How does Pashtunism manifest itself in both a secular and an Islamic-extremist shell?
Author: Arif Hasan Khan Akhundzada, regional affairs researcher and analyst, member of Sangar Advisory Board
Tajikism describes the rule of a settled form of state and society in Khorasani (eastern) Iranshahr—as was always the case—whereas Pashtunism refers to its polar opposite: a state of perpetual instability, volatility, and unsettled lawless social conditions, characterized by the Indo-Saka Iranian (Scythian) nomadic cultures living in the same region.
Historically, Pashtuns-Afghans lived obscurely on the southeastern peripheries of Persian-dominated imperial polities, till Islam and subsequent Turkic political influences began to stir them, bringing them progressively to the forefront, beginning about 1000 years ago.
Although the term “Tajik” originated after the arrival of Islam here, Tajikism is derived directly and legitimately from the legacies of pre-Islamic Iranshahr and is not based wholly on modern Persian culture, as is the commonly held perception regarding Tajiks, especially in Afghanistan. Other Eastern Iranian languages – both living and dead such as Sogdian, Bactrian as well as Baraki/Ormari - and those of the Pamiri (Saka) group – and even Pashto language itself, which is considered to be the largest Pamiri tongue, can be and are included in its linguistic repertoire as is the case in Soviet founded Tajikistan. Tajikism, therefore, has the potential to encompass and portray diverse Iranian elements, while neutralizing and overcoming noxious influences such as those found in Pashtun tribalistic cultural tendencies born of unreal nationalistic concepts.
“Pashtunism” was instigated primarily by modern European nation-state concepts, and began flourishing in early 20th Century post-Durand Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s traditional Durrani State although ostensibly Afghan (Pashtun), was actually Persianate in nature. Pashtunism received a further boost after 1947, as it became a major lever for the Afghan state when a new wave of Pashtun national irredentism fuelled by the creation of Pakistan brought it to the fore. Pakistani Pashtuns who were more numerous and advanced, lived in territories that had been progressively annexed by the British from Afghanistan during the 19th Century. Till the US victory in the Cold War in 1992, Pashtun politics was overtly secular and pro-Soviet; it had acquired this apparent character via Ghaffar Khan and his Congressite political movement in British India, which after 1947 had allied itself to the pro-Soviet leftist-ethnonationalist camp in Pakistan. This boost reached its apogee when it became associated with the post-1978 April Marxist revolution of Afghanistan. But this leftist secular character amounted to a mere veneer. After the 1992 global Cold War victory by America of its CIA Jihad, the secular patina of “Pashtun nationalism” or Pashtunism fell apart and its raw and vicious tribal nature became fully apparent, fuelled by an Islamic fanatical fervour that was bankrolled by the West, and in which venture the West’s key regional proxy Pakistan and its ruling Indic statehood was its eager subordinate. In that manner the Taliban version of political Pashtunism was born in late 1994 and it thus began to play the role it was ideally suited to…as the mercenary spearhead for Anglo-American imperial ambitions in this area against Russia, operated by their Pakistani proxies. But due to the very nature of its insufferability, this arrangement could not last long without its harmful side effects soon manifesting, and 9/11 took place in 2001. Twenty subsequent years of punitive occupation of Afghanistan by US and NATO militaries saw a revival of secular Pashtunism in Kabul in a Western puppet form, but this collapsed after defeated America fled Afghanistan in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban “2.0” was witnessed which still holds in Afghanistan. Islam’s character is far more conducive to the actual primitive tribal nature of Pashtunism and its culture.
The fact that Pashtunism is in itself an unstable and unruly proposition, being patron-dependent and thriving in a dirty-work, criminal and destructive environment does not lend viability to it as the basis for any kind of stable or benign political arrangement or cultural expression. For that we must look to the actual reality of what Iran and Iranian lands were like in the past, and not from some naively contrived, ill-informed, modern time Pashtunist point of view.
In sum, about a thousand years ago the character of the ancient Saka-Parthian Sarabanis was changed for one more time under Ghaznavid Turkic influence to become the “Qaisis”, and soon thereafter the imperial adventures of their Ghurid successors threw up the Ghilzais who attained their apex in India’s Delhi Sultanate. Then five hundred years ago the Timurids employed the Qaisis politically, and brought them across the Hindukush north to Kabulistan from Kandahar/Sistan-Zabulistan – from where more intrigues propelled them further east into Gandhara/Peshawar Valley. The Sarabani Afghan tribal confederacy had succeeded in becoming the dominant Pashtun-Afghan faction.
On the other hand, the earliest and most primitive Pashtuns are considered to be the Karlanis who are mostly hillmen -- the bandits who are famed for their wild independence and laws of the jungle. They have lived in innocuous obscurity and unruly egalitarianism in their domain of Greater Paktia since the very earliest times of the "Pactyan" Dards who mixed with other local ancient populations and later became Sakified with the arrival here of the Indo-Scythians in the First Century BC. Only late in the last century did their conditions change appreciably.
If left untreated Pashtunism as a historically aberrant concept will continue to rot everything in “Afghanistan” and Western Pakistan – that is Eastern Iran/Khorasan, or ancient Bactria and Gandhara. The Pashtuns-Afghans have always been organically part of that historic dispensation, but can only be viably so if they know their proper place in it.