Good read, though I do not find myself in agreement with the title that the Pashtoonistan issue is all but dead. It is alive and well and waiting for the right time to rear its ugly head.
Let me tell you a story about about a racist British police officer I ran into. As I walked toward my car I noticed there were two Police officers nosing around my car. As I got closer I enquired what this was about. The officer says somebody had reported a strange car parked. Bemused I asked him "so".
To which he recoiled "You look like a nice guy but you never know". At this point I was very annoyed. I asked "what has my looks of being nice or not got to do with anything"? To which he said "A person can look sweet and innocent but they might have outsmarted the system".
I was real pissed of at this guy. I knew he was racist. I said to him "You look all honest and clean in that uniform but how do I knew your not the dirtiest corrupt officer in the entire country and the only reason your not been caught is your too smart".
I then reminded him of the fundamental principle that all people are innocent until sufficient evidence has been produced and then
prima facie there is a case that person could be "suspect". Further down the road he will be judged by his peers if he is guilty.
You have made a claim that could apply to Baloch, Mohajir and other ethnic groups without any validity based on present facts.
President Ayub Khan is probably the leader that did more for this country then anybody. You know his background. Pakistan would have been mulched and spat by the Indian's in 1940s or 1950s like bloody paan chewer spits that red crap out of his mouth. The only thing left of Pakistan would be a red bloody stains like you see in the streets of India ( Karachi ) that did not happen.
That did not happen not because we had something that mostly newly premature countries like Pakistan did not have. A huge highly trained, mostly made up of
combat vetarans of the histories biggest conflict
WW2. Thus the famous Frontier and Punjab Regiments which had fought all over and went on to constitute the newly formed Pakistan Army.
Leaving asides why the British preferred men from Peshawar, Mardan, Hazara, Potohar, Jhelum, Lahore axis the reality was almost 45%f the British Raj army was recruited from what is now Pakistan.Please refer to link below which shows the overwhelming number of Pakhtun and Punjabi's in the British empire armies. It is those
Frontier and
Punjab regiments that deterred India from squashing us in 1940s.
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/48674/WP24_Shaheed_Hussain.pdf
It is this Pakhtun/Punjabi dominated army that took over from the hopeless ML who had singularly lost us Kashmir war and under Ayub Khan ( himself a veteran of the WW2 and a picture postcard of what I am alluding to ) set up laying the foundation of Pakistan. Chances are the food your eating is thanks to the dams he had built ( Warsak, Tarbela, Mangla and shifting waterflow from the Indus toward Punjab which was being strangled by Indian control of the headwaters ) and the electricity generated.
So I would as everybody to back off this issue. I said before the measure of this countries strength is the Pakhtun/Punjabi nexus. The day that unravels Pakistan is finished. So stop trying to gnaw away at the very structure that is the backbone of this country.
I will be opening a thread on the Ayub Khan years to highlight why his shadow stands tall over Pakistan even in 2015. He made one terrible mistakes that cost him his Presidentship but asides that he did so much for Pakistan.
Any of you detractors ought to go and say such things to the relatives of Capt. Kernal Sher Khan who gave his life on the peaks of Kargil .....