“We Are One People and Ours Is a Land”: The Demand for Pashtunistan, 1948–1952

Abstract

With Pakistan's independence, its leader, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, succeeded in establishing the largest state for Muslims in the world – a state that included both the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and neighboring frontier tribal area. Pakistan's difficulties, however, were evident almost as soon as partition had become official. The eruption of conflict with India over Kashmir and Afghanistan's irredentist demand for an autonomous “Pashtunistan” along the Durand Line created an immediate threat to Pakistan's territoriality and sovereignty. The country's security and independent trajectory were further affected by the international setting. Pakistan's emergence came at a time of huge global change: the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, and their respective allies, already had begun polarizing the globe along an East–West axis. Britain, while trying to remain involved in South Asia, struggled to balance great power ambitions with war debt, colonial unrest, and domestic matters. Indo–Pakistan tensions only complicated Britain's relationship with the Commonwealth, as British officials tried to negotiate a settlement between the warring dominions. As in colonial times, the Afghan–Pakistan borderlands occupied an important space in the minds of local and foreign officials, although historians of Pakistan, Afghanistan, decolonization, and the Cold War largely have overlooked the region. While foreign officials, particularly from Britain and the United States, continued to focus on the region's strategic importance, the frontier tribal area and neighboring NWFP gained new meaning for Pakistan in its context as a newly independent nation-state. The redrawing of South Asia's borders during partition meant that the northwestern borderlands were no longer as geographically peripheral as they had been in colonial times; instead, they made up a crucial portion of the emergent “moth-eaten” Pakistan (even if Pakistani leaders’ focus predominantly remained on Punjab and East Bengal). Leaders of the Pakistani state, like those in India, were very aware of the complexities of national integration and the immediate need to cement their country's international boundaries. As political geographers have shown, state sovereignty is not a “natural” phenomenon but instead requires active construction by the government – and recognized borders to circumscribe this action.