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Afghanistan's history as a country spans little more than two centuries, although it has contributed to the greatness of many great Central Asian empires. As with much of the region, the rise and fall of political power has been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of religions.
It was in Afghanistan that the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism began in the 6th century BCE. Later, Buddhism spread west from India to the Bamiyan Valley, where it remained strong until the 10th century AD. The eastward sweep of Islam reached Afghanistan in the 7th century AD, and today the vast majority of Afghans are Muslim.
Between 1220 and 1223, Jenghiz Khan tore through the country, reducing Balkh, Herat, Ghazni and Bamiyan to rubble. After damage was repaired, Timur swept through in the early 1380s and reduced the region to rubble again. Timur's reign ushered in the golden Timurid era, when poetry, architecture and miniature painting reached their zenith.
Timur's fourth son, Shah Rukh, built shrines, mosques and medressas throughout Khorasan, from Mashhad, in modern-day Iran, to Balkh. Herat continued to prosper under Sultan Hussain Baykara (died 1506), producing such great Central Asian poets as Jami and Alisