I'd like to hear the views of people from KPK, especially Pakhtuns. Have you heard any of these things from your elders?

I've come across the claim that there were 12 lost tribes of Israel, and that many people consider the Pakhtuns to be descended from one of them. Some of the similarities people point to are:

Similar styles of wearing a shawl

A festival or observance on Friday

The custom of marrying your late brother's widow

A strong sense of tribal unity

Facial features

Similar names, for example, Yousafzai meaning "son of Yousaf," which some link to Hazrat Yousuf (A.S.), a Prophet from Bani Israel

I've also seen a rabbi (or someone presented as one) suggest that the Pakhtuns may be one of the lost tribes. There's also a story about a man named Afghana, in the area of modern Palestine, whose descendants supposedly migrated to Afghanistan.

Another story I've heard is that a man from the Pakhtun lands (Pakistan/Afghanistan region) traveled to present-day Saudi Arabia, met Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and accepted Islam. He then married a daughter of Hazrat Khalid ibn Walid (R.A.), returned to his people, and spread Islam among them.

What have you heard, and what do you think?

As Pashton of Afghanistan, for the past few days, I have been really sad about the situation of our Pashtun and Baloch people in Pakistan.

There was once a strong Afghan government that stood up for the rights of Pashtuns and Baloch people in Pakistan. Today, our people have no one.

The Pakistani military has dissolved the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa against the will of the people. In Balochistan, 26 Baloch people who were forcibly disappeared were killed, and their dead bodies were thrown in public.

Even Palestinians have many Arab countries that can at least raise their voices for them. But who do our Pashtun and Baloch people have?

The government in Kabul seems satisfied with saying that Pakistan should not blame Afghanistan for its internal affairs.

Pakistan is planning to exploit the mineral resources of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa while large numbers of people will be displaced. What makes it even more painful is the recent statement from the Prime Minister's Office about establishing mineral value-addition centres in Punjab.

Our people are suffering, our land is rich in resources, but our people have no one to defend their rights.

God, we are really helpless.

Looking for suggestions for a Pashtun name for coffee shop or Middle Eastern just has to be easy to say. I’ve spent months thinking 😭

I’m working on a project with pashto AI reading. could you please evaluate this speech for me?

please feel free to mention all errors you observe

thank you!

Dear brothers! If you do not fall in the Battle of Maiwand, by God, someone is keeping you alive as a symbol of shame!

(Pashto: که په میوند کی شهید نشوی خدایږو لالیه بی ننګی ته دی ساتینه)

Do people still remember these famous words? For some reason, I think not. Emulating Gandhi seems to be more important to Pashtuns nowadays.

I don’t know why I’m sharing this. For some odd reason, these words just popped into my head like a red alert. Take from them what you will. I just felt like sharing them at this moment.

Pashtuns have suffered for decades and we continue to suffer. Landmines still scattered across our lands; rubble still present from the drone strikes green-lighted by the beghairat establishment that occurred.

It got me thinking. Would things like this ever happen in the aforementioned regions? Is Pakistan just Punjabistan at this point or was it always like this?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

​"We strongly condemn the imposition of military rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the name of an emergency and Governor's rule, using the military's own created so called terrorism as an excuse.

​The arrests of all PTI leaders and workers, including Chief Minister Sohail Afridi, are illegal, undemocratic, cruel, and oppressive acts by Punjabi generals and politicians. ​

Punjabi military generals have always used occupied Pakhtunkhwa as a laboratory for their imperialist experiments. ​

Whether it is strategic policies, the use of new and old weapons, the looting of resources, or cruel political policies, all of this is tested on subjugated Pakhtunkhwa under the guise of a notorious law and constitution. ​This law, these courts, this parliament, this media, this entire system, and this state were founded on Pashtun-enmity, they are currently based on it, and they will remain so.

​Hollow slogans like the "struggle for the supremacy of democracy" are, in reality, just another form of Punjab's supremacy. Because if there is democracy in Pakistan, Punjabi politicians will rule, and if there is a dictatorship, Punjabi generals will rule. Both of these classes are enemies of the Pashtuns.

​Deliverance from them is only possible through independence. Pashtuns have tried all other paths for 80 years. You can try them further, but you will achieve nothing but humiliation.

​There is no need to look too far back. If you look at the record of just the last ten years, you will easily understand that in the Punjabi state (alias Pakistan), democracy, elections, parliament, and hollow claims like the "supremacy of parliament" are mere illusions. Through these institutions and words, the hopes of subjugated nations are collectively tied to this imperialist system.

​When the British left, they handed over their imperialist system to this imperialist army, and to this day, occupied and subjugated nations are controlled under this same system.

