Terminales

The Pashtuns have lived on the periphery of other Asian civilisations for most of their history, and beyond the writ of the polities established around the Afghan borderland. They have been unable to coalesce around a single polity that eclipses tribal authority but for limited periods.

The first significant success at pan-Pashtun unity of which there is an historical record began in 1709 under the leadership of Mirwais Khan Hotak (1673-1715), a Ghilzai tribal leader from the powerful Hotak clan. Mirwais arose in insurrection against the then Safavid governor of Kandahar, killing him and other representatives of the Safavid dynasty (Malleson 1878: 225).

Successfully resisting a succession of Safavid armies dispatched to subdue him, Mirwais remained in control of the province of Kandahar, rallying support among the Pashtuns for championing the cause of Sunni Islam over Safavid Shi’ism (Malleson 1878: 227-234). Mirwais died in 1715, succeeded by his brother Abdul Aziz Hotak, who was himself shortly succeeded by Mirwais’ son Mahmud Hotak (1697-1725). Mahmud successfully subdued the Abdali Pashtuns who had arisen in insurrection with support from the Safavids, and by 1722 had taken the Safavid capital of Isfahan (Malleson 1878: 237, 240). For seven years, Hotaki rule unified the entire Afghan borderland and surrounding territories stretching from eastern central Persia into the Peshawar Valley. The significance of this period stems from the fact that the tribes of the Afghan borderland, for the first time, were the masters of the region surrounding the borderland. Being tribal, both organisationally but also in a psycho-social sense, and having no cultural experience of administrating a state or indeed a structured army, the Hotaki fell to infighting and the Pashtun domain was in turn conquered by the Persian commander Nader Shah in 1729 (Dupree 1980: 329).

Nader Shah (1698-1747) established his own dynasty, the Afsharid, over the ruins of the Safavids, consolidating much of western Pakhtunkhwa and the bulk of the territories of Safavid Persia (Axworthy 2006: 79-82). After Nader Shah’s assassination in 1747, the eastern Afsharid provinces, corresponding with western Afghanistan today and then termed Khorasan, were ruled by Ahmed Shah Abdali (1722-1773). Ahmed Shah was a Pashtun of the Abdali tribe and had been a bodyguard and close confidant of Nader Shah. Upon being declared Khan of the Abdali at a loya jirga in 1747, he lent his title ‘Durr-i-Durran’ (pearl of pearls) to the tribe

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which subsequently came to be known as the Durrani. Ahmed Shah set about removing Ghilzai authority from western Afghanistan, consolidating his own position within the Durrani tribe and consolidating the position of the Durrani over all Pashtun tribes with a series of alliances with the Yusufzai and the northern Tajiks.⁶ Although the hold of Ahmed Shah over the non-Durrani Pashtuns was tenuous at best, and was constantly plagued by insurrection, he was able to expand Pashtun authority over the entire area of Pakhtunkhwa, and pushed into India, Kashmir and eastern and central Afsharid Persia. Ahmed Shah’s ability to form an alliance with the Tajiks extended his authority into the northern reaches of Pashtun territory, an achievement that has had the lasting legacy of being considered the founding of the modern Afghan state. However, the Durrani state began to crumble with Ahmed Shah's death in 1773, plagued by the twin insurmountable challenges of the constant Sikh uprisings in the Punjab and Ghilzai uprisings across the Pashtun belt (Dupree 1980: 338-44). These insurrections shortly fractured the Durrani state such that Ahmed Shah's successors ruled over receding territory which was increasingly fragmented.

Through a retrospective analysis, the short lived nature of the Durrani state underlines a number of determinant factors that have characterised the strategic setting of the Afghan borderland historically, the current relevance of some of which continues.

1) The inter-tribal contest for supremacy and autonomy remains the defining attribute of socio-political conscience in the Afghan borderland and the wider areas of Pakhtunkhwa. The fundamental challenge that characterised the Durrani state was its inability to subdue Ghilzai resistance to Durrani led pan-Pashtun authority. The size and spread of the Ghilzai constituted the principal obstacle to Durrani aspirations, a challenge overcome for brief periods by projecting Pashtun military power externally and employing Ghilzai warriors in the pursuit of the riches of northern India, and through maintaining alliance with Tajiks and the Yusufzai to generate numerical and strategic superiority over the Ghilzai. This tribal challenge remains the state of affairs currently, an attribute that has endured the recent politically turbulent history of the borderland and of the state of Afghanistan. Currently, the size, organisation, territorialisation, and fighting capabilities of the tribes with the larger confederations⁷ of Ghilzai and Durrani determine that each remains sovereign within the territorial zai with which

6 Davies, Colin C. “Ahmed Shah Durrani” Encyclopedia of Islam (EI2 CD-ROM edition v. 1.0) Ed. P.J Bearman, T. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. Van Dozel, W.P. Heirichs et. al. Brill, Leiden,1999.

7 The term confederation here is employed to represent the loose nature of association within the larger groupings of Ghilzai and Durrani. It does not reflect an institutionalised arrangement as is more generally the connotation of the term in conventional political discourse.

each is associated, rendering the domination of a single tribe over all tribes in Pakhtunkhwa as distant a reality now as it was during the Durrani state.

