The Pashtun Question The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan
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Abubakar Siddique
Random House India
316 pages, Rs 499
Most accounts of the instability gripping Afghanistan and Pakistan claim the problem is rooted in Pashtun history and culture, or deliberately exacerbated by Pashtun communities straddling the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, or both. Siddique, a stout-hearted Pashtun himself, tells a very different story: that the failure and unwillingness of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to absorb the Pashtuns into their state structures, and to incorporate them into their economic and political fabrics, is central to both countries’ current problems, and a critical failure of nation- and state-building.
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