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Pashtunistan ( ps, پښتونستان, lit=land of the Pashtuns) is a historical region in Central Asia and South Asia, inhabited by the indigenous Pashtun people of Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Wherein Pashtun culture, the Pashto language, and Pashtun identity have been based. Alternative names historically used for the region include Pashtūnkhwā (), Pakhtūnistān, or Pathānistān. Predominantly located on the Iranian Plateau, Pashtunistan borders the geographical regions of Turkestan to the north, Kashmir to the northeast, Punjab to the east, and Balochistan to the south.

During British rule in India in 1893, Mortimer Durand drew the Durand Line, fixing the limits of the spheres of influence between the Emirate of Afghanistan and British India during the Great Game and leaving about half of historical Pashtun territory under British colonial rule; after the partition of India, the Durand Line now forms the internationally recognized border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The traditional Pashtun homeland stretches roughly from the areas south of the Amu River in Afghanistan to the areas west of the Indus River in Pakistan; it predominantly comprises the southwestern, eastern and some northern and western districts of Afghanistan, and 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. During this time, the eastern parts of Pashtunistan were ruled by the Mughals while the western parts were ruled by Safavid Iran. Pashtunistan first gained an autonomous status in 1709, when Mirwais Hotak successfully revolted against the Safavids in Loy Kandahar. The Pashtuns later achieved unity under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded the Durrani dynasty and established the Afghan Empire in 1747. In the 19th century, however, the Afghan Empire lost large parts of its eastern territory to the Sikh Empire and later the British Empire. Famous Indian independence activists of Pashtun origin include Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai, and Mirzali Khan. Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar movement was strongly opposed to the partition of India along Hindu–Muslim religious lines. When the Indian National Congress declared its acceptance of the partition plan without consulting Khudai Khidmatgar leaders, Khan expressed staunch disagreement. Despite the Bannu Resolution, in which the Khudai Khidmatgar movement demanded that the Pashtun-majority North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) become an independent Pashtun state, the NWFP was incorporated into the Dominion of Pakistan following the 1947 NWFP referendum. The NWFP referendum was boycotted by Khudai Khitmatgar and rejected by Khan and his brother, then-chief minister Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, who remarked that it did not give voters the option to make the NWFP an independent state or merge it with Afghanistan rather than independent India or Pakistan. Khan later stated that "Pashtunistan was never a reality" and that the idea of an independent Pashtunistan would never help Pashtuns and only cause suffering for them. He further stated that the " successive governments 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 guerilla war against the Pakistani government from their base in Gurwek. However, the growing participation of Pashtuns in the Pakistani state and government resulted in the erosion of 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 the Pakistani NWFP. In 2018, the Pashtun-majority Federally Administered Tribal Areas, formerly an autonomous buffer zone with Afghanistan, were also merged into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously known as the NWFP), fully integrating the region with Pakistan proper.

Origin of term

The name used for the region during the Middle Ages and up until the 20th century was Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a reference to this land by its ethnicity, which were the Afghans, while Pashtunistan is a reference to this land by its language. Mention of this land by the name of Afghanistan predates mention by the name of Pashtunistan, which has been mentioned by Ahmad Shah Durrani in his famous couplet, by 6th-century Indian astronomer Varāhamihira, 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Hiven Tsiang, 14th-century Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta, Mughal Emperor Babur, 16th-century historian Firishta and many others.

The Pashto name Pakhtunistan or Pashtunistan ( ps, پښتونستان ( Naskh)) evolved originally from the Indian word "Pathanistan" (Hindustani: ( Nastaleeq), पठानिस्तान ( Devanagari)). The concept of Pashtunistan was inspired by the term " Pakhtunkhwa". British Indian leaders, including the Khudai Khidmatgar, started using the word "Pathanistan" to refer to the region, and later, the word "Pashtunistan" became more popular.

The native people

The native or indigenous people of Pashtunistan are the Pashtuns (also known as Pakhtuns, Pathans and historically as ethnic Afghans), an Iranic ethnic group. They are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan. The Pashtuns are concentrated mainly in the south and east of Afghanistan but also exist in northern and western parts of the country as a minority group. In Pakistan they are concentrated in the west and north-west, inhabiting mainly Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan. In addition, communities of Pashtuns are found in other parts of Pakistan such as Sindh, Punjab, Gilgit-Baltistan and in the nation's capital, Islamabad. The main language spoken in the delineated Pashtunistan region is Pashto followed by others such as Balochi, Hindko, Gojri, and Urdu.

The Pashtuns practice '' Pashtunwali'', the indigenous culture of the Pashtuns, and this pre-Islamic identity remains significant for many Pashtuns and is one of the factors that have kept the Pashtunistan issue alive. Although the Pashtuns are politically separated by the Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan, many Pashtun tribes from the FATA area and the adjacent regions of Afghanistan, tend to ignore the border and cross back and forth with relative ease to attend weddings, family functions and take part in the joint tribal councils known as ''jirgas''. Though this was common before the war on terror but after several military operations conducted in FATA, this cross border movement is checked via military and has become much less common in comparison to the past.

Depending on the source, the ethnic Pashtuns constitute 42-60% of the population of Afghanistan. In neighboring Pakistan they constitute 15.42 percent of the 200 million population, which does not include Pashtun diaspora in other Pakistani cities and provinces. In the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan, Pashto speakers constitute above 73 percent of the population as of 1998.

History

Since the 2nd millennium BC, the region now inhabited by the native Pashtun people had been conquered by Ancient Iranian peoples, the Medes, Achaemenids, Greeks, Mauryas, Kushans, Hephthalites, Sasanians, Arab Muslims, Turks, Mughals, and others. In recent age, people of the Western world have nominally explored the area.

Arab Muslims arrived in the 7th century and began introducing Islam to the native Pashtun people. The Pashtunistan area later fell to the Turkish Ghaznavids whose main capital was at Ghazni, with Lahore serving as the second power house. The Ghaznavid Empire was then taken over by the Ghorids from today's Ghor, Afghanistan. The army of Genghis Khan arrived in the 13th century and began destroying cities in the north while the Pashtun territory was defended by the Khalji dynasty