separated from the province of Punjab and turned into the new North West Frontier Province (NWFP). This province was placed under regular British Indian administration and law. Until 2010, when it was renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the province retained its British geographical name, much to the irritation of Pathan nationalists.
Today, the NWFP covers 29,000 square miles and has a population of some 21 million, some 13 per cent of Pakistan’s total population. Apart from the 3 million or so Hazara (who speak Hindko, a language more closely related to Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu), the great majority are Pathan and Sunni. Peshawar city has ancient minorities of Shia and Hindko speakers, though these have been greatly reduced in terms of proportion over the past generation by the influx of Sunni refugees from Afghanistan. Ethnic divisions are in any case somewhat blurred compared to religious and tribal ones. Many Hindko-speakers in Abbotabad are descendants of Pathans who adopted the language after they migrated to the area, while in other parts tribes originally believed to be Hindko-speaking adopted Pashto.
Other Pathans live in the territories which after Pakistani independence became the province of Balochistan, the northern parts of which are overwhelmingly Pathan and which overall may be as much as 40 per cent Pathan in population. It is here that much of the