From day one until today, there has only been one rule, and that is the Generals' rule. Pinning hopes of any good on the constitution, law, courts, parliament, and this state system—and failing to struggle against it—is synonymous with further subjugating your nation and homeland. It only leads to more humiliation, degradation, exploitation, massacres, and self-disgrace.

​An emergency or Governor's rule may temporarily increase the hardships of the public, but these very hardships will steer the Pashtun nation toward national consciousness and the thought of a struggle for freedom. This very thought and consciousness is the true solution to our problems.

​These hardships, these atrocities, and this pain will one day awaken the great homeland of Pakhtunkhwa and the great Pashtun nation from the ignorant slumber of tying their hopes to this system. And these very atrocities will ultimately become the cause of the worst defeat for these oppressors."

In this dire time, we really, desperately, need Afghan unity, everywhere you look, there is only hate and propaganda against us, our name, our language and our history, to sell out at such a time, is the biggest crime of all. You cannot be dense enough to fall for the prespective of some imaginary wall being between us, further division, only helps anyone but Pukhtuns.

To give worth to opinion's of farsiwans, hindkowans or urdus, should bring shame to you.

Check out the comments made by the CM of Punjab and the niece of the current PM recently (she stated that she views Pashtunkhwa and Balochistan as bigger threats than India) well as today’s events in Pashtunkhwa.

Re-uploaded for sound.

Fundamental question: How important is this? Should Pashtuns assert power?

Do the existing structures enable Pashtuns to maximise opportunities to build civic power that means the life our children have ensures language, culture and freedom is protected? Can we learn from other systems?

Much as we love to rally behind Manzoor Pashteen and Bacha Khan ideals does that ultimately mean pacifist Pashtuns lose the long game? Is the Fakir of Ipi approach a fix or flawed?

Is the Taliban model a short-term solution only? Have Pashtuns lost the ability to organise differently? Should Pashtuns consider partnerships?

Salamoona, Starney Ma Shay!

I'm constructing a personal pashto dictionary, and I want you to help me find out what different word(s) mean. I will be posting often for help as it's an ongoing project! :)

Dagara - ډاګاره

Duziya - دوزییه

Dawgeera - داوګیره

Nishaka - نیشاکه

ok so i just joined this community and im confused. is this for pashtuns to get together and talk or is this for other ppl to talk shit about pashtuns? i genuinely looked throught a bit and i still cant tell.

Nu Laka Za sa olikam dalta?

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.

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?

• If Pashtuns suddenly appeared only 350 years ago, then who were the founders?
• When exactly did Afridis, Yusufzais, Khattaks, Mohmands, Wazirs, Ghilzais, Abdalis, and all the other tribes supposedly decide that they were members of a new ethnic group called Pashtun?
• Who chose the name Pashtun/Pakhtun?
• What historical event marks the creation of this identity?
• Where are the contemporary records describing this supposedly enormous ethnogenesis taking place during the 17th century?

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.

• So if Pashtuns supposedly did not exist until around 350 years ago, how do you explain older references to Afghans as an identifiable population?
• Who supposedly decided that this already-existing ethnonym would suddenly be attached to a newly invented ethnic group?

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.

• So if Pashtuns and Pashto were supposedly created only 350 years ago, what language were these people speaking before then?
• Who created Pashto?
• How did a supposedly newly created language acquire inherited Iranian vocabulary, morphology, grammar, and systematic sound changes connecting it with much older stages of the Iranian language family?

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.

زما په دواړو اوږو ناستو فرښتو اوليکئ
ﺯما په سر که څه ليکئ نو په پښتو اوليکئ

د پاکې مينې ګنهګارو ! چې منکر پري نه شئ
د رقيبانو الزامونه په تندوو اوليکئ

په ښائستونو پسې ورکو ليونو ملګرو !
ﺯما په ﺯړه کښې د ګل مينه په اﺯغو اوليکئ

ﺯما په لاسو او په پښو کښې ديوتاګانو د وخت
د ﺯندګۍ نوم د اجل په ﺯولنو اوليکئ

د ﺯنځيرونو خالقانو ! د وحشت ځامنو !
ما په قطار کښې د ژوندون د ليونو اوليکئ

اې شاعرانو ! د قلم په آﺯادۍ مئينو
حال د بلوچو ماشومانو د سلګو اوليکئ

د آﺯادۍ عالم بردارو د نړۍ قامونو !
اوس د نړۍ نقشه کښې کور د پښتنو اوليکئ

As above.

Read in places they aim to break KPK into 4 for example.

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.

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.

So my great-great-great-great-grandfather came from kunar to Charsadda. I guess it was familial disputes which caused that migration. If anyone has any information about those people would really be grateful. I have heard stories from strangers (were from afghanistan) about those people who came from kunar to to charsadda. so if anyone has anything.