While Pazhwak's late father Judge Abdullah Khan served as the Chief Justice of Afghanistan's Supreme Court, Habibullah Kalakni and his followers took control of the capital city, Kabul in 1929.
In 1968 Pazhwak was seen as having a solid chance to replace the hesitating U Thant – who spent a whole term dithering whether to run for another period – and occupy the high position of the UN Secretary General.
Pazhwak's liberal and progressive mindset, his advocacy for freedom of opinion, his support for active political participation of citizens, and his championing of human rights had fallen on fertile grounds particularly among intelligentsia.
In 1973, when Daoud Khan came to power through a bloodless coup d'état, which had considerable support among the leftist and pro-Moscow elements of the Afghan army, he relied on Pazhwak as a special envoy to promote Afghanistan's national security interests in major international forums.
Upon learning the nature of the coup in Kabul, Pazhwak resigned his post as Afghanistan's ambassador to London and voluntarily returned home where he was put under house arrest.
Ordered by the new communist power holders, Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin's purging campaigns were launched, turning into waves of terror throughout the country.
Deeply moved by the violent death on 9 April 1980 of Naheed Sahed, who was a student in her final year of high school, Pazhwak later crafted a volume of poetry dedicated to "The martyr Nahid Sa‘id, her sisters, and all those Afghan women who have stood up against the Red Army, inside or outside of the homeland.".
Pazhwak's farsighted concept for, which he presented to the United Nations, provided for bringing together all the relevant Afghan groups, factions, parties and figures, conspiring to make them walk along a common path and gather together at the table of negotiation.
His body was taken back to his beloved homeland where he found eternal peace buried in his ancestral village of Baghbani, Surkhrod district of Nangrahar province.
For example, Pazhwak wrote the following verse: Stand up inn keeper and fill the cup with wine, It is said that spring has arrived, how much longer will you remain asleep?
[11] In writing this, he was making use of important ingredients of classical, eastern, Islamic poetry – for example wine (badah/mai/sharab), love (‘ishq), inn keeper (saqi) and beloved (dust/mahbub) – which were already known since the time of Hafiz (d. 1389).
The declaration in the content can be paraphrased as follows: even though has been freed from foreign (i.e. British) rule by the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, the lack of freedom of thinking keeps its people still imprisoned.
His work Almas-i Nashikan, for example, is a poetic rendition of what is a collection of facts in which the total brutality of events is depicted in a manner making minimal use of the classical style of poetry.
For example, Pazhwak talks in the poem about chemical weapons used by the Red Army or the troops of the Communist regime opening fire on young male and female Afghan students who marched on the streets of Kabul in protest.
A research text written by Pazhwak about Pashtunwali (the ancient code of conduct prevalent among Pashtuns until today) and some journalistic writings date to the period of the late 1930s and 1940s.
The drams, short stories (dastan-i kuta) and novelettes (nawil) stem from Western literature but are nowadays an established part of modern Afghan prose writing (nasr-i adabi).
Tarzi's regular elaborations in his influential newspaper Seraj al-Akhbar on Western literature and its various genres and movements were not only noticed by Afghan literati but also greatly influenced their work.
In recognition of his standing and contribution, Sayed Haschmatullah Hossaini described Pazhwak as a "pioneer of Afghan short story writing," in his research on modern Dari literature in Afghanistan.
Pazhwak's prose writing is almost entirely made up of short pieces in which the plot, often triggered by an unusual incident, follows an increasingly steep line of development.
Pazhwak translated the Psalms of King David (from Urdu) and the works of Khalil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Lord Byron, John Keats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Reynold A. Nicholson, William Pitt Root and Jacques Prévert (from French).
Additionally, Pazhwak translated selected poems and fragments from the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Victor Hugo.
Among the translations that were published were Pishwa (‘The Prophet’) by Khalil Gibran and Baghban (‘The Gardener’) by the Indian author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Rabindranath Tagore.
King Amanullah intended to reshape his country, introducing it to modernity through political and social changes that followed the example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Republic of Turkey.
His modernization measures for Afghan society, for example the removal of the hijab, the introduction of Western clothes, compulsory education for girls, and so forth were met with fierce resistance by a great section of the conservative rural and urban clerical establishment.
They had made achievements in certain fields, for example they firmly stuck to Afghanistan's political neutrality during the Second World War and worked on modernizing with the help of foreign development aide.
The themes related to Afghanistan which he openly or subtly dealt with in his texts included social conditions, the citizens’ right of freedom, the peaceful handling of a probable threat to from outside, the damage to and weakening of traditional nomadic lifestyles through sedentary life and the anachronistic seeming aspects of the Pashtunwali code.
Similarly, in his social critical novelette Dhamir (‘*’), Pazhwak demonstrates through a ruthless portrayal of the story's protagonist that decadence and a lack of a sense of justice on the part of members of the Afghan feudal system are both immoral and un-Islamic.
The poem in which Pazhwak makes use of the artful, poetic language of the classical masnawi form, still feels fresh and accessible even though the conditions of its reception have changed.
In the poem Mardan-i Parupamizad, there first appears a description of the time that Alexander the Great spent in Ariana (the historical name of and parts of ) and the experiences he had with the people of the country.
- Almas-i Nashikan -- sh'er-i sha'er-i englis W. Pitt Root bah mojahedin-i Afghanestan wa jawab-i Pazhwak, (Dari / Englisch), Virginia 1996.