Why are pashtuns so influential in afghanistan

Afghans tend to hold a stronger sense of loyalty for their kin , tribe or ethnicity than their national identity see Ethnicity below. Some older Afghans may see the hardship and political turmoil of the past few decades as a recent devastating chapter in a much longer peaceful history.

Prior to the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was widely considered to be a peaceful country in the Asia region. For example, the country remained neutral during World War II.

People may express disappointment or dismay at the fact that most Western perceptions of their country are formulated around news of terrorism and turmoil without insight into the geopolitical factors that caused such conflicts.

Such perceptions overlook many of the positive aspects of the culture, such as its respect for artistry and intellectualism. For example, the Afghan artistic style is very decorative and embellished. Many Afghan items are beautifully embroidered in woven finery, including those that are used for everyday purposes e. Embellishment is also noticeable in the language, with poetry being one of the most admired art forms.

Respect is shown to those who have proof of expertise and can speak eloquently. Most reside in rural areas, as Afghan culture is traditionally agricultural. Many people are produce or livestock farmers living at a subsistence level. Generally, all Afghans have to work very hard to make ends meet child labour is common from the age of five and involves both genders. Most villages and rural regions tend to govern themselves. In small villages, there is a lack of schools, stores or government representation.

Often a village will have a large landowner khan who governs by assuming the role of both the malik and mirab. However, an assembly of men jirga usually vote on the important decisions that affect the whole village or tribe. This is exacerbated by the underfunded social services that are often unable to meet basic needs due to corruption and lack of security. The most common ethnic groups are the Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras.

However, there are also significant populations of Uzbeks, Nuristani, Aimak, Turkmen and Baloch among others.

The Pashtun are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Most speak Pashto and are Sunni Muslims. Pashtun culture and social organisation have been traditionally influenced by tribal codes of honour and interpretations of Islamic law.

Pashtunwali, in its strictest form, is mostly only followed in rural tribes. However, its influence can still be seen in much of Pashtun behaviour. For example, values such as honour, loyalty, hospitality and protection of female relatives remain important principles of social responsibility throughout Afghanistan.

The Pashtun are widely regarded as the most politically influential and dominant group in Afghanistan. Members of minority ethnicities have argued that the national identity of the country is exclusionary of non-Pashtun ethnicities.

Nevertheless, while Pashtuns have continuously held advantage in the political domain, many do not see or receive the privileges that come from being a member of the most dominant ethnic group. Political power and economic wealth definitively lies in the hands of the few. Many Pashtuns earn subsistence-level or very modest incomes as traders, farmers, livestock breeders and merchants.

Unlike most other ethnicities , they are not tribal and do not organise themselves by tribal association. Instead, their loyalty revolves around their family and village or local community for those living in urban areas. This is evident in the way many Tajik last names tend to reflect their place of origin, rather than their tribe or ethnicity. The Tajiks tend to be more urbanised than many other ethnicities and are relatively less rigid in their adherence to provincial attitudes.

Some reside in Kabul or the north-eastern part of the country. Many also live in the west, close to the Iranian border. Those who live in the cities are usually traders or skilled artisans.

However, the majority are farmers and herders. According to Minority Rights Group International, this accumulated privilege gives them quite a high social status as an ethnic group. However, the Tajik political influence is not very dominant. Many Tajiks have been persecuted amidst the unrest of the past 35 years and discussions over their political representation in government continue.

The Hazara people are widely understood to be one of the most socially and politically marginalised ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Pashtuns are historically the dominant ethnic community in Afghanistan, and they have actively fought to keep their predominance throughout Afghan history. In the years before Pashtuns made up about 40 per cent of the Afghan population. After the Soviet invasion in , some 85 per cent of the more than 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan were Pashtuns. They have always played a central role in Afghan politics, and their dominant position has been a major catalyst in triggering conflict.

For example, conflict arose between partners in the Mujahidin coalition which fought the Soviet troops and opposed the regime of President Mohammad Najibullah. This period brought severe poverty to Afghanistan, accompanied by food insecurity for most Afghans, and large-scale displacement and emigration, though some Pashtun communities were treated favourably and protected against the worst of the conditions. However, though Pashtuns were in power, the majority of the community nonetheless continued to suffer discrimination.

This was particularly true for Pashtun families who had been moved to the north more than years earlier by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, as part of a state consolidation effort. They were left to the mercy of the Tajiks and Uzbeks who are the predominant ethnic groups in the area. With the collapse of the Taliban regime and the signing of the Bonn Agreement in , Pashtun dominance over the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan came to an end.

Of the estimated one million internally displaced at that time, most of those remaining in displacement were Pashtuns, who had been uprooted by ethnic violence in the north and the west of the country. Since the fall of the Taliban, there has a fundamental shift in the traditional power balance. Although the first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, belongs to a prominent Pashtun family from Qandahar, the central government was largely dominated by the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance.

This less privileged position in administration and power has created obvious dissatisfaction among Pashtuns. Following the final results of the most recent parliamentary elections, Pashtun parliamentary candidates from Herat and several other provinces staged protests, claiming that they were systematically excluded from the election process through fraud and intimidation. Nevertheless, Pashtuns remain the largest ethnic group and therefore in an increasingly democratic system are likely to regain their influence.

