History and origins

The Pashtuns have an ancient history, much still unresearched. From the second millennium B.C.E.to the present, Pashtun regions have seen invasions and migrations including Aryan tribes (Iranian peoples, Indo-Aryans), Medes, Persians, Mauryas, Scythians, Kushans, Hephthalites, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols. Many conflicting theories exist about the origins of the Pashtun people, some modern and others archaic, both among historians and the Pashtuns themselves.

Demographics

The vast majority of Pashtuns live in an area stretching from western Pakistan to southwestern Afghanistan. Additional Pashtun communities reside in the Northern Areas, Azad Kashmir, and Sindh provinces of Pakistan as well as throughout Afghanistan and in the Iranian region of Khorasan. A large migrant-worker community lives in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula and in smaller communities in Europe and North America. A sizable community of largely putative ancestry calls India home.Important metropolitan centers of Pashtun culture include Peshawar and Kandahar. In addition, Quetta and Kabul have ethnically mixed cities with large Pashtun populations. With 1.5 million ethnic Pashtuns, Karachi stands the largest Pashtun city in the world.

Pashtuns comprise over 15.42 percent of Pakistan's population or 25.6 million people. In Afghanistan, they make up an estimated 42 percent of the population or 12.5 million people. The exact measure of those figures remains uncertain, particularly for Afghanistan, which has been affected by approximately three million Afghan refugees (of which 81.5 percent or 2.49 million claim ethnic Pashtuns lineage) that remain in Pakistan. An unknown number of refugees continue to reside in Iran. A cumulative population assessment by the United Nations suggests a total of over forty million across the region.