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The blame-game that we sometimes resort to in our discussion would not help us. It would be against facts to state/claim that Pashtuns/Afghans of Afghanistan didn't want to reclaim the lost territory or Pashtuns/Afghans of Pakistan didn't want re-unification and were happy being complacent.
The reality is, for the last two centries, Pashtuns/Afghans were at the receiving end of a global conflict in which the main players were determined to establish, retain, and expand their hegemony and zones of influnce as much as possible and at any cost to, supposedly, "lessor" humans like Pashtuns/Afghans. In such a situation, assuming that either Pashtuns/Afghans of Pukhtunkhwa or Afghanistan could change the regional status-quo(borders) and re-draw political maps is insensible. Likewise, saying that one set of Pashtuns/Afghans was less nice to another, etc. is also irrational. In a displacement of this scale and for such a long time, undesirable things happen but fortunately, there isn't a single instance to indicate that there occured even a slightest clash.
So the issues above are irrelevant to our future. The IMPORTANT THING for Pashtuns to deliberate upon, concerned with, and do something about is to think what regional political/geopolitical arrangement would help Pashtuns avert the repetition of the painfull ordeal they went through involving loss of millions of lives, devastation of homes, destrcuction of property, displacement/migration and disruption of social and political life not to mention the humuliation and sense of non-entityness resulting from the misfortune. If Pashtuns and their leadeship want their future generations to be secured from such scale of devastation, they must do something durable about their status on war-footing. There can be many models. Some that come to mind are,
Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, which is a sort of soft belly of Afghanistan becomes autonomous not vulnerable to the mechanation of the Punjabi clique that wants to expand its tanticles to Afghanistan and farther to Central Asia. For that to happen, the Punjabi clique and its ability as well as plans to destablise the region would have to be decapacitated. There is a good degree of optimism that the global players trying to establish a new international order are working on these lines.
Second model would be the establishment of a Pashtun state combining Pashtuns/Afghans of either side. How much is this likely is a guess hard to make but it seems if the regional crisis couldn't be resolved in a smooth manner, that may be a consequence.
The third model is the merger of Pukhtunkhwa with Afghanistan but that depends on how flexible Pashtuns/Afghans of Afghanistan are to offer the non-Pashtuns an olive branch in the form of substantial autonomy and self-rule.
Some may say there is a third solution i.e., Durand Line is accepted as an international border but as long as the Punjabi clique retains its destablising capacity togethor with the expansionist Islamo-Punjabi or Islamo-Indic nationalism, it will be a GRAVE BLUNDER to assume that they will stop dreaming about taking Kashmir by force or extending their empire to Kabul.
The reality is, for the last two centries, Pashtuns/Afghans were at the receiving end of a global conflict in which the main players were determined to establish, retain, and expand their hegemony and zones of influnce as much as possible and at any cost to, supposedly, "lessor" humans like Pashtuns/Afghans. In such a situation, assuming that either Pashtuns/Afghans of Pukhtunkhwa or Afghanistan could change the regional status-quo(borders) and re-draw political maps is insensible. Likewise, saying that one set of Pashtuns/Afghans was less nice to another, etc. is also irrational. In a displacement of this scale and for such a long time, undesirable things happen but fortunately, there isn't a single instance to indicate that there occured even a slightest clash.
So the issues above are irrelevant to our future. The IMPORTANT THING for Pashtuns to deliberate upon, concerned with, and do something about is to think what regional political/geopolitical arrangement would help Pashtuns avert the repetition of the painfull ordeal they went through involving loss of millions of lives, devastation of homes, destrcuction of property, displacement/migration and disruption of social and political life not to mention the humuliation and sense of non-entityness resulting from the misfortune. If Pashtuns and their leadeship want their future generations to be secured from such scale of devastation, they must do something durable about their status on war-footing. There can be many models. Some that come to mind are,
Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, which is a sort of soft belly of Afghanistan becomes autonomous not vulnerable to the mechanation of the Punjabi clique that wants to expand its tanticles to Afghanistan and farther to Central Asia. For that to happen, the Punjabi clique and its ability as well as plans to destablise the region would have to be decapacitated. There is a good degree of optimism that the global players trying to establish a new international order are working on these lines.
Second model would be the establishment of a Pashtun state combining Pashtuns/Afghans of either side. How much is this likely is a guess hard to make but it seems if the regional crisis couldn't be resolved in a smooth manner, that may be a consequence.
The third model is the merger of Pukhtunkhwa with Afghanistan but that depends on how flexible Pashtuns/Afghans of Afghanistan are to offer the non-Pashtuns an olive branch in the form of substantial autonomy and self-rule.
Some may say there is a third solution i.e., Durand Line is accepted as an international border but as long as the Punjabi clique retains its destablising capacity togethor with the expansionist Islamo-Punjabi or Islamo-Indic nationalism, it will be a GRAVE BLUNDER to assume that they will stop dreaming about taking Kashmir by force or extending their empire to Kabul.
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