Advocacy  

A Name For Everyone: The Case For Renaming Afghanistan

I am for renaming Afghanistan. Not as a thought experiment. Not as a curiosity to revisit when conditions are friendlier. As a serious political project that the non-Pashtun peoples of the country - Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Aimaqs, Turkmen, Baloch, Nuristanis, Pashais - can build a coalition around. The name was given by one group. It can be taken back by the rest.

In an earlier piece on this site, Whose Land Is Afghanistan?, we laid out the historical case. "Afghan" meant Pashtun for several centuries before it was stretched in the twentieth century to cover everyone. The state that took the name Afghanistan was built by Pashtun rulers, codified by Pashtun-led constitutions, and has run, with brief exceptions, on lines the name itself anticipates. That piece argued the asymmetry. This piece argues the answer.

This Is Not a Hazara Grievance

The first thing to get right is who this argument belongs to.

It is tempting, when you are Hazara and writing about state-naming and ethnic asymmetry in Afghanistan, to frame the argument as a Hazara case against a Pashtun-led state. That framing is wrong on the politics. It is also wrong on the facts. The asymmetry the name encodes does not fall on Hazaras alone. It falls on every population in the country whose self-identity is not "Afghan" in the historical sense of the word.

Tajiks are roughly a quarter of the country, by most plausible estimates, and have lived inside a state whose official language designation, "Dari," was deliberately chosen in the 1960s to keep their language - Farsi - from carrying the prestige its actual literary tradition would warrant. Uzbeks and Turkmen in the north have watched, across multiple generations, as state-sponsored Pashtun resettlement reshaped the demographics of their provinces. Aimaqs have been treated by the state as a residual category, named in the census, ignored in the constitution. Baloch in the south have a national life that crosses borders into Iran and Pakistan, with the Afghan state more an inconvenience than a reference point. Nuristanis had their pre-Islamic religion destroyed by Abdur Rahman Khan in 1895 and 1896, after which their land was renamed in Farsi-language religious vocabulary on the state's terms. Pashais have languages and a history older than any of the modern state's categories. None of these peoples chose the name of the country they live in.

This is the unifying frame. It is the most important argument in this piece. The case for renaming is not Hazaras against Pashtuns. It is the non-Pashtun peoples of the country making a shared claim against an inherited structural injustice that subordinates each of them in specific ways. The argument's legitimacy does not rest on Pashtun buy-in. It rests on whether the asymmetry is real. It is. A coalition built on that frame is sustainable. A coalition built on grievance is not.

Why a Name Change Matters

The objection I hear most often, including from people who agree with the historical analysis, is some version of: "It is just a name. Fix the real problems first."

I want to take that objection seriously, because it sounds reasonable. It is also wrong. The reason it is wrong takes a moment to lay out.

The name of a country is not a label on a map. It is a piece of state ideology, repeated in every passport, every textbook, every official document, every news broadcast, every sporting event, every diplomatic letter. When that name is, etymologically and historically, the name of one of the peoples in the country, the name does political work whether or not anyone in any given moment intends it to. That work is upstream of the things people typically call "the real problems."

Consider what flows downhill from the name.

Constitutional drafting. Every Afghan constitution since 1923 has had to define what an "Afghan" is. Each definition has been a small political event in itself. The 1964 Constitution stretched "Afghan" to mean every citizen, while leaving every institutional preference for Pashtun cultural primacy intact. The 2004 Constitution did similar work in different language. The name forces the question. The answer has consistently been a redefinition that asks non-Pashtuns to accept a label that, in their own languages and historical memory, names someone else. A different country name forces a different opening question.

Language policy. Pashto was named a national language in 1964 alongside Dari, despite Farsi being the actual lingua franca of the country since at least the Ghaznavid period. State-promoted Pashto education campaigns in Farsi-speaking areas in the mid-twentieth century followed directly. The name of the country provides the cover story for elevating the named group's language. Remove the cover story. The policy gets harder to justify.

