The Pashtun Counter-Narrative

This article provides a critical appraisal of ethnicity as the primary route to knowing Afghanistan. The critique is founded on the fundamental voiceless-ness of Pashtuns in academic and international discussions about them. It utilizes longue durée history to amplify the salience of migration as an alternate framework for understanding Afghanistan, and it analyzes the place of the Pashto language in the modern Afghan state structure. The article also discusses the impact of the nineteenth-century British Indian colonial authority Mountstuart Elphinstone and the twentieth-century American specialist Louis Dupree to illustrate the persistence of Orientalism in Anglo-American imperial knowledge about Afghanistan.