Though their exact numbers are…. Sign up to Minority rights Group International's newsletter to stay up to date with the latest news and publications. Since August, MRG has been assisting Afghan minority activists and staff from our partner organizations as their lives and their work came under threat with the return of the Taliban.

We need your help. For the last three years, we at MRG have run projects promoting freedom of religion and belief across Asia.

In Afghanistan we have fostered strong partnerships with amazing local organizations representing ethnic and religious minorities. They were doing outstanding work, educating minority community members about their rights, collecting evidence of discrimination and human rights abuses, and carrying out advocacy. Not all have been able to flee.

Many had no option but to go into hiding. Some did not have a valid passport. Activists can no longer carry out the work they had embarked on. They can no longer draw a salary, which means they cannot feed their families. With a season of failed crops and a cold winter ahead, the future is bleak for too many. We refuse to leave Afghanistan behind.

We are asking you today to stand by us as we stand by them. We will also use your donations to support our Afghan partners to pay their staff until they can regroup and make new plans, to use their networks to gather and send out information when it is safe to do so, and to seek passports and travel options for those who are most vulnerable and who have no option but to flee to safety. Azadeh worked for a global organization offering family planning services.

Standing for everything the Taliban systematically reject, Azadeh had no option but to flee to Pakistan. MRG is working with our partners in Pakistan to support many brave Afghans who have escaped Afghanistan because of their humanitarian or human rights work or their faith. They are now in various secure locations established by our local partners on the ground in Pakistan. Although they are safer in Pakistan than Afghanistan, Hazara Shia and other religious minorities are also persecuted there.

We need your help, to support those who put their lives on the line for basic human rights principles we all believe in: equality, mutual respect, and freedom of belief and expression.

The situation on the ground changes daily as more people arrive and some leave. Aluminium mining in Baphlimali, India, has caused environment devastation and has wrecked the lifestyle of thousands of Adivasis. For centuries, Adivasi communities like the Paraja, Jhodia, Penga and Kondh have been living amidst the Baphlimali foothills.

For generations they have lived in harmony with nature. They lived through rain fed subsistence agriculture of millet, cereals, pulses, rice and collection of non-timber forest produce, e. With widespread mining activities and linked deforestation, they have lost access to forest products and to the much needed pasture land in the vicinity of their villages.

Your help will mean that MRG can support communities like these to help decision makers listen better to get priorities right for local people and help them to protect their environment and restore what has been damaged. The above picture is of a tribal woman forcibly displaced from her home and land by District Forest Officers in the district of Ganjam, Odisha.

Her cashew plantation burned in the name of protection of forests. Please note that the picture is to illustrate the story and is not from Baphlimali. Esther is a member of the indigenous Ogiek community living in the Mau Forest in Kenya.

Her family lives in one of the most isolated and inaccessible parts of the forest, with no roads, no health facilities and no government social infrastructure. The Ogiek were evicted from some forest areas, which have since been logged. The Ogiek consider it essential to preserve their forest home; others are content to use it to make money in the short term. Esther has a year-old daughter living with a physical disability who has never attended basic school, as it is over 12 kilometres away.

Young children living in these areas face challenges such as long distances to school, fears of assault by wild animals and dangers from people they may encounter on the journey.

Because the Ogiek have no legally recognised land rights, despite hundreds of years of residence in this forest, the government is refusing to provide social services or public facilities in the area. Ensuring that the Ogiek can access health services and education is essential and will mean that they can continue living on their land, protecting and conserving the environment there.

We are also advocating for equity in access to education and health by supporting OPDP to ensure that budgets for services are allocated fairly and are used well. The consequence of this wealth is that successive governments — colonial and post-colonial — have seen greater value in the land than the people. Pashtuns are united by the Pashto language, which is a member of the Indo-Iranian language family, although many also speak Dari Persian or Urdu.

One important aspect of traditional Pashtun culture is the code of Pashtunwali or Pathanwali , which sets out standards for individual and communal behavior.

This code may date back to at least the second century B. Some of the principles of Pashtunwali include hospitality, justice, courage, loyalty, and honoring women. Interestingly, the Pashtuns do not have a single origin myth. Since DNA evidence shows that Central Asia was among the first places peopled after humans left Africa, the ancestors of the Pashtuns may have been in the area for an incredibly long time—so long that they no longer even tell stories of having come from someplace else.

The Hindu origin story, the Rigveda , which was created as early as B. It seems likely that the ancestors of the Pashtun have been in the area for at least 4, years, then, and probably far longer. Many scholars believe that the Pashtun people are descended from several ancestral groups. Likely the foundational population were of eastern Iranian origin and brought the Indo-European language east with them.

They probably mixed with other peoples, including possibly the Kushans , the Hephthalites or White Huns, Arabs, Mughals, and others who passed through the area.

Specifically, Pashtuns in the Kandahar region have a tradition that they are descended from the Greco-Macedonian troops of Alexander the Great , who invaded the area in B. The Lodi Dynasty to C. Up until the late nineteenth century C. The Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan had to be distinguished from other people in Afghanistan, such as the ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara.

Most Pashtuns today are Sunni Muslims, although a small minority are Shi'a. As a result, some aspects of Pashtunwali seem to derive from Muslim law, which was introduced long after the code first developed.