The Pashtuns (or Pathans, in the British literature) form approximately 50 percent of the total population of Afghanistan but are in the minority in the North. They are unequally distributed in the region, being much more heavily represented in Kataghan, their most recent area of immigration, than in Turkestan or Badakhshan. The Pashtuns have been moving up and infiltrating the North over the course of more than two centuries. Various Afghan rulers, in the hope of either breaking up some dissident confederation of Pashtun tribesmen or achieving domination over Turkestan, have sent groups of settlers to the North from traditional southern Pashtun regions. One of the early waves of Pashtuns arrived in the course of the Afghan (Pashtun-led) invasion of Iran in the early eighteenth century; however, it was in the middle of late nineteenth century when more sizable bodies of Pashtun nomads turned up in the North under the prompting of the Amirs Dost Mohammed (1835-63) and Abdurrahman (1880-1901). In addition, a large number of Pashtuns appear periodically in Turkestan each year as a result of seasonal nomadic migrations that start as far south as Kandahar and move across the Hazarajat (central Afghanistan) to the North.

Study of the northern Pashtuns has barely begun; Richard and Nancy Tapper completed intensive fieldwork in 1971 and 1972, and we must look forward to their publications for the first serious work on Pashtuns (both nomads and villagers) in Turkestan. While Pashtuns maintain the considerable ethnic distinctiveness that characterizes them across the wide sweep of their areas of habitation (cf. Earth 1969a), they have also come to terms with the basic Uzbek-Tajik culture of the North; of this, more below. In demographic terms, sedentary northern Pashtuns tend to form isolated encampments or villages (e.g., Pashtunkot near Maimana), or even separate quarters of a village if they are in the minority. They make up only a very small percentage of the urban population. For the Saripul region (town and country- side), early estimates by the Tappers (1973: p.c.) set the Pashtun population at 25 percent of the total.