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Whose Land Is Afghanistan? A History of the Country's Name

The country we call Afghanistan is named after one of the peoples who live in it. "Afghan," in Farsi, Mughal, and British sources, meant Pashtun. "Afghanistan" meant the land of the Pashtuns. When that name was extended in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to cover everyone living between the Amu Darya and the Indus, including Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Aimaqs, Turkmen, Baloch, Nuristanis, and Pashais, it did not become neutral. It carried its meaning with it. The state that took that name was built by Pashtun rulers, codified by Pashtun-led governments, and has, with brief exceptions, been administered along lines that the name itself anticipates. This is a piece about how the name got there, what it announces, and what that announcement has cost the peoples it does not name.

This is not a piece about Pashtun people. Pashtun individuals and Pashtun communities are not the subject of this critique. The subject is a particular project of state-building, conducted by specific dynasties and codified by specific governments, that wrote one ethnic identity into the name of a multi-ethnic country. The distinction matters. Pashtuns living their lives, raising families, working their land, are no more responsible for the naming choices of the Durrani court than Hazaras are responsible for any decision a Hazara political faction has made. The argument here is about state-naming and the political work the name does, not about the people who happen to share its root.

Before "Afghanistan" Had That Name

For most of recorded history, the territory that is now called Afghanistan went by other names. Those names were not ethnic.

The oldest layer is Aryana, an ancient term used in Farsi and Greek sources for the broad eastern reach of the Iranian world. After the Arab conquests and through the rise of the Farsi-speaking dynasties, the dominant name for the region was Khorasan, sometimes called Greater Khorasan to distinguish it from the modern Iranian province of the same name. Khorasan in its medieval extent covered eastern Iran, parts of present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and most of what is now Afghanistan, including Herat, Balkh, Ghazni, and Bamyan. The cities that anchored it - Herat, Balkh, Nishapur, Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand - were Farsi-speaking centers of learning, poetry, science, and trade. The region's identity was civilizational and linguistic, not ethnic. Farsi, in its various registers, was the language of administration, scholarship, and literary culture across this whole zone, used by Turks, Tajiks, Hazaras, Pashtuns, and many others alike.

Under successive empires - Samanid, Ghaznavid, Ghurid, Timurid, Safavid, Mughal - the area was divided into provinces named for cities or regions: Khorasan, Kabulistan, Zabulistan, Sistan, Badakhshan, Turkestan. None of these were ethnic labels in the modern sense. They were geographic and administrative. The Mughals administered Kabul as a province of their empire. The Safavids held Herat and Kandahar at various points. The territory passed back and forth between Persian and Indian imperial frameworks, with local dynasties in between. But at no point in this long pre-modern history was it called the land of any one people.

When "Afghan" appears in these sources at all - and it does, regularly - it refers to a specific group: the Pashtuns of the eastern mountains, often described in Farsi as "Afghan tribes" or "Afaghina." It is not a description of everyone living in Khorasan. It is a description of one of the peoples in it.

What "Afghan" Meant

The historical record on this point is unusually clear. Across several centuries of Farsi, Arabic, Mughal, and early modern European writing, "Afghan" meant Pashtun.

The eleventh-century Farsi historian Abu'l-Fadl Bayhaqi uses "Afghan" for Pashtun tribesmen. The Mughal court chronicles - the Akbarnama, the Padshahnama, the historical writing produced under Aurangzeb - use "Afghan" consistently to describe Pashtun communities, particularly the powerful tribes of the Sulaiman range and the eastern frontier. The Mughal emperors had complicated relationships with Afghan, meaning Pashtun, military elites, who at various points ruled significant parts of northern India: the Lodi dynasty of Delhi and the brief but consequential rule of Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century were both Afghan, in this specific sense, meaning ethnically Pashtun.

When the British East India Company began documenting the region systematically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they inherited this usage. Mountstuart Elphinstone's 1815 An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul - the first major English-language ethnography of the region - is precise on the point. Elphinstone treats "Afghan" as the name of a people, the Pashtuns, and uses other names - Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimaq - for the other peoples of the kingdom. He does not extend "Afghan" to mean a citizen of the kingdom. In his usage, you are an Afghan if you are Pashtun. If you are a Hazara of Bamyan or a Tajik of Herat, you live in the kingdom. But you are not an Afghan.

