{"book":"adl0980","page":71,"text":"THE PEOPLE\n\nTHE figure of 12 million population for Afghanistan is an estimated one, as the project adopted four years ago for a new and complete census has not yet been completed.\nThe Afghans are entirely Muslim, with the exception of minority groups of Hindus and Jews in various parts of the country, but these number less than one per cent of the population.\nFrom this figure, about 60% are composed of the Pakhtoons (Pashtoons). They occupy the provinces of Nangarhar (in the east), Paktya (in the south), Kabul and Kandahar, Herat, Kataghan and Mazar-i-Sharif, too, have Pakhtoons residing in them. The speak Pakhto and, of course, are mostly also able to converse in Persian, the other main language of the country.\nNext to them in numbers are the Tajiks, Persian-speaking peoples who live in Badakshan, Kataghan, Kabul and Herat. These make up about a quarter of the Afghan population.\nThe rest of the population is made up of the people of Afghan Turkestan, Kirghiz and Turkman, speaking Turkish dialects; Hazaras, living in central mountainous areas and speaking Persian; and Nooristanis speaking various dialects mentioned in the previous chapter.\nOn the whole, Afghans are a pastoral and agricultural people. Whether north or south, east or west, they are mainly busy farming, rearing cattle—sheep, goats and cows—and herding donkeys, horses and camels, mostly for transportation of their products to markets within the country for bartering.\nThere are roughly about two million Pakhto-speaking nomads who travel constantly from summer pastures in Central and northern Afghanistan to their warm winter quarters in the eastern and southern lowlands.\nLife under somewhat hard geophysical conditions has made the Afghans a hardy people. They are warm-hearted, honest, trusting, generous and tolerant people, and mind their own business so long as they are not interfered with. They work hard and live their own quiet lives. They learn fast and use what they have learnt for the good of their society.\nThey are slowly becoming aware of the limitations of their life as compared to that of the more advanced nations of the world, and are therefore increasingly determined to bridge the gap in material comforts which exists between them and the rest of the world. This calls for more hard work and more united effort on the part of the nation, and they readily accept their task for the attainment of a high degree of progress. They wholeheartedly support all plans and projects which are to bring them and their country more prosperity and a higher standard of life.\nThey are excedingiy patriotic and this is a tradition with the Afghans. They have an intense love for independence and would like all nations of the world to enjoy it without interference by anyone. Their love of freedom and self-respect is described in these words by the famous Afghan thinker and philosopher of modern times, Sayyed Jamaluddin Afghani:\n\"Self-respect is the guiding light of the Pakhtoons and they prefer death rather than to lose their self-respect by passing under the rule and yoke of others . . .\"\nPhysically the Afghans are tall and well-built. Their complexion is light tan. They have dark hair, usually dark eyes, somewhat long heads and long straight noses. Other types also exist in small numbers.\nThey love the open air and are fond of sports, which range from wrestling and weight-throwing to hunting and marksmanship. Their favourite games, too, show their trait of toughness. One of\n68","chars":3491,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0980/00071.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":93,"title":"Afghan progress in the fourth year plan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0980/71","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0980/canvas/71","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0980/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0980_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}