I mean at one point it has to be enough, I have never found a group of people so desperate for attention, I mean why are south asians like this? They are some of the most insecure desperate people I have ever seen.
The funny thing is they use Pashtuns as a way to differentiate themselves from their neighbours yet they have the audacity to act like it's the same
Source from Facebook: Some Gul Khan or probably Punjabi (likely; can’t figure it out) saying Pashto is useless to teach. The Khattak guy states that learning your mother tongue is a person’s right (basic translation for those of you who don’t know Urdu). The guy responds saying there’s no such thing as a Pashtun, Baloch, Sindhi etc., we are all one now and should forget our identities. It’s funny in the speech he copied that it mentions Bengalis but they are no longer part of this state 😂.
I promise you that the vast majority of the dominant ethnic group of Pakistan think this way. They claim they love Pashtun culture and Pashto zaba, especially to spite Afghans by saying there’s more Pashtuns in Pakistan, but they want you to forgo your identity. When we ask for our rights, they say we are gadaraan. When we ask for Pashto as a daftari zaba, we are ignored. They committed linguistic suicide and many of them now have an identity crisis and want you to do the same.
As above.
Read in places they aim to break KPK into 4 for example.
I know im going to get a lot of hate for this post i apologise but it must be said even if it gets me banned from here radical Afghan and other Pashtun feminists who openly go against Islam must be stopped even if the whole world hates you for it!
Now dont get me wrong im all for the rights of women to work and have an education and to be treated with kidness and respect and dignity and to be safe and not mistreated but that does not mean they can knowingly spread lies about islam and about culture that are bot true.
This problem is huge on ticktock where you have people both women and men in the west who become athetists who dont know how to separate people like taliban from islam and if you try to explain it to them they make you like a mysgonist and an extremist.
Im sorry if this is difficult for you to accept but that is not true islam is perfect muslims are not every muslim country and empire has its issues but that dosent mean you can go on ticktock and blame islam and muslims as a whole for it.
The truth is many Pashtun men are bad weather we accept it or not but that dosent mean everyone is yet this simple concept is too much especially for the atheist Afghans the west. I know Pashtuns have problems but there is a way of criticism without goinf out of fold of islam entirely.
My advice to Pashtun Parents and pashtuns in the west keep your children away from social media at least until they are at an age where they know right from wrong because it will poison their mind.
And theres one last thing im gonna say which is the most controversial for some people they dont just want freedom to be treated properly no thats not enough they want the freedom to do sinful acts such as zina such as Alchohol such as dressing ina degrading manner and until they get that they will blame islam and Pashtuns for it and those husbands and fathers who are mistreating pashtun women are only adding to the situation both sides must be stopped we need to stop Abusive Pashtun men and also radical feminist Afghan Atheists who will contribute to many afghan brothers and sisters not only leaving islam but Pashtun culture as well
… useful idiots in a bigger game of those around us? Are we simple in who we align with?
I want a sense of people’s opinion on this. Not interested in being upvoted or downvoted for my positions.
Also interested in your commentary on this.
No one really knows.
No one can really say.
A supposed Islamic state, yet operates heavily on riba.
A supposed Islamic state, yet the half the country split off in 1971 following a civil war during which horrific crimes were committed against Bengalis.
So paranoid that they arrested swathes of our Mashaaran in the past 79 years.
There is no Pakistani identity. Therefore, the Pakistani state (Punjabis and Urdu speaking folk) has had to manufacture an artificial one. It essentially accounts to becoming an urban Pakistani Punjabi (i.e. Lahori). It means giving up your language and identity to become a generic Indian Muslim. At least India owns its identity.
I want to send this message out to Lar Pashtuns, especially the Pashtuns of the Peshawar Valley (I say this as someone originally from there myself and someone who hates what we have become). A significant portion of you are one of the most cucked groups of people in existence. You actively support these oppressors in the erasure of our identity. You can’t even speak a single sentence in soocha Pashto without adding some Urdu or English into it. You can’t even count in Pashto. When questioned, you state you are a ‘Pakistani’. What does this even mean? So many of your weddings are something straight out of a Bollywood movie. Absolute disgrace. This culture and language which you seem to supposedly hold so dear won’t even exist in your lands in like 50 years.
When this happens, I don’t think you should call yourself a Pashtun. Merely a Pashtun by DNA. That’s all. Then you can call yourself a Pakistani.
