page_title: Pashtunistan
hierarchical_section_title: Pashtunistan
caption_attribution_description: English: The four major ethnic groups of Pakistan in 1980.
context_page_description: Pashtūnistān is the geographic historical region inhabited by the indigenous Pashtun people of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, wherein Pashtun culture, language, and national identity have been based. Alternative names historically used for the region include "Pashtūnkhwā" and "Afghānistān", since at least the 3rd century CE onward. Pashtunistan borders Iran to the west, Persian and Turkic-speaking areas of Turkestan region to the north, Kashmir to the northeast, Punjab to the east, and Balochistan to the south.
  For administrative division in 1893, Mortimer Durand drew the Durand Line through Pashtunistan, fixing the limits of the spheres of influence between Afghanistan and British India and leaving about half of the Pashtun territory under British rule. This Durand Line now forms the internationally recognized border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Roughly, the Pashtun homeland stretches from areas south of the Amu River in Afghanistan to west of the Indus River in Pakistan, mainly consisting of southwestern, eastern and some northern and western districts of Afghanistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan in Pakistan.
context_section_description: Pashtūnistān (Pashto: پښتونستان‎; also called Pakhtūnistān, or Pathānistān, meaning the "land of Pashtuns") is the geographic historical region inhabited by the indigenous Pashtun people of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, wherein Pashtun culture, language, and national identity have been based. Alternative names historically used for the region include "Pashtūnkhwā" (پښتونخوا) and "Afghānistān" (افغانستان), since at least the 3rd century CE onward. Pashtunistan borders Iran to the west, Persian and Turkic-speaking areas of Turkestan region to the north, Kashmir to the northeast, Punjab to the east, and Balochistan to the south.
  For administrative division in 1893, Mortimer Durand drew the Durand Line through Pashtunistan, fixing the limits of the spheres of influence between Afghanistan and British India and leaving about half of the Pashtun territory under British rule. This Durand Line now forms the internationally recognized border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Roughly, the Pashtun homeland stretches from areas south of the Amu River in Afghanistan to west of the Indus River in Pakistan, mainly consisting of southwestern, eastern and some northern and western districts of Afghanistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan in Pakistan.
  The 16th-century revolutionary leader Bayazid Pir Roshan of Waziristan and the 17th-century "warrior-poet" Khushal Khan Khattak assembled Pashtun armies to fight against the Mughal Empire in the region. In those times, the eastern parts of Pashtunistan were ruled by the Mughals while the western parts were ruled by the Persian Safavids. The Pashtun region first gained an autonomous status in 1709 when Mirwais Hotak successfully revolted against the Safavids in Loy Kandahar. The Pashtuns again achieved unity under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani dynasty, when he established the Afghan Empire in 1747. In the 19th century, however, the Afghan Empire lost large parts of its eastern territory to the Sikh and British Empires. Famous Pashtun independence activists against the rule of the British Raj include Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan), Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai, and Mirzali Khan (Faqir of Ipi). Bacha Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar movement was strongly opposed to the partition of India. When the Indian National Congress declared its acceptance of the partition plan without consulting the Khudai Khidmatgar leaders, Bacha Khan felt deeply betrayed and hurt by this. Despite the Bannu Resolution in which Bacha Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar movement demanded that the Pashtun-majority North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) should become an independent state of Pashtunistan, the NWFP joined the Dominion of Pakistan as a result of the 1947 NWFP referendum which had been boycotted by the Khudai Khidmatgar movement. Bacha Khan and his brother, then-chief minister Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan (Dr. Khan Sahib), rejected the referendum citing that it did not have the options of the NWFP becoming independent or joining Afghanistan. Later on Bacha Khan, during his stay in Afghanistan, said that "Pashtunistan was never a reality". The idea of independent Pashtunistan never helped Pashtuns and it only caused suffering for them. He further stated that the "successive government of Afghanistan only exploited the idea for their own political goals". On the other hand, Mirzali Khan and his followers refused to recognize Pakistan and continued their war from their base at Gurwek, Waziristan against the Pakistani government. Growing participation of Pashtuns in the Pakistani government, however, resulted in the erosion of the support for the secessionist Pashtunistan movement by the end of the 1960s. In 1969, the autonomous princely states of Swat, Dir, Chitral, and Amb were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously known as NWFP). In 2018, the Pashtun-majority Federally Administered Tribal Areas, formerly a buffer zone with Afghanistan, were also merged into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously known as the North-West Frontier Province), connecting the regions to Pakistan p
caption: Pashtun-inhabited regions in green (1980)
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "960", "Image ImageLength": "928", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "150", "Image YResolution": "150", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2016:08:30 03:28:18", "Image ExifOffset": "232", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "382", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9264", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "960", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "928"}