The Pashto-language tradition reinforces this. Pashtuns themselves used "Afghan" as a name for their own people, alongside the older self-designation Pashtun or Pakhtun. The seventeenth-century Pashto poet Khushal Khan Khattak writes about Afghans as a distinct people with a particular code, the Pashtunwali, and a particular language. The terms "Afghan" and "Pashtun" function in Pashto literary and political tradition as synonyms for the same group.

This is the load-bearing fact for everything that follows. The word that became the name of a country was, for most of its history, the name of one ethnic group within that country.

The Durrani Empire and the First Naming

The political project that eventually produced the modern state began in 1747, when Ahmad Shah Durrani was elected leader of a confederation of Pashtun tribes at a loya jirga in Kandahar. Ahmad Shah was Pashtun, of the Abdali tribal confederation that he renamed Durrani. The polity he founded - sometimes called the Durrani Empire and sometimes the Sadozai Empire after his lineage - was the first time a Pashtun-led dynasty controlled, from a base in present-day southern Afghanistan, a territory roughly corresponding to the modern country plus significant additions in present-day Pakistan and Iran.

This polity was governed in Farsi. Its court culture, administration, and chronicles were Persianate. The Durranis themselves used Farsi as their official language, as essentially every dynasty in the Persianate world had done for centuries. But the political base - the warriors, the tribal leadership, the military aristocracy - was Pashtun. The state was multi-ethnic in its subjects and Farsi in its administrative culture, and Pashtun in its ruling class. This is the moment when "Afghanistan," in the sense of "the realm of the Pashtun rulers," begins to be a politically meaningful term.

It is also the moment when the long subjugation of the non-Pashtun peoples of the territory by a Pashtun-centered state begins. The Hazaras were not conquered as part of the original Durrani consolidation. Hazarajat retained significant autonomy through most of the nineteenth century. Tajik populations in Herat and the north were under varying degrees of Durrani authority. Uzbek khanates north of the Hindu Kush were independent or quasi-independent for most of this period. The polity called itself, when pressed for a name, the Durrani Empire or simply the realm. "Afghanistan" was not yet its formal name. But the word was beginning to mean something more than just "the area where Pashtuns live."

The Nineteenth Century: From Word to Country

The hardening of "Afghanistan" into the name of a state happened over the nineteenth century, as British India and Qajar Iran needed a label for the territory between them, and as the Pashtun-led dynasty in Kabul needed a name to claim it.

The 1801 Anglo-Persian treaty, negotiated by the British envoy John Malcolm with the Qajar court, refers to "Afghanistan" in the modern, geographic sense - the country east of Iran ruled by the Durrani line. This is one of the earliest uses of the term in a formal international document to mean a country rather than a tribal homeland. The Anglo-Afghan Wars that followed - the First (1839-1842) and the Second (1878-1880) - hardened the usage further. British official correspondence increasingly referred to the territory as Afghanistan and its ruler as the Amir of Afghanistan. That usage flowed back into how the rulers themselves referred to their realm in their dealings with European powers.

The Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, ending the Second Anglo-Afghan War, formalized this on the British side. It recognized Yaqub Khan as Amir of Afghanistan, with the British controlling foreign affairs. By the time Abdur Rahman Khan came to the throne in 1880, "Afghanistan" was the standard term used by the Amir's court, the British, and the Russians for the polity in the middle. None of this consulted, and none of this could have consulted, the non-Pashtun peoples whose lands the name now encompassed. The name was settled by Pashtun rulers and European empires, in their own correspondence, in languages that the bulk of Hazaras, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and others were not party to.

