Afghanistan
Capital : Kabul
Badghisat, Bamian, Farah, Ghazni, Ghowr, Helmand, Herat, Kabul, Konarha, Nangarhar, Oruzgan, Paktia, Parvan, Qandahar, Rigestan
Size: 250 000 sq m Popn: 19 062 000
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"Afghānistān has borne that name only since the middle of the 18th century, when the supremacy of the Afghan race (Pashtuns) became assured: previously various districts bore distinct apellations, but the country was not a definite political unit, and its component parts were not bound together by any identity of race or language. The earlier meaning of the word was simply “the land of the Afghans”, a limited territory which did not include many parts of the present state but did comprise large districts now either independent or within the boundary of Pakistan."
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Introduction:
This region was part of the Persian Empire and was used as a path to India by Darius I and Alexander the Great. It was conquered by Islamic groups in the C7th and the Mongols Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in the C13th and C14th. In 1747, Afghanistan became an independent emirate under Ahmed Shah Durrani. The three Afghan Wars of the C19th were fought by Britain to prevent Russian expansion into India. In the first, 1838-42, the British garrison in Kabul was wiped out, in the second, 1878-80, General Roberts recaptured Kabul and relieved Kandahar. The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 gave Afghanistan autonomy and it gained independence through the Treaty of Rawalpindi after the Third Afghan War of 1919 in which the UK sent an aeroplane, the first seen in Kabul.
History of Afghanistan
Buddhas of Bamyan, dating back to 1st century, were the largest Buddha statues in the world.Afghanistan exists at a unique nexus point where numerous Eurasian civilizations have interacted and often fought and was an important site of early historical activity. Through the ages, the region today known as Afghanistan has been ruled by Aryans (Indo-Iranians: Indo-Aryans, Persians, Medes, Parthians, etc.). It also has been invaded by a host of peoples, including the Greeks, Mauryans, Kushans, Hepthalites, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, British, Soviets, and most recently by the United States. On other occasions, native Afghan entities have invaded surrounding regions to form empires of their own.
Between 2000 and 1200 BC, waves of Indo-European-speaking Aryans are thought to have flooded into this part of Asia which now consists of modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Azerbaijan and others, setting up a nation that during the rule of Medes and the Persian Empire became known as Aryānām Xšaθra or Airyānem Vāejah. Later, during the rule of Ashkanian, Sasanian and after, it was called Erānshahr ايرانشهر (Irānshæhr) or Irān, meaning "Dominion of the Iranians (Aryans)", which as well as modern-day Iran, included large parts of Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and modern-day Central Asia (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the western part of Pakistan, etc.).
Zoroastrianism is speculated to have possibly originated in what is now Afghanistan between 1800 to 800 BC. Ancient Eastern Iranian languages, such as Avestan, may have been spoken in this region around a similar time-line with the rise of Zoroastrianism. In the eastern area, the early Indo-Aryan Vedic civilization may have had some prominence, although this has yet to be conclusively proven.
By the middle of the 6th century BC, the Persian Empire(Achaemenids) supplanted the Median Empire and incorporated what was known as Persia to Greeks within its boundaries; and by 330 BC, Alexander the Great had invaded the region. Following Alexander's brief occupation, the Hellenistic successor states of the Seleucids and Bactrians controlled the area, while the Mauryas from India annexed the southeast for a time and introduced Buddhism to the region until the area returned to the Bactrian rule.
During the 1st century AD, the Tocharian Kushans occupied the region. Thereafter, it was ruled by a number of Eurasian tribes — including, Scythians, and Huns, but they were defeated by an Iranian family (Ashkanian) and it fell back to Iranians again, until the 7th century AD, when Muslim Arab armies invaded Iran and conquered the Sassanid Empire in the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah.
The Arab Empire initially annexed parts of western Afghanistan in 652 and then conquered most of the rest of Afghanistan between 706 and 709 AD and administered the region as Khorasan. Over time much of the local population converted to Islam. Khorasan became the center of various important empires, including the Ghaznavid Empire (962-1151), founded by a local Turkic ruler from Ghazni named Yamin ul-Dawlah Mahmud. This empire was replaced by the Ghorid Empire (1151-1219), founded by another local ruler, this time of Tajik extraction, Muhammad Ghori, whose domains laid the foundations for the Delhi Sultanate in India.
In 1219, the region was overrun by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, who devastated the land. Their rule continued with the Ilkhanates, and was extended further following the invasion of Timur Lang, a ruler from Central Asia. In 1504, Babur, a descendant of both Timur lang and Genghis Khan, established the Mughal Empire with its capital at Kabul. By the early 1700s, the region of present-day Afghanistan was controlled by three ruling parties, Uzbeks to the north, Safavids to the west and the remaining larger area by the Mughals.
Coronation of Ahmad Shah Durrani
The Sunni Ghilzai Pashtuns rose against Shia Safavid rule in the early 18th century, defeated them and took a 10 year control (1719-1729) of many parts of Persia. Nadir Shah, from the Afsharid dynasty in Khorasan, defeated back the Pashtuns in the 1729 Battle of Damghan. In 1738, Nadir Shah conquered Kandahar, in the same year he occupied Ghazni, Kabul and lahore. On June, 19, 1747, Nadir Shah was assassinated, possibly planned by his nephew Ali Qoli.
In the same year, one of Nadir Shah's high-ranking military general, Ahmad Shah Durrani, a Pashtun from the Durrani clan, called for a loya jirga following Nadir Shah's assassination. The Afghans came together at Kandahar and unanimously chose Ahmad Shah to be king, who changed his tribal name to Durrani (Persian: "pearl of pearls").
