Pakhtoon Defenders of Pakistan

The growth of resistance in tribal region of north-western Pakistan and southern Afghanistan is usually attributed to the popularity of their messianic brand of Islam and to covert help from Pakistan.
But the Pakistani Pakhtoon identity has a large part to play in this issue as the increasing co-operation between Pakistani Pakhtoon nationalist and Islamist forces against American domination.
In Afghanistan, where the Pakhtoon are the largest single ethnic group, they bitterly resent the disproportionate influence enjoyed by the Tajik ethnic minority in the regime of Hamid Karzai, a legacy of US collaboration with Tajik militias in overthrowing the Taliban. More importantly, it is the Pakhtoon who have been the main victims of US-NATO bombing attacks on the Taliban, who are largely Pakhtoon and operate almost entirely in Pakistani Pakhtoon territory. In one authoritative estimate, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have numbered nearly 5,000 since 2001.
In Pakistan, census data indicate 25.6 million Pashtu speakers. To this must be added some 2.5 million Pakistani Pakhtoon refugees in Pakistan.
There are from two to three dozen Pushtun tribes, depending on how one classifies them, generally divided into four major groupings: the Durranis and Ghilzais, concentrated in Afghanistan; the so-called independent tribes, straddling the Durand Line; and several tribes, such as the Khattaks and Bannuchis, centred on the Pakhtoonkhwa Province of Pakistan.
However, in contrast to Baluch society, with its hierarchical structures and its all-powerful sardars, Pakistani Pakhtoon culture has an egalitarian mystique epitomised by the role of the jirgah (assembly).
Non-Pakhtoon constituted at least 35% –possibly as much as 45%– of the population of Afghanistan during the decades preceding the Soviet occupation. As the ethnic balance has changed, the Pakhtoon in Afghanistan have intermittently attempted to forge some form of political unity with the Pakhtoon in Pakistan that would make possible a restoration of unchallenged Pakistani Pakhtoon dominance in Kabul.
With Pakhtoon outnumbering Baluchis in parts of northern Baluchistan, Pakistani Pakhtoon now propose restructuring the Pakistani state to add all Pakistani Pakhtoon regions in FATA, Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and northern Baluchistan in the province of Pakhtoonkhwa.

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