It was Abdur Rahman Khan, sometimes called the Iron Amir, who turned this naming into a project of internal state-building. From 1880 to 1901, he carried out a program of centralization that brought every region of the modern country, by force, under a single Pashtun-centered state. The most violent expression of this was the 1891-1893 conquest of Hazarajat, in which his armies invaded the central highlands, broke local autonomy, executed leaders, enslaved tens of thousands of Hazara men, women, and children, and carried out massacres whose scale historians including Mohammad Hassan Kakar have called genocidal. The campaign was framed in religious terms - the Hazaras were Shia. Abdur Rahman declared a state-sanctioned jihad against them. But the political logic was about state consolidation under a Pashtun crown. The demographic outcome was a permanent reduction of the Hazara population and a redistribution of Hazara lands to Pashtun nomadic tribes, the Kuchis, on terms set by the state. (We have written about the resistance to the early phase of this campaign in the piece on the Guldara resistance.)

The state had a name by then,, and it had begun to use that name to act on the peoples whose name it was not.

The 1923 and 1964 Constitutions: Name Becomes Law

The naming was further codified, in the modern legal sense, by two constitutions.

The 1923 Constitution - the Nizamnama-yi Asasi-yi Dawlat-i Aliyya-yi Afghanistan, the Fundamental Code of the Sublime State of Afghanistan - was promulgated under King Amanullah Khan. It was the first written constitution of Afghanistan and one of the earliest in the wider Muslim world. Amanullah, modernist and reformist in many respects, did not modernize the ethnic logic of the state. The constitution names the country Afghanistan, names its official religion as Hanafi Sunni Islam (Hanafi is the Sunni school dominant among Pashtuns; this designation immediately marginalized Shia Hazaras and Ismaili communities), and centered state authority in Kabul. Amanullah's reforms - on women's rights, on education, on dress codes - were ambitious. His constitutional definition of Afghan identity was conventional: an Afghan was a subject of the kingdom, in a state whose name and official sect both pointed at one of its peoples. (Senzil Nawid's work on the Amanullah period is the standard reference here.)

The 1964 Constitution, promulgated under Zahir Shah, did more of the formalizing work that shapes the modern state. It declared Pashto the national language alongside Dari (the Afghan-government register of Farsi, which had been the actual lingua franca of the country for centuries). It defined "Afghan" as the term for every citizen of the country, an extension of the word that was politically novel - it took a name that had meant Pashtun for several centuries and stretched it to cover everyone, while leaving intact every institutional preference for Pashtun cultural primacy. This was presented as inclusion. In practice, it asked non-Pashtuns to accept that the official identity of the country, the public language of state ceremony, the symbols on the currency, and the very name of the place they lived now claimed them under a label that, in their own languages and historical memory, named someone else.

Conrad Schetter and other scholars of ethnicity in Afghanistan have made this point precisely: the twentieth-century state did not abolish the ethnic asymmetry that the name expressed. It papered over it with a redefinition that asked everyone to accept the cover.

What the Name Does

A country's name is not just 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.

It does that work in several specific ways.

It assigns a default ethnic identity to the state. The "Afghan nation" is, by the literal logic of the name, the nation of the Afghans, meaning Pashtuns. Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and others who carry that passport are Afghans by extension, by political stretching of a word, not by the word's own meaning. The asymmetry is constant. A Pashtun is straightforwardly an Afghan. A Hazara is an Afghan only by a redefinition that he or she did not choose. (M. Nazif Shahrani's work on ethnicity and state formation in Afghanistan develops this in more depth.)

It naturalizes Pashtun cultural reference points as national. Pashto language, Pashtunwali, Pashtun tribal structures, Pashtun historical figures, Pashtun musical and literary forms become the default reference for "Afghan" culture, even when the actual demographics of the country make Farsi-speaking and Turkic-speaking communities numerically comparable to or larger than the Pashtun population. The 1964 constitutional designation of Pashto as a national language - despite Farsi being the actual lingua franca - is the clearest legal instance of this. State-promoted Pashto-language education campaigns in Farsi-speaking areas in the mid-twentieth century are another.

It shapes who counts as fully native. Hazaras, in particular, have been described in Pashtun-nationalist rhetoric as outsiders, as Mongol remnants, as people who do not fully belong to the country. This is grotesque on the historical facts - Hazaras have lived on this land for at least seven centuries and likely much longer, as we have discussed in our piece on Hazara origins - but the rhetorical move is structurally available because the name of the country implies that Pashtuns are the original, default population and everyone else is a complication. (Sayed Askar Mousavi's The Hazaras of Afghanistan documents the long history of this rhetorical move.)