By 1751, Ahmad Shah managed to rule the entire present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Khorassan region of Iran, along with Dehli in India. In 1772, Ahmad Shah retired to his home in Maruf in the mountains east of Kandahar, where he died peacefully. He was succeeded by his son, Timur Shah Durrani, who transferred the capital from Kandahar to Kabul and died in 1793, and was finally succeeded by his son Zaman Shah.
During the 19th century, following the Anglo-Afghan wars (fought 1839-1842, 1878-1880, and lastly in 1919) and the ascension of the Barakzai Pashtun dynasty, Afghanistan saw much of its territory and autonomy ceded to the United Kingdom. The UK exercised a great deal of influence, and it was not until King Amanullah Khan acceded to the throne in 1919 ( "The Great Game") that Afghanistan regained complete independence.
During the period of British intervention in Afghanistan, ethnic Pashtun territories were divided by the Durand Line, and this would lead to strained relations between Afghanistan and British India, and later the new state of Pakistan, over what came to be known as the Pashtunistan debate.
Daoud Khan, President of the Republic of AfghanistanThe longest period of stability in Afghanistan was between 1933 and 1973, when the country was under the rule of King Zahir Shah. However, in 1973, Zahir's brother-in-law, Sardar Mohammed Daoud launched a bloodless coup. Daoud and his entire family were murdered in 1978 when the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan launched a coup known as the Great Saur Revolution and took over the government.
Opposition against, and conflict within, the series of communist governments that followed, was considerable. As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski began to covertly fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service agency known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which were derived from discontented Muslims in the country who opposed the official atheism of the Marxist regime, in 1978.
In order to bolster the local Communist forces the Soviet Union—citing the 1978 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborliness that had been signed between the two countries —intervened on December 24, 1979. The Soviet occupation resulted in a mass exodus of over 5 million Afghans who moved into refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. More than 3 million settled in Pakistan alone. Faced with mounting international pressure and the loss of approximately 15,000 Soviet soldiers as a result of Mujahideen opposition forces trained by the United States, Pakistan, and other foreign governments, the Soviets withdrew ten years later, in 1989.
Soviet troops withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1988.The Soviet withdrawal from the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was seen as an ideological victory in the U.S., which had backed the Mujahideen through three US presidential administrations in order to counter Soviet influence in the vicinity of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Following the removal of the Soviet forces in 1989, the U.S. and its allies lost interest in Afghanistan and did little to help rebuild the war-ravaged country or influence events there. The USSR continued to support the President Najibullah (formerly the head of the secret service, Khad) until its downfall in 1992. However, the absence of the Soviet forces resulted in the downfall of the government as it steadily lost ground to the guerrilla forces.[3]
The result of the fighting was that the vast majority of the elites and intellectuals had escaped to take refuge abroad, a dangerous leadership vacuum came into existence. Fighting continued among the various Mujahideen factions, eventually giving rise to a state of warlordism. The chaos and corruption that dominated post-Soviet Afghanistan in turn spawned the rise of the Taliban (who mainly derived from Pashtun of Afghanistan) in response to the growing chaos. The most serious fighting during this growing civil conflict occurred in 1994, when 10,000 people were killed during factional fighting in Kabul.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, Afghan military leader, fought against the Soviets in the 1980s and against the Taliban in the 1990s.Exploiting the chaotic situation in Afghanistan, a few regional bedfellows, including fundamentalist Afghans trained in refugee camps in western Pakistan, the Pakistani ISI, helped establish a puppet regime in Kabul called the Taliban(2000) [4], Yale University Press Backed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other strategic allies, the Taliban developed as a politico-religious force, and eventually seized power in 1996.
The Taliban were able to capture 90% of the country, aside from the Afghan Northern Alliance strongholds primarily found in the northeast in the Panjshir Valley. The Taliban sought to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law and gave safe haven and assistance to individuals and organizations that were implicated as terrorists, most notably Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
During Taliban rule the population faced massive restrictions of freedom and human rights violations. Women were banned from jobs, girls forbidden to attend schools or universities. Those who resisted were punished. Communists were systematically eradicated and Islamic Sharia law was imposed.
Following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a military campaign to destroy the Al-Qaeda terrorist network operating in Afghanistan and overthrow their host (Taliban). The US made common cause with the Afghan Northern Alliance to achieve its ends.
In December 2001, major leaders from the Afghan opposition groups and diaspora met in Köningswinter, near Bonn, and agreed on a plan for the formulation of a new government that resulted in the inauguration of Hamid Karzai as Chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority (AIA) in December 2001.
After a nationwide Loya Jirga in 2002, Karzai was chosen by the representatives to assume the title of President of Afghanistan. In 2003 the country convened a Constitutional Loya Jirga (Council of Elders) and ratified a new constitution in early 2004. Hamid Karzai was elected President in a nation-wide election in October 2004. Legislative elections were held in September 2005. The National Assembly--the first freely elected legislature in Afghanistan since 1973--sat in December 2005, and was noteworthy for the inclusion of women as voters, candidates, and elected members.
President Hamid Karzai casting his vote at the 2004 Presidential elections.As the country continued to rebuild and recover, as of late 2006, it was still struggling against widespread poverty, continued warlordism, a virtually non-existent infrastructure, possibly the largest concentration of land mines and other unexploded ordinance on earth, as well as a huge illegal poppy and heroin trade. Afghanistan also remains subject to occasionally violent political jockeying.
The landmine problem persists; in 2002, the Red Cross recorded 409 landmine deaths in Afghanistan, one of the highest mine tolls anywhere. The country continues to grapple with the Taliban insurgency, the threat of attacks from a few remaining al-Qaeda, and instability, particularly in the north, caused by the remaining semi-independent warlords.