However, the post-Soviet withdrawal period, characterised by the failure of the mujahideen government and then the emergence of the Taliban, has demonstrated a further attribute that emerges millennially; that of Durrani-Ghilzai co-operation under a religious authoritarian figure.⁸ One of the key components of the rapidity with which the Taliban militia was able to extend authority over the overwhelming majority of the territory and population of Afghanistan between 1993 and 1999 was the ability of the militia to incorporate elements of both the Durrani and Ghilzai tribal confederations into its leadership structures. Giustozzi (2007: 47) tabulates the inclusion of both Durrani and Ghilzai principals within the leadership structure of the Taliban.⁹ By replacing tribal identity with ideational/religious identity in the political sphere, or more precisely by formulating a religious regime within which tribal identity was incorporated, a workable trans-tribal order was successfully developed under the Taliban. The persistence of the threat of the re-emergence of the Taliban currently, stems from the continued ability of the militia to draw support from across tribal lines under the same millennial pretext, a pretext the nascent state in Afghanistan is unable or unwilling to adopt but one that finds resonance from within the Karlanri and Yusufzai in Pakistan.¹⁰ 2) Historical Persia is a core factor that continues to impact the Afghan borderland in the form of present day Iran. The Persian Safavids (1501-1736) and the Afsharids (1736-1796) have ruled significant parts of Pakhtunkhwa, particularly the western parts populated by the Abdali, through whom Persian dynasties have historically sought to exert their own influence in Pakhtunkhwa.¹¹ Both the Hotaki and Durrani states sought to reverse that influence through successfully invading eastern Persia and subduing Persian authority. Antagonism between the

8 Here, the millennial attribute referred to is the periodic pan-Pashtun drive for unity that has a

tendency to emerge once or twice in a century, fuelled by a call to arms on the basis of defending either religion and co-religionists, or the aggregate of Pakhtunkhwa from foreign invasion. It arose in the first two Anglo-Afghan wars in the nineteenth century, in the frontier insurrection of 1896-7, and during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-1989. The phenomenon forms a subtext to Akbar

Ahmed‟s (1976) Millennium and Charisma Among Pathans.

9 Rashid (2001: 98, 231-35) also identifies principals from both Ghilzai and Durrani in the leadership shura of the Taliban.

10 This is manifest in the continued presence of Pakistan based tribesmen in the insurgency in Afghanistan. Many are actually returning from long periods of madrassas education in Pakistan, but there is a number of indigenous Karlanri tribesmen from South Wazristan, North Waziristan, Kurram and Bajaur who periodically participate in the Afghan insurgency. Interview with NCO-A, 3^rd

September 2008, north Pakhli, KP.

11 The Afsharid Persian ruler Nadir Shah bestowed military authority and political prestige upon Ahmed Shah Abdali, as was customary for the Persian monarchs to do with Abdali notables. Also, Persian rulers included Abdali lashkars as a component of their militaries in campaigns against the Ghilzai between the 14^th and 17^th centuries (Malleson 1878: 225-40).

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Pashtun tribes, particularly the Ghilzai, and Persian authority has been borne of this adversarial political history and the fact that Persian dynasties have tended to espouse Shia Islam, considered heretical by many Ghilzai and Karlanri Pashtuns. Sustained Persian influence over the city of Herat and over the predominantly Hazarajat Shia population of west-central Afghanistan has rendered the region of Herat as the north-western boundary of Pakhtunkhwa while the west-central highlands, populated by the Hazarajat, have constituted the northern boundary. Since the Durrani state, Afghan rulers have sought to subdue the Hazarajat through alliances between the Durrani, Tajiks and Uzbeks, a dynamic that continues currently.

Sustained Persian/Iranian influence over the Hazarajat means that Iran continues to constitute the western boundary of Pakhtunkhwa and a potentially significant internal factor in the tribal politics of the Afghan borderland.

3) Punjab has historically formed the southern barrier of the Afghan borderland. Roughly corresponding with the current Pakistani administrative province of Punjab today, Punjab has historically constituted a martial challenge to the southward expansion of the Pashtun tribes who, consequently, have historically moved northward and eastward in search of agricultural land. Both the Hotaki and the Durrani states did push southward through Punjab to its heart, the city of Lahore, but were unable to sustain an authoritative Pashtun presence. Sikh insurrections persisted, eventually leading to the counter thrust northward of Ranjit Singh, whose domain extended to include the second Afghan capital of Peshawar from 1818 to 1849 (Stewart 2008: 40).

4) The most significant development in the region’s recent history and the event that has had the greatest impact upon the Afghan borderland in the last two centuries however, has been the British imperial expansion in India which included the eastern and southern parts of Pakhtunkhwa. After the dissolution of Company rule in India in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857, the British presence in Pakhtunkhwa – now in the form of the Raj - increased, with the British consolidating garrisons across what subsequently became the North West Frontier Province (Caroe 1958: 348-349). Having faced a serious set-back deep inside Pakhtunkhwa fifteen years previously in the first Anglo-Afghan war, British policy was at the period characterised by ‘masterly inactivity’ (Hopkirk 2001: 286). However, the ‘forward policy’ of the Disraeli government (1874-1880) would shortly precipitate another Anglo-Afghan war, beginning the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the demarcation of the Durand Line, a tactical solution to part of a larger strategic contest that has resulted in decades of still intense feuding between the successor states of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

These factors; the Ghilzai-Durrani rivalry, the role of Persia/Iran in the west of Pakhtunkhwa, the Punjabi Sikh insurrections, and the presence of the British in India, are the major socio-political and geo-strategic formative factors that have shaped, and continue to shape, the political context into which the Afghan borderland has emerged in its current form. Although presently the states of Pakistan and Afghanistan form the immediate political context surrounding the Afghan borderland, the themes mentioned above constitute enduring pre-state and trans-pre-state realities that function on a pre-state level and are also manifest in the pre-state – sub-state dynamic that continues to shape and dynamics of the Afghan borderland.