It supposedly seems that for some Pashtuns of Pashtunkhwa, they feel that this tiny corner of the internet is ‘hostile’ to them. I understand that sometimes we can, including myself, get carried away. I love Pashtuns. I love being around Pashtuns. I am sorry if I have offended you.
However, I made a list of questions which I wrote in response to another post which was made earlier. I thought it would be useful to share it separately. I think we should educate our brothers of Pashtunkhwa who have been swayed by Pak Studies using these questions. I urge all Pashtuns to repeatedly ask the following to any Pakistani nationalists. I think this is the way forward in changing these people’s minds; to ultimately help them think more critically.
If anyone can answer these questions and provide explanations contrary to what I believe, I may even become a Pakistani nationalist myself!
This is going to be a long post, so bear with me.
Over the past two weeks, I've seen several posts here from people frustrated by the racism, historical revisionism, and false claims about Pashtuns being spread on social media, often by Khorasani nationalists and, in some cases, Hazara, Uzbek, Punjabi, and other ethnic nationalists.
Given my own background, I figured I would offer my two cents on the issue. I am half Pashtun from my father's side which is from Kandahar and I belong to the Alekozai tribe, and half Tajik Afghan. I do not approach this from the perspective of being hostile toward one ethnic group or blindly defending another. I am proud of both sides of my family and, above all, proud to be Afghan. My issue is with ethnic nationalism, racism, and historical revisionism regardless of who is doing it.
I think most people here already understand that the Khorasani nationalist crowd you encounter online represents a very small but extremely vocal minority. A lot of this discourse also seems to come from diaspora users who have never actually lived in or visited Afghanistan but use the current Taliban regime as a representation of all Pashtuns and Pashtun culture. It's absolutely moronic and makes no sense. If the Taliban represents Pashtuns and Pashtun culture as a whole, then by the same logic al-Qaeda or ISIS would represent Muslims and Islamic culture as a whole. A political or militant organization does not become the embodiment of an entire ethnic or religious population simply because many of its members come from that population.
Personally, I think most of these people are better ignored. They are a tiny minority, and social media amplifies people who would otherwise have very little influence. But if you do want to engage with their arguments, then at least make them defend those arguments historically.
The first thing I would ask any Tajik/Khorasani nationalist is why they act as though all Tajiks or Persian-speaking peoples constitute some naturally unified bloc. When I lived in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2014, plenty of Tajiks had very negative views of Panjshiris, and some outright hated them. Not ordinary, everyday Panjshiris, but people still associated with the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, related political groups, and the political networks surrounding them, including their cronies. People from Mazar had their own views about other Tajik communities. The same could be said of Herat and other predominantly Tajik areas. Panjshiris themselves had plenty of internal political disputes, rivalries, and even outright hostility toward one another. In other words, "Tajik" has never meant that everyone thinks alike politically, culturally, regionally, or even religiously.
Take my own cousins from my mother's side. They are Herati Tajik Shia who grew up in Peshawar before returning to Afghanistan in 2004. They would always tell me how glad they were that their family had gone to Pakistan rather than Iran because, at least in Peshawar, they were surrounded by other Afghans, and by that they meant Pashtuns as well as people from Afghanistan's other ethnic groups. One of my cousins even owned a women's clothing shop with a Peshawari Pashtun business partner. They remain close friends today. I always found that interesting, especially because my cousins are Shia. You might assume they would have preferred Iran, where they would have been surrounded by other Shia and Persian/Farsi-speaking people, but they were happier being around fellow Afghans in Peshawar.
My mother and her family have also always referred to themselves simply as Afghan. They would never describe themselves as "Afghanistani," Khorasani, Iranian, or Persian. They usually would not even lead with Tajik unless the conversation were specifically about ethnic groups within Afghanistan. Most of the time, they simply say they are Afghan and then mention that they are Herati.