It enables periodic violence to be framed as internal correction. When the Pashtun-led state has acted violently against non-Pashtun populations - Abdur Rahman's campaigns against the Hazaras and the Nuristani peoples in the 1890s, the early Taliban's massacres in Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamyan in the late 1990s, the post-2021 Taliban's targeting of Hazaras and the destruction of non-Pashtun cultural and educational institutions - the framing inside the country's official discourse has tended to treat these as the state restoring order against unruly subjects, rather than as one ethnic project violently subordinating others. The name of the country supports that framing without anyone having to argue for it. The Hazaras, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, and others are, in this telling, the ones who must be brought into line with what the country is. What the country is, the name has already announced. (Niamatullah Ibrahimi's The Hazaras and the Afghan State is the standard scholarly treatment of this dynamic.)

The Other Peoples

The marginalization that follows from the name does not fall equally. Each of the non-Pashtun peoples of the country has had its own relationship with this state, its own grievances, and its own forms of resistance.

Hazaras are the most concentrated case. Largely Shia in religion and Farsi-speaking in language (the Hazaragi register of Farsi), Hazaras have been the principal target of state violence under Pashtun-led governments. Abdur Rahman's 1890s campaigns reduced the Hazara population by a contested but enormous figure - older estimates speak of more than half the population killed or displaced - and confiscated land in Hazarajat that has never been restored. The Taliban's 1998 massacre at Mazar-e-Sharif and the 2001 destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas were attacks on Hazara people and Hazara cultural heritage. The post-2021 Taliban have continued this pattern with attacks on Hazara schools, mosques, and neighborhoods that meet the legal threshold of genocidal intent, as a growing body of scholarship and several parliamentary recognitions have argued. (See our piece on the case for genocide recognition.)

Tajiks are the second-largest population in the country and the largest non-Pashtun group. Farsi-speaking and predominantly Sunni, Tajiks have, on paper, been less easily marked as outsiders by the Pashtun-centric state, since they share the dominant religion. In practice, the political marginalization has been consistent. Almost every government since 1747 has been Pashtun-led, with Tajik prime ministers and ministers serving in supporting roles. The brief presidency of Burhanuddin Rabbani in the 1990s and the Northern Alliance's military prominence are partial exceptions that prove the pattern. The cultural marginalization has run alongside: Farsi, the actual lingua franca, has had to be officially designated "Dari" rather than Farsi in Afghan state usage since the 1960s, in part to distinguish it from Iranian Farsi and in part to deny it the prestige its actual literary tradition would warrant.

Uzbeks and Turkmen are Turkic peoples concentrated in the northern provinces. Both have their own languages, their own historical relationships with the polities of Central Asia north of the Amu Darya, and their own grievances with the Pashtun-led state. The 1880s Durrani consolidation brought northern khanates under Kabul's authority and resettled Pashtun populations into northern lands, a project that continued under Abdur Rahman and his successors and reshaped the demographics of the north. Tensions between Pashtun settlers and indigenous Uzbek and Turkmen populations in the north persist into the present and have erupted into violence at multiple points.

Aimaqs are a Farsi-speaking, mostly Sunni population scattered across western and central Afghanistan, made up of several distinct sub-groups. They have been historically less visible in state politics than Hazaras or Tajiks, and the state has generally treated them as a residual category - documented in censuses, named in ethnographies, but not engaged with as a political community.

Baloch in the south have a national identity that crosses borders into Iran and Pakistan, where larger Baloch populations live. Afghan Baloch have rarely been more than a minor presence in state politics, and the principal Baloch question in the region has played out elsewhere.

Nuristanis are a small population in the eastern mountains, historically known to the rest of the country as Kafirs (unbelievers) until Abdur Rahman's forced conversion campaign of 1895-1896, after which the region was renamed Nuristan, "land of light." The renaming itself is a small case study in what the state does with peoples it has subordinated. Their pre-Islamic religion was destroyed. Their lands were absorbed. The new name announced their incorporation in Farsi-language religious vocabulary, on the state's terms.

