{"id":3108,"date":"2009-05-19T04:35:07","date_gmt":"2009-05-19T04:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3108"},"modified":"2009-05-23T04:26:26","modified_gmt":"2009-05-23T04:26:26","slug":"pushtunistan-rising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3108","title":{"rendered":"Pushtunistan Rising?"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nSteve Hynd<\/strong> at Newshoggers <\/strong>made the intriguing suggestion of an independent Pushtun state <\/a>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:<\/p>\n

\n

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 <\/strong>border reiver clans of the English\/Scottish border<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0– another bunch of inter-related hill country wildmen\u00a0who raided their neighbours irrespective of nationality for over 300 years before finally calming down and accepting imposed nationality. That territorial stramash <\/em>was only solved by exiling the worst offenders to the American colonies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

….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\u00a0own traditional religious forms would put the two at odds more often than not. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Rather than insisting on fighting the Pashtun, the amswer in Af\/Pak may lie in giving them back the independence they once had.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sort of like Ralph Peters<\/strong> famous re-drawing <\/a>of the Mideast map <\/a>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\u00a0in 1979 creating even semi-unity among Pushtuns – and then temporarily. This is the stuff of Pakistani nightmares but a latent sense of Pushtun nationalism\u00a0lurks in the shadows, with Afghanistan being thought of as a “Greater Pushtunistan”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[527,87,178,78,199,499,319,448,511,11,10,127,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-foreign-policy","category-geopolitics","category-ideas","category-insurgency","category-islamic-world","category-map","category-newshoggers","category-ralph-peters","category-state-building","category-state-failure","category-strategy","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}