If Pashtuns themselves are not some completely unified group, why would Tajiks, Persians, or Farsiwan somehow be? There have historically been, and continue to be, tensions and prejudices/racism between some Iranians and Afghans, and Iranian anti-Afghan attitudes have not always neatly distinguished between Pashtun and non-Pashtun Afghans. There are also major religious differences: most Tajiks are Sunni, whereas the majority population of Iran is Shia. So I do not understand the attempt by some Khorasani nationalists to portray the entire Persian-speaking world as a naturally unified political or cultural bloc. Even within Persian-speaking societies, there are arguments over national identity, history, cultural ownership, historical figures, and who gets to claim particular contributions to Persian literature and civilization. Persian ultra nationalists shit on Tajik identity all the time. We also know that Tajiks are an Eastern Iranic ethnic group, but they gave up their culture/language and adopted it from the Persians. The claim that Tajiks are ethnically Persian is laughable. Sure, a small minority might be including myself, but the majority of Tajiks are more closely related to Pashutns than they are to Persians.
Meanwhile, going back to social media, there are plenty of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and members of Afghanistan's other ethnic groups who proudly display the Afghan flag in their social-media bios and openly identify themselves as Afghan. And inevitably, you will sometimes see Khorasani nationalists show up in the comments trying to "correct" them by insisting that Afghan means Pashtun only. It does not seem to matter, because the owner of the account often pushes right back and says that they are proud to be Afghan.
So if you want to engage Khorasani nationalists or anyone else who claims Pashtuns are only around 350 years old and/or originated in India, ask them these four questions. They should be able to answer them if they apparently know more than the researchers, linguists, historians, and scholars who have dedicated significant portions of their careers to studying Pashtun history, language, culture, and identity.
1. Who created the Pashtun identity?
You cannot take the earliest written source you personally know about and declare that everyone mentioned in it came into existence at that moment.
2. Why was "Afghan" already historically associated with Pashtuns?
Most of you already know that before Afghan became the modern national identity encompassing all peoples of Afghanistan, the term had historically been used as an ethnonym associated with Pashtuns.
The history of the ethnonym Afghan and the history of the modern state of Afghanistan are related, but they are not the same historical question.
3. Where did the Pashto language come from?
This is probably the biggest problem with the claim Khorasani nationalists make about Pashtuns.
Most of you already know that Pashto is not an Indo-Aryan language. It is an Iranian language, conventionally classified among the Eastern Iranian languages.
Historical linguists can even reconstruct an earlier Proto-Pashto stage. Pashto also preserves inherited features and correspondences connecting it to the wider history of the Iranian languages, including correspondences with ancient Iranian languages such as Avestan. It did not simply appear out of nowhere in the 1600s.
Languages do not magically acquire thousands of years of linguistic development because someone decides to invent an ethnicity.
4. Why confuse surviving written evidence with the birth of a people or language?
The earliest document you personally know about is not the birthday of an ethnicity. Likewise, the earliest surviving book written in a language is not the day that language was invented. Languages can exist orally for centuries before developing extensive surviving written traditions.
By the 17th century, Khushal Khan Khattak was already writing sophisticated literature in Pashto while speaking about Afghans/Pashtuns as an existing collective people. Think about what that means. He was not sitting there inventing a language from scratch or announcing that all the tribes had suddenly become a brand-new ethnic group called Pashtuns/Afghans. The language, tribal identities, and broader ethnic consciousness already existed. What changes in that period is the quality and quantity of the historical documentation available to us. That is not the same thing as saying the people themselves suddenly appeared.
None of this means that modern Pashtuns have existed completely unchanged for thousands of years. Of course they haven't. Pashtun identity developed through ethnogenesis, tribal migration, assimilation, intermarriage, political change, and cultural exchange, just like Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Persian, and practically every other major ethnic identity in the region.
That is normal human history. But there is a massive difference between saying:
"Modern Pashtun identity developed gradually over centuries."
and saying:
"Pashtuns were invented 350 years ago and are actually Indians."
The first is a perfectly reasonable historical argument.
The second raises some very basic questions about history and historical linguistics that Khorasani nationalists or anyone else repeating it should be expected to answer. If the enormous body of research devoted to Pashtun history, identity, genealogy, linguistics, and culture still cannot give us one simple, definitive origin story for the Pashtun people, how the hell are Khorasani nationalists on social media supposedly able to do it?
I hope this gives some of you peace of mind.
نن سبا د پاکستان پښتانه ځوانان جناح خپل اتل ګڼي او باچا خان ورته دښمن ښکاري. دوی په خپل پېژندګلوۍ کې سم ورک دي. زما د ژوند مقصد بس همدا دی چې د دوی سترګې خلاصې کړم.
I've been seeing a ridiculous amount of Sindhis and Punjabis specifically Potoharis claim these two items. What's their reasoning for this vulture like behavior?
