Pushtunistan Rising?
Steve Hynd at Newshoggers made the intriguing suggestion of an independent Pushtun state as a solution to the strategic problems of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The Pushtuns, like the Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a state:
The Punjabi and Sindh populations have always regarded the Pashtun as mountain wild men, bandits and reivers. The Pashtun have always regarded their neighbours as prey for their raids. It’s been that way since before the British arrived and shows no sign of abating anytime soon. The Pashtun were only forced at gunpoint into accepting the splitting of their traditional tribal ranges by the Durand Line in 1893. The situation is entirely analogous to the old border reiver clans of the English/Scottish border – another bunch of inter-related hill country wildmen who raided their neighbours irrespective of nationality for over 300 years before finally calming down and accepting imposed nationality. That territorial stramash was only solved by exiling the worst offenders to the American colonies.
….More, with the Pashtun in their own homeland free from outside overlords their reason for supporting the Taliban politically would disappear and the incompatibility between the Taliban’s extreme form of Islam and the Pashtun’s own traditional religious forms would put the two at odds more often than not.
Rather than insisting on fighting the Pashtun, the amswer in Af/Pak may lie in giving them back the independence they once had.
Read the rest here.
Sort of like Ralph Peters famous re-drawing of the Mideast map a few years ago, Steve’s suggestion is provocative.The Kurds took decades to get beyond the Talabani-Barzani rivalry and seize the de facto independence that the U.S. invasion of Iraq made possible and “frontier agents”, whether British or from the ISI , have always succeeded in playing off one Pushtun group against another with only the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 creating even semi-unity among Pushtuns – and then temporarily. This is the stuff of Pakistani nightmares but a latent sense of Pushtun nationalism lurks in the shadows, with Afghanistan being thought of as a “Greater Pushtunistan”.
May 19th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
The sticky bit isn’t "Pushtunistan", the green-shaded areas of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As it always has been it’s "Greater Punjab" which extends well into India. It’s enormously more populous than any of the other highlighted areas and would be completely landlocked if the region were divided according to ethnic majority. IMO that would make the pressure for conflict between India and the Pakistani Punjabis irresistible.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Excellent point, Dave. The population overwhelmingly skews to Punjab and that mass of people will, at a minimum, want an outlet to the sea and the natural resources of Baluchistan.
May 19th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
The situation is eerily similar to Yugoslavia. I thought that was one reason why Holbrooke may well have the most relevant experience to deal with this.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I’m sure Steve would love being mentioned in the same breath as Ralph Peters! (Not)
May 19th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Hi Russ,
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I have my own problems with Peters. Having read some of his serious stuff, he is capable of insightful and nuanced analysis but Peters generally chooses to do political shtick in his newspaper columns that I tend to think he doesn’t really believe in the way he frames for public consumption. I’m told he’s a calmer persona behind closed doors.
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I matched Steve’s post with Peters because both of them happened to be thinking creatively about political geography, which suffers from many acts of historical chance ( and is more fragile than we usually like to admit). Wide political differences do not bother me much when ideas are in play – sometimes the different angles bring the ideas out more effectively.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Sorry, seems a tad simplistic to me. What of the Tajik, and Uzbek populations, both of whom had marked presence in the Soviet war and the Afghan civil war against the (mostly Pashtun) Taliban?
May 21st, 2009 at 3:53 am
Hi Jay,
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I would expect that both groups would peel their areas away into TAZ, supplemented by reinforcements from their kinsmen to the north. Tajiks are already headed south right now.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Good luck trying to convince the Pakistani establishment to break up the country it spent so much time and effort in creating – with some degree of success.
There is such a thing as a Pakistani national identity, superimposed upon local identities, at least for some groups (Sindhis, Punjabis, and of course the Muhajirs who came from India after the partition and were largely the driving force behind the creation of Pakistan). The Pathans/Pashtuns and the Balochis may differ.
Pakistan ain’t breaking up anytime soon, anymore than Iraq (except perhaps for the admittedly large Kurdish component) is.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Toto:Pakistan broke apart once. It is more than conceivable that it could happen again.