Story of the Pakhtoons

By M. Ilyas Khan

Special Correspondent – Dawn, Monthly Herald

Peshawar, and by extension the entire North West Frontier Province (NWFP), offers a unique politico-cultural mix of the Persian and the Indian. According to H.A. Rose, an officer of the Indian Civil Services, the key to its history lies "in the recognition of the fact that the valley of Peshawar was always more closely connected politically with Eastern Iran (the ancient Ariana and modern Afghanistan) than with India, though in the pre-Mohammadan times its population was mainly Indian by race". Around 500 BC, the Persian king Darius Hystaspes subdued the races dwelling west of the Indus and north of Kabul, thereby bringing the entire Indus valley and Afghanistan under the Persian influence.

This situation lasted for 200 years, and was terminated by the Macedonian conqueror Alexander in 326 BC. Around 305 BC, the Frontier region passed under Indian influence, courtesy Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of India's first empire that was the civilizational answer to the forces of reason and inquiry unleashed by the reformist movements of Buddhism and Jainism. Ashoka, the third Mauryan ruler, made Buddhism the dominant religion of Gandhara (Peshawar valley) and Pakhli (Hazara).

The Greek Bactrian rulers (roughly 200-100 BC), who came next, provided the overlays of Greek influence to the excellent Buddhist sculpture and art of Gandhara. The Bactrians were overwhelmed by a wave of the Central Asian Saka population, who gradually wrested political control of the region and ruled it until 75 AD, when they were challenged and defeated by the Parthians from Iran.

But the Parthians themselves were soon ousted by a new wave of nomads from Central Asia, the Kushans. Under the third Kushan king, Kanishka, Peshawar became the seat of power and the centre of a vibrant civilization based on Mahayana Buddhism.

In 226 AD, the Kushans were humbled by the Sassanides of Persia, who were in turn subdued by the White Huns in 425 AD. A barbarian Indo-European race, the Huns utterly destroyed the Gandhara civilization and caused the decline of Buddhism. When the Mohammadans appeared on the scene in the tenth Century, the region was under Hindu Shahi.

In a nutshell, by the end of the first millennium AD, the NWFP had already withstood 1,500 years of population onslaughts from foreign lands. Some came in search of protection and livelihood, others sought riches or power. Most of them hailed from Iran and the northern Turkistan, but some also from India. It was the mixing of these races that threw up the Pakhtoon nationality as we know it today.

While intermittent periods of creative outbursts translated into notable cultural advancements, frequent wars and destruction created breaks in the collective memory of these people. Their scriptures and ancient mythology perished, depriving them of their historical depth. This is particularly true of the Mohammadan period, when the achievements of Gandhara were lost to the natives' memory forever.

Incidentally, the beginning of the Mohammadan period also coincided with the completion of the ethnogenesis of the Pakhtoon race. In other words, the new race was born at the juncture of a major ideological fault-line in the history of the region, and suffered intellectual separation from its past.

The economy of early Pakhtoons was based on the nomadic and semi-nomadic stock breeding, but some of them, especially a large concentration in the area of Suleiman mountains, took to settled agriculture and established what some scholars regard as the first Pakhtoon hamlets in history.

During thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as a result of the large-scale displacement of Indo-Tajik and Indo-Aryan populations by the armies of Ghengiz Khan and Tamerlane, the Pakhtoons were able to occupy the Ghazni plateau, part of the Peshawar plains, Kohat, Bannu and areas in the vicinity of Kabul. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth Centuries they moved into Kandahar, Shal (Quetta), Zhob and Loralai in the south, and Swat, Kurram and Panjkora (Dir) in the north.

During the process of dispersion, they also assimilated neighbouring tribes into the clan structure of the Pakhtoon society, such as the Turkish Khalaj tribe to whom the Ghilzais are affiliated, the Tarkalani tribe of the Khakhi tribal union, and the Tajik-Iranian Baraki (also known as Ormari) tribe of Logar from which the Afridis, the Orakzais, Mangals, Khataks and Khugianis are understood to have descended.

At this time, the agrarian relationships based on common land ownership also began to crumble and the era of feudal relationships dawned. The clan aristocracy of the Pakhtoons began to render administrative and military services to the competing feudal powers of India and Iran in return for land benefices, titles and tolls.

Feudal relationships grew faster in the socially and economically more developed areas of the north east and the south west. The former connected India with Kabul, Iran and Central Asia through Khyber Pass and Peshawar, while the latter connected Iran, through Kandahar, with the southern Indus valley via the Bolan and Gomal passes.

The developed northern lands gave rise to the first feudal principalities, such as those at Akora, Teri and Khyber. In the south west the Pakhtoons formed into a sovereign state in early eighteenth century. This was just one step away from the state unification of the Pakhtoons, which ultimately crystallized in the Durrani empire (1747-1819). The rise of the Pakhtoon state checked inter-tribal strife, improved irrigated agriculture and created stronger economic and administrative bonds between separate Pakhtoon regions. External trade grew, commodity-money relations developed and local exchange flourished. The Pakhtoon population also grew at this time.

But since the bulk of this population still depended on semi-nomadic stock breeding, the patriarchal clan institutions survived, playing a determining role in the parcelling of land and water (wesh), the allotment and collection of renders and imposts, the recruiting of armies, the adjudication of disputes through jirgah, and the right of retribution (badal).