If we are going to talk honestly about Pashtuns in Pakistan, we have to talk about what actually happened. The history is not simply one of Pashtuns becoming part of Pakistan and everything carrying on normally afterwards. There were political crackdowns, disputes over territory and language, years of conflict, displacement and ongoing arguments over development and resources. These are all part of the historical record.
Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement were major political forces in the former North-West Frontier Province. After Pakistan was created, the elected government of Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan was dismissed in August 1947 even though it had a majority in the provincial assembly. Bacha Khan later took an oath of allegiance to Pakistan, but he was imprisoned and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement was suppressed. In August 1948, security forces opened fire on Khudai Khidmatgar supporters at Babrra. The exact number killed is disputed, but the massacre itself is not. And this was not something unique to Pashtuns. Sindhi, Baloch and Bengali political movements were also suppressed at different points. That does not change what happened to the Pashtun political movement.
The political demands did not stop there.
Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai spent years campaigning for Pashtun political and linguistic rights and was repeatedly imprisoned. He supported the idea of a single Pashtun province within Pakistan, bringing together the Pashtun-majority areas of the former NWFP and Balochistan. That never happened. When One Unit was abolished in 1970, the Pashtun areas of Balochistan remained part of Balochistan.
Even the name of the province tells you something. It was called the North-West Frontier Province, or NWFP, until 2010, when the 18th Amendment changed it to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or KP. So after decades of political campaigning, we went from one abbreviation to another. The name changed, but the wider demand for a united Pashtun province was never realised. FATA was also kept separate from KP for decades before finally being merged into the province in 2018.
Then came years of war. The former FATA became a major centre of militancy, Pakistani military operations and US drone strikes. Large numbers of people were displaced, infrastructure was damaged and civilians were caught in the middle. The consequences have not simply disappeared. In 2025, an unexploded mortar shell in Lakki Marwat killed five children and injured around a dozen other people. That is the kind of long-term damage that remains after the fighting is over.
It is also important to separate Pashtun culture from the Taliban. Pashtun culture is centuries older than the Taliban. Rahman Baba, Khushal Khan Khattak, Ghani Khan, Pashto poetry, attan, jirga traditions and a huge oral tradition all existed long before the Taliban. Pashtun identity cannot be reduced to a militant movement that appeared in the 1990s.
Language is another part of this. Pakistan's 2023 census recorded Pushto as the mother tongue of 18.15% of the country's population, while 81% of people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reported Pushto as their mother tongue. Urdu was the mother tongue of 9.25% nationally. There is nothing contradictory about having Urdu as the national language while giving Pashto proper recognition in Pashtun-majority areas. Article 251(3) of the Constitution allows provinces to promote and use their own languages.
The same goes for history. Bacha Khan, Achakzai, Ghani Khan and Ajmal Khattak were not figures from some foreign country. They lived and worked in what became Pakistan and were important political and cultural figures. Their place in the national story has often been limited or contested. Saying that other regional figures are also neglected does not really answer that point. It simply shows that regional histories have often been pushed into the background. They did build a statue of Ranjit Singh though 😂!
Then there are resources and development. Nobody is saying that having natural resources automatically makes a region wealthy. The actual question is whether constitutional provisions concerning provincial resources are being properly applied. Articles 158 and 161 deal with provincial interests in natural gas and hydroelectric power. At the same time, the former FATA and other Pashtun-majority areas have faced serious problems with infrastructure, education, healthcare, security and investment. Blaming all of that on “tribal culture” is far too simplistic. Decades of conflict and weak state infrastructure obviously matter.
So when you put everything together, the record is not difficult to understand. The elected Frontier government was dismissed. Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgars were suppressed. People were killed at Babrra. Pashtun political leaders such as Achakzai were repeatedly imprisoned. The demand for a united Pashtun province was never fulfilled. NWFP was eventually renamed KP in 2010, changing one abbreviation for another, while FATA remained separate until 2018. Pashtun-majority areas then endured years of militancy, military operations, displacement and drone warfare, and civilians are still dealing with unexploded ordnance today. You can argue about what these facts mean, but you cannot honestly erase the facts themselves.
Calling every Pashtun political or cultural grievance “separatism”, blaming underdevelopment on “tribal culture”, or reducing Pashtun identity to the Taliban does not change the historical record. It simply avoids it.
PashtunForums.com seems to be restored!