afghanistaninto the Pakistan provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan up
to the banks of the Indus. At the heart of Pushtun tribal territory lies the
mountains and hills of the Safed Koh, Sulaiman Koh and Spingar.
Since the foundation of the Durrani kingdom in the early eighteenth
century, hundreds of thousands of Pushtuns have settled in other regions
of modern Afghanistan, the result of voluntary and involuntary migration,
nomad resettlement programmes and state-sponsored colonization. Today
substantial Pushtun communities are located in the lower Hari Rud and
Bala Murghab rivers in western Afghanistan and in and around most of
the main urban centres of the northern plains from Maimana to Qunduz.
Southern Kabul, Ghazni and Uruzgan provinces have also become
Pushtun-majority areas due to the forcible relocation of indigenous peoples
such as the Hazaras, Aimaqs and other Persian-speaking communities.
The Ghilzai and Durrani Pushtun tribes make up the largest nomadic
community in Afghanistan, known as maldar or kuchis. Since the 1970s
substantial numbers of Pushtun nomads have become sedentary due to the
unresolved civil war and the hostility of non-Pushtun communities in their
traditional summer grazing grounds in northern and central Afghanistan.
Today many former maldar eke out a meagre living as subsistence farmers
on marginal land, some have become small-time traders, while others are
lorry drivers in Pakistan’s Pushtun-dominated trucking businesses.
There are probably as many Persian-speaking peoples in Afghanistan
as there are Pushtuns. It is common to refer to these peoples as Tajiks, but
they are far from being members of a single tribe or ethnic group, hence
to lump all these peoples together under the generic label of Tajik is some-
what misleading. Historically, Ta j i k was the term used to describe the Arab
Muslim invaders and not the indigenous Persian population of eastern Iran,
Afghanistan or Central Asia. In Afghanistan native Persian-speakers are
usually known by the generic term farsiwans, though in the northern plains
the term Ta j i k is more frequently employed due to the influence of Soviet
ethnography. Many farsiwans are simply known by their place of origin:
Kabuli, Panjshiri, Kohistani, Badakhshani and so forth. Unlike Pushtuns,
most farsiwans are not tribal and have a diverse and mixed ethnogenesis.
The only exception are the Chahar Aimaq – the Sunni Hazara, Firozkohi,
Jamshidi and Taimani-Timuris – tribal people who live mainly in Badghis
and southern Faryab and Sar-i Pul provinces. Farsiwans are also scattered
throughout the country, including Pushtun-majority regions such as the
Logar valley, Nangahar and Ghazni.
Historically, Persian was the language of the court and commerce
and by and large this is still the case, for while Pushtu and the Kabuli