Education curricula. What gets called "Afghan history" in a textbook is what the state names "Afghan." Hazara children learning the history of "their" country read about Pashtun kings, Pashtun poets, Pashtun military victories, with Hazaras appearing as a footnote about a population that was difficult to integrate, if Hazaras appear at all. Tajik children read the same textbooks. Uzbek children read the same textbooks. The name pre-decides whose history is the main story.

Cultural recognition. What gets called "national" music, "national" dress, "national" food, "national" sport in Afghanistan tracks the name. The contests over these designations are constant and small and lose every time, because the bigger contest about the name has already been settled.

Belonging. Hazaras have been described in Pashtun-nationalist rhetoric as outsiders, as Mongol remnants, as guests on land that "really" belongs to someone else. This is grotesque on the historical facts - we have lived in this region for at least seven centuries and almost certainly much longer, as our piece Who Are the Hazara discusses. The rhetorical move is structurally available because the name of the country implies that there is a default population and the rest of us are complications. A country called something else makes that move much harder to land.

Renaming is not symbolic theater. The symbolism encoded in the constitution and the name of the state is the structure. The name is upstream of constitutional drafting, language policy, education curricula, cultural recognition, and the politics of who is from this country and who is a guest. Change the name and you do not solve those problems. You change the ground on which they get fought.

The Name Options

Several real options exist. I want to walk through them honestly, with their problems intact, because the conversation has tended to either crown one of them as obvious or dismiss them all as unworkable. Neither is right.

Khorasan

Khorasan is the historical name. It was the standard term for the broader region across multiple medieval and early modern empires. Its cities - Herat, Balkh, Nishapur, Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand, Ghazni - anchored a Farsi-speaking civilizational space in which Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns, and many others all participated. The literary tradition, the scientific tradition, the administrative tradition: all of it was Khorasanian before any of it was Afghan.

The case for Khorasan is strong. It predates "Afghanistan." It carries deep legitimacy in Farsi-speaking memory. It points to a civilizational frame that is genuinely shared rather than ethnically owned. Various Tajik and Hazara intellectuals, particularly after 2001, raised the idea of returning to it.

Two real problems. First, historical Khorasan was substantially larger than today's Afghanistan. It included parts of modern Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Reusing the name for a smaller modern state creates regional confusion and could provoke entirely reasonable objections from neighbors. Second, the Islamic State's Khorasan branch - ISIS-K - has used the term in recent years for its own propaganda purposes, which has tainted it in international media coverage and made any rehabilitation harder than it would have been twenty years ago. Neither problem is fatal. Both are real.

Aryana

Aryana is older than Khorasan. It appears in ancient sources for the eastern reach of the Iranian world. The Pashtun nationalist intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century - Mohammad Hassan Kakar discusses this in his work, and Abdul Hai Habibi in his own writing - revived the name in some periods as part of a project to give Afghanistan a deep pre-Islamic identity that pre-dated Islamic Khorasan. Ariana Afghan Airlines, founded in 1955, took the name into modern public usage.

The case for Aryana is that it is even older than Khorasan and carries the same pre-Islamic civilizational weight. The case against it is precisely that early-twentieth-century Pashtun nationalism has already done romantic work with it. Reusing it would risk relabeling the same asymmetry under an older brand, particularly given that the name has been used in nationalist literature to claim a deep Pashtun pedigree on the territory. The history is contested in ways that make the name, in 2026, less neutral than its age would suggest.

A descriptive geographic name

A third option is to abandon ethnic and civilizational names entirely and pick a descriptive geographic one. The Hindu Kush. The Amu Darya. The High Plateau. A name based on the mountains or the rivers that the country actually contains. Some federal states have done versions of this - the United States, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates - using descriptive structural language rather than ethnic or historical reference.

The case for a descriptive name is that it makes a clean break. It does not reward any one group's historical claim. It does not invite confusion with neighbors. It is the most genuinely neutral option on the table.

