The Pashtun Borderlands, 1944–1947

In the 1940s the Afghan dynasty in Kabul and newly independent rulers in Pakistan did not meet the challenges of building enduring representative political institutions and sustainable national economies. The dynamics of post-war globalized political and economic relationships undermined perceived elements of colonial-era stability. Borderland individuals and communities buffeted by post-war uncertainties and traumas from the Partition of British-India in August 1947 often ignored or resisted state-building efforts too often seen as lacking political legitimacy or local benefit. State institutional failures of governance in the 1970s that preceded subsequent decades of regional instability were foreshadowed in the 1940s. By 1950, the working of global capital, including in the form of American corporate interests, complicated any state notions that foreign funded economic development schemes might substitute for substantial structural political and social reforms.