The impetus for Pakhtoon unification came from two hundred years (sixteenth to eighteenth century) of struggle against exploitation by the Moghul and Safavid feudal lords. Both the dynasties exercised only symbolic political overlordship in the Pakhtoon lands, which otherwise remained internally autonomous through most of its history. It can be safely presumed therefore that the Pakhtoons' struggle against these dynasties was in essence a struggle against their agents in the Pakhtoon aristocracy.

Two movements stand out from the rest in this connection. The first and the most extensive was the Roshaniya movement (1560-1638), led by Bayazid Ansari alias Pir Roshan (the illuminated one). The Moghul emperor, Akbar, countered it militarily as well as by getting religious figures like Akhund Darweza to declare Pir Roshan as Pir Tarikai (the dark one) and a heretic. The second movement was led by Khushal Khan Khatak (1613-39), the great Pakhtoon poet who turned against the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb, became the first Pakhtoon political prisoner at the Rathanbor fort where he spent four years behind bars, and then formed a grand alliance with the Yusufzais to wage war on the Moghuls.

These movements became the catalysts for literary activity, and led to the creation of nationalist literature, specially poetry, with the unity of the Pakhtoons as the dominant theme. But this hard-earned unity did not outlast the Durrani empire, whose disintegration in early nineteenth century threw the Pakhtoons back into their age-old spiral of parajumba (one-upmanship), preventing the emergence of consensus leadership.Significantly, the demise of the Durranis came at the head of a brand-new international power game in the region, this time between the British Raj in India and the rising power of Tsarist Russia. The pattern for the British was set by the Sikhs, who under Ranjit Singh conquered the Frontier region in 1818, and ruled it for two decades.

Meanwhile, the British invaded Afghanistan in 1838, and captured Kabul, supplanting there a king, Shah Shuja, who had been living in exile in India. But in 1842, the entire British army of 7,000 men was wiped out by the Afghans, forcing the British to vacate Kabul. Shah Shuja was also deposed.

But the British were able to dismember Afghanistan, and bring the Frontier as well as the Pakhtoon areas of Balochistan under their control. In 1849, they defeated the Sikhs, wresting control of the Punjab and the Frontier. On March 29, 1849, they proclaimed the annexation of the Frontier territory and included it in the Punjab province.

The first test of the Englishmen's hold over the territory came during the revolt of 1857, when the chances of an Afghan attack through the Khyber Pass were imminent. Almost every powerful tribe on the borderland was blockaded, and garrisons at all major towns were fortified. But the Afghan attack never materialized, and the British were able to disarm all native regiments suspected of mutinous intentions.

During the nine years between the annexation and the 1857 uprising, the dispatch of troops against the tribesmen was necessitated at least on seventeen occasions, but the gesture was mostly aimed at establishing a strong rule. More serious expeditions were undertaken during the period upto 1878, when the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, the Mohmands and the Yusufzais repeatedly challenged the British authority and raided towns in the settled districts.

In 1878, the British once again over-ran Kabul, and installed another puppet king, Yaqub Khan, who returned the favour by signing the Treaty of Gandamak in May 1879. Under this treaty, Afghanistan renounced its claim to authority on Mohmand and Khyber passes, the Kurram valley and the districts of Pishin and Sibbi in Balochistan.

Afghan resistance forced the British and their puppet king out of Kabul once again, but by that time the British had consolidated their power in the Frontier region. Suffering insecurity on his northern as well as eastern borders, the Afghan king, Amir Abdur Rahman, consented to a more precise border delimitation, and a mission under Sir Mortimer Durand visited Kabul in 1993 to discuss the question.

The two governments agreed to the demarcation from Bashgal valley on the border of Kafiristan to Nawa Kotal on the confines of Bajaur and Mohmand. But no demarcation was made south of Nawa Kotal due to disagreement between the parties. Similarly, no demarcation was attempted between Kabul River and Sikaram (Safed Koh).

Further south, however, boundary markers were set up on the Kurram border in 1894, and the demarcation from Kurram to the Gomal river was undertaken in 1895. The remaining portions of the border still remain unmarked, and have in recent years led to several hush-hush disputes between Islamabad and the Taliban. Partly due to the delimitation of borders and the increased British presence in the tribal areas, and partly due to rumours of a Turkish victory over Greece as well as the expectations of military aid from Afghanistan, the entire Frontier region erupted into what the British historians call the Pathan Revolt of 1897. Trouble first started in Tochi, where the entire escort of an unsuspecting British Political Officer was wiped out by the tribesmen, and then in Swat, Dir, Malakand, Mohmand, Shabkadar and Tirah where lashkars were raised to storm the British-held towns.

Punitive strikes by the British were undertaken in right earnest, but due to unyielding resistance by the tribesmen, these strikes continued well into the twentieth century, showing slow but steady progress.

The lesson -- the need to secure closer and more immediate supervision of the frontier -- led the British government in 1901 to separate the Frontier from Punjab and organize it into a separate province. The new arrangement included the districts of Hazara, Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan, and the political agencies of Khyber, Kurram, Tochi (North Waziristan) and Wana (South Waziristan).

Initially the province was placed under a chief commissioner, but in 1932 it was upgraded to a fully fledged Governor's province. But there was one administrative subtlety involved. While the above mentioned districts were incorporated into British India, the political agencies were kept as the no-man's-land, enjoying internal autonomy. Besides, the Pakhtoon areas of Sibi, Quetta and Pishin were incorporated into British Balochistan. Thereby, the Pakhtoons were divided into three separate compartments, with the fourth left behind in Afghanistan.

This is what Pakistan inherited in 1947.