The case against is that descriptive names feel manufactured. They do not stir loyalty the way Khorasan or Aryana might. Building emotional attachment to "the Federal Republic of the Hindu Kush" is harder than building attachment to a name with a thousand years of poetry behind it. Names need to live in the mouths of children and grandparents, not just in constitutional documents.

A federal designation

A fourth option, often raised as an alternative to renaming, is to keep the territory and add a federal structure with a name that signals plurality. "The Federal Republic of the Peoples of [region]." Or a name that pairs the largest peoples explicitly. This is closer to what Niamatullah Ibrahimi and others have argued for in the political reform literature, where the central concern is devolution of power rather than the name itself. Thomas Barfield's work on the question of the state in Afghanistan addresses similar terrain, with skepticism about whether federal structures are politically viable in the country's specific conditions.

The case for a federal designation is that it makes the plurality explicit at the level of the name itself. The case against is that it is wordier, harder to use in everyday speech, and does not solve the problem of finding a positive identity that everyone can sit inside. A federal name is what the constitution does. The country still needs something its citizens can call home.

One picks itself, or none does

I do not think this article needs to crown a winner. Picking the name is a political act that should belong to a coalition, not a single writer. What this article argues is that the conversation needs to happen seriously. The four options above each have merit. Two or three of them, in some combination, are likely to define the eventual shortlist. The point is not to skip to the answer. It is to insist that the question is on the table.

Honest Objections

Three serious objections to the renaming argument come up reliably. Each deserves a real answer.

"This will fragment the country."

The country is already fragmented. It has been fragmented since at least 1973, and arguably since 1747. The Taliban government in Kabul does not control a unified national project. It controls a Pashtun-centric apparatus that holds territory in which Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others live as effectively second-class subjects. The fragmentation is the existing state of affairs.

Renaming names what is. It does not cause the fragmentation. It might, by acknowledging the multi-ethnic reality of the country in its very name, create the conditions for genuine unity for the first time. A country whose citizens all see themselves in the name has a chance of feeling like a country. A country whose name announces that one group is the default does not.

"It is too early. Get rid of the Taliban first."

The Taliban will not last forever. The history of Afghan governments is the history of regimes that look permanent until they are not. The Soviet-backed governments looked permanent. The mujahideen looked permanent. The first Taliban looked permanent. The Karzai-Ghani republic looked permanent. None of them lasted.

The work of imagining a post-Taliban country is the work that should be happening now, in exile, in academia, in the Farsi-language and Hazaragi-language and Uzbek-language press, in the rooms where political coalitions get assembled. The naming question is part of that imagination. Waiting for permission from Kabul has never produced anything in the modern history of this country, because no government in Kabul has had any reason to grant such permission. Permission is not where political change comes from. It comes from the work that is already done by the time the political moment arrives.

"Pashtuns will see this as an attack."

Many will. That is a real political fact and worth naming honestly rather than waving away. The distinction worth holding firmly is between Pashtun people and Pashtun-centric state-naming. The first is a population, with the same range of opinions, dissents, and internal disagreements that any population has. The second is a particular project, conducted by specific dynasties and specific governments, that wrote one ethnic identity into the founding documents of a multi-ethnic country.

Pashtun individual dissidents and intellectuals have questioned aspects of the state-building project across the modern history of the country. Pashtun dissidents have suffered under the same Pashtun-centric governments that have targeted Hazaras and Tajiks. Some Pashtun allies and friends of this argument exist. They are welcome in the coalition as individuals. But the case for renaming is made by non-Pashtun peoples for non-Pashtun reasons. Its legitimacy does not depend on a Pashtun popular constituency that does not exist. It depends on the asymmetry the name encodes, which is real whether or not it is acknowledged across the line.

A Pashtun who is a citizen of the new country is a citizen who chose to live there, not a citizen because the country is named after his people. That is, if anything, a more dignified citizenship than the current one, even for those who do not arrive at it willingly.

The framing matters. Renaming as ethnic revenge is a project nobody honest can support. Renaming as a structural correction made by the peoples the current name excludes is a different project entirely.