Pashais are another small population in eastern Afghanistan, with their own distinct languages and a long history that predates any of the modern state's categories. They have, like the Nuristanis and Aimaqs, been treated as a curiosity rather than a constituency by Kabul's governments.

The point of naming these groups is not to claim them all as victims of one identical experience. It is to make visible that the country whose name announces it as the land of one people is, in fact, the land of many peoples, and that those many peoples have had to live inside a state whose name does not include them.

Has Anyone Proposed Renaming?

The honest answer is yes and not seriously.

Various non-Pashtun voices have, at moments of acute political pressure, raised the question. After the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001, some Tajik and Hazara intellectuals briefly floated the idea of returning to the name Khorasan, the historical name that pre-dates the Pashtun-named state. Some Farsi-language commentators outside Afghanistan have continued to use Khorasan as a deliberate alternative. The proposals have not gained traction inside formal politics. The political conditions to revisit the name have not existed under any government in Kabul, which have all, with exceptions measurable in months, been Pashtun-led.

A separate strand of proposal has called for federal restructuring rather than renaming, with the argument that even a country called Afghanistan could devolve real power to provinces and regions in ways that would weaken the central ethnic logic. This case has been made forcefully by Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek political figures at various points, and almost as forcefully resisted by Pashtun-led governments and their international backers, who have generally preferred a unitary state on the conventional model.

Neither renaming nor federalization is a politically active proposal at present. The Taliban government installed in 2021 has, predictably, doubled down on the Pashtun-centric framing of the state. The only government in a position to consider any structural change rejects the question on principle.

The point of naming the proposals here is to argue that the country should be renamed. The point is also to record that the question is real, that serious people from the marginalized peoples have asked it, and that its absence from active politics is itself a measure of how secure the original naming has been.

What This Means for Hazaras Now

For Hazaras living in the country - and for Hazaras in Quetta, in Mashhad, in Sydney, in Toronto, in Mississauga, in San Diego, in Denver, in Hamburg, in London - the practical question is not whether to launch a campaign to rename Afghanistan. The practical questions are smaller, harder, and more honest.

It means understanding that the asymmetry we feel, in language policy, in representation, in cultural memory, in physical safety, is not a recent contingency. It is built into the state at the level of its name and has been since at least the 1923 Constitution, with antecedents reaching back to the Durrani founding in 1747. The state was never neutral. The name of the country has always announced its preferences.

It means recognizing that the people who tell us that "we are all Afghans" are, depending on who they are, doing one of two things. Sometimes they are extending an honest hand of solidarity, asking us to accept a national identity that, in its current form, does not historically belong to us, in exchange for full recognition. Other times they are using the redefinition to deny us a separate identity, as a way of refusing to address what the state has done to us specifically. Telling the difference is part of the political work of being Hazara.

It means continuing to write our own history, in our own languages, on our own terms, whether or not the state acknowledges it. (We have written about this in the piece on the Hazaragi language under threat.) Faiz Mohammad Katib Hazara, the great Hazara historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote his histories under the rule of Habibullah Khan, knowing that the state was not going to record what he was recording. We are in the same position. The state will not name us correctly. We have to do that work ourselves.

It means, finally, refusing to let the politics of state-naming become the politics of ethnic resentment. Pashtun farmers, teachers, mothers, students, drivers, scholars, and dissidents are not the people who built the asymmetry. Many of them suffer under the same Taliban government that targets us. The critique of the Pashtun-centric state is not a critique of Pashtun people. Holding that distinction firmly is what separates honest historical analysis from ethnic grievance. It is what allows a Hazara argument about state-naming to be heard by Pashtun friends and allies who, in private, often agree with much of it.

The country has the name it has. We did not choose it. We have lived inside it. We are entitled to say, plainly and without apology, what the name has cost us. We are entitled to write the history of how we got here. That is what this article has tried to do. The next step is to keep writing.