Pakistan’s relationship with the various Afghan ethnic groups has been a fascinating journey since independence.
During Zahir Shah’s rule, Daud Khan was the real power behind the throne, and soon enough he overthrew Zahir Shah altogether. During this period, it was the Tajiks who were the pro-Pakistan ethnicity. Daud Khan was a bit of a Pashtun nationalist, was popular among the predominantly Pashtun officer cadre in the Afghan forces, and with NAP (the predecessor of the ANP) popular in the erstwhile NWFP and Bacha Khan still alive, the Tajiks in Afghanistan and the Pakistani state had something of a common foe. There was even a Persian element to this, because before the Arabization of the 70s and 80s and before the Iranian revolution, Pakistan and Iran had cordial relations, Pakistan was far prouder of the Persian influence it inherited from subcontinental Muslim empires, and the Tajiks saw themselves as a bastion of Persian culture in Afghanistan.
This of course changed following the Saur revolution, the Iranian revolution, Zia’s coup and the Soviet invasion all happening in quick succession. It was then that the Pakistani state managed to pacify and neutralize the nationalist Pashtun element, but also at the cost of antagonizing the Tajiks. Religion obviously played a major role, and the roots of this go back to at least the early Bhutto years: the state recognized the potential of using religion in Afghanistan as a counterweight to nationalism and the communism that was beginning to make inroads into Afghan political life. There’s the famous case of Gulbudin Hikmatyar and Ahmed Shah Massoud, one Pashtun and the other Tajik, belonging to the same same outfit at that time before their acrimonious falling out, being brought to Pakistan during Bhutto era for training.
Lately, there’s been talk of a fascinating development, and that is the rumors of Abdullah Abdullah, former Massoud ally and the most prominent Tajik politician of recent times, having made overtures and having achieved some sort of rapprochement with Pakistan. Have we gone full circle fifty years or so, with the Tajiks again being the Pakistani counterweight in Afghanistan while the likes of the PTM are the Afghan pressure group in Pakistan? Probably not entirely, but these recent developments add an intriguing subtext to Pak-Afghan relations.
This is a an excellent post. It is alert to the complexities of the Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship and the changing contexts which have shaped Pakistani strategic thinking. It also hints to the sense of anxiety on part of the Pakistan state that has influenced its policies.
But what I want to pick up on is the following:
There was even a Persian element to this, because before the Arabization of the 70s and 80s and before the Iranian revolution, Pakistan and Iran had cordial relations, Pakistan was far prouder of the Persian influence it inherited from subcontinental Muslim empires, and the Tajiks saw themselves as a bastion of Persian culture in Afghanistan.
This is a perceptive and interesting point.
I appreciate that I am going off-topic but it is worth adding here that we can also see the decline of Persian high culture in South Asia over a longer historical period.
We may turn as far back as the eighteenth century when the leading intellectual of Islamic revivalism in the century, Shah Wali Allah, declared ‘We are an Arab people whose fathers have fallen in exile in the country of Hindustan, and Arabic genealogy and Arabic language are our pride.’ It is in the eighteenth century that we see the first great flowering of Urdu literature which eventually paved the way for it to supplant Persian as a pillar of Muslim high culture. (This is, of course, notwithstanding that Urdu itself draws heavily on Persian). ‘No cultured North Indian Muslim before the beginning of the eighteenth century’ wrote the great Urdu scholar, Ralph Russell, ‘would have dreamed of writing poetry in any other language [than Persian]’. But in the eighteenth century there emerged amongst others, writing in Urdu, such eminent personalities as, Sauda, Dard, Mushafi and of course, above all, Mir.
It was a trend confirmed in the nineteenth century. Ghalib took the greatest pride in his Persian poetry but became most famous for his Urdu verse. As the reality of British power became an inescapable fact of life, Persian was replaced as the language of government and administration. The colonial challenge inspired movements for revival and reform including those associated with Deoband and Aligarh. Many Muslims began to look to the Arab world for religious inspiration. The ulama of Deoband, in the absence of Muslim state power, sought to fashion an individual moral conscience and knowledge of God’s word. There was, in this context, a greater emphasis on the revealed sciences and less on what had become associated with Persianate culture - rational sciences.
Turning to Aligarh: many of the early modernists of the nineteenth century were familiar with Persian high culture. But the winds of change were blowing. In the college Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded, he became aware that students were more interested in learning English than Persian. The next generation of modernists would not have the same grasp of Persian culture. Iqbal, though not an Aligarh product, was amongst modernists of his age an exception in that his doctoral dissertation was on ‘The Development of Metaphysics in Persia’ and in that he wrote some of his profoundest poetry in Persian.
Yet, even Iqbal argued that ‘the conquest of Persia meant not the conversion of Persia to Islam, but the conversion of Islam to Persianism.’ It was Persian influenced mysticism that Iqbal attacked the most for ‘the spirit of Islam…aimed at the conquest of matter’ whereas mysticism too often led to a ‘flight from it’.