What the Path Forward Looks Like

The honest version of "what do we do" is unglamorous and slow. It looks like this.

Cultural and intellectual work. Use the alternative names already, in the spaces we control. Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek, Aimaq, Turkmen media in exile and inside the country can begin referring to the territory by alternative names in op-eds, podcasts, academic papers, songs, poetry, and fiction. The first time a Hazara magazine publishes a piece dated "Khorasan, May 2026" is a small act. The hundredth time it happens is a movement. The state cannot prevent this work. It can only ignore it, until the volume makes ignoring impossible. This is work the Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Aimaq, Baloch, Nuristani, and Pashai communities of writers and thinkers can already do, with no permission from anyone.

Coalition work. There is no single non-Pashtun coalition in the country at present, or among those of us writing from abroad. There are Hazara political formations. There are Tajik political formations. There are Uzbek political formations. They do not coordinate on shared questions, except in narrow tactical moments. The renaming question is the kind of shared question that can do coalition-building work that other questions cannot, because it is structural rather than tactical. It does not require any party to give up its own identity. It asks all parties to identify a common interest in a country whose state-naming does not subordinate any of them.

Convening that conversation - in Toronto, in San Diego, in Sydney, in Hamburg, in Mashhad, in Quetta, wherever the political and intellectual life of non-Pashtun communities outside Afghanistan happens - is the work. The convening does not need the permission of any government. It needs the will of the communities involved.

Writing into the international record. International organizations, universities, think tanks, and human rights bodies that engage with Afghanistan should hear the renaming argument from non-Pashtun communities and individuals as a serious, sustained, and intellectually grounded position. That means op-eds in international Farsi-language and English-language outlets. It means academic papers. It means the question being raised at every conference and panel where the future of the country is discussed. The international community will not lead on this. It will follow, once the position is unmistakable.

The political moment, when it comes. A post-Taliban political reset - whether in five years or twenty - will involve constitutional drafting. Every previous reset has. The 1964, 1977, 1987, 1990, 2004, and (briefly) 2021 constitutions each represented a political opening in which fundamental questions were on the table. The next one will be no different.

The work between now and then is to make sure the naming question is not optional in that conversation. It should be one of the named items in any political negotiation. It should be a position that non-Pashtun parties take to the table as non-negotiable. None of that happens unless the intellectual and cultural work is already done by the time the political opening arrives.

That is the case for starting now. The country will be renamed eventually, by some coalition, in some moment of political reset. The question is whether the work is done in advance, by people who have thought it through carefully, or improvised in haste by whoever happens to be in the room.

What Becomes Possible

A country whose name belongs to everyone is a country in which Hazara children and Tajik children and Uzbek children and Pashtun children sit in the same classroom and read the same history. That history names all of them. The textbook does not have to redefine "Afghan" to include the children whose ancestors were not Afghans in the historical sense. The name on the cover already includes them.

It is a country in which a Hazara student writing a dissertation on the literary tradition of the region does not have to argue, against the implied weight of the country's name, that her tradition is part of the national one. The national name does not pre-decide that question against her.

It is a country in which a Pashtun citizen is a Pashtun and a citizen of the country, without those two facts folding into each other through the name on the passport. Whether he welcomes the change or resents it, the citizenship he holds in the renamed country is structurally cleaner than the one he holds now.

It is a country in which the Constitution can begin its first sentence with "We, the peoples of [name]," without having to perform the redefinition that every previous Afghan constitution has had to perform. The name does the work the redefinition used to do.

That is what is on the other side of this argument. It is not a small thing. It is the difference between a state whose founding name asks one of its peoples to carry it, and a state whose founding name belongs to all of its peoples equally. It is what every other country whose name does not name a single ethnic group already has, without thinking about it.

We do not have it yet. We can build it. The work starts in the rooms where we already gather, in the writing we already do, in the languages we already speak. It does not need anyone's permission. It needs us to decide, together, that the name we have was given by one group. The name we want is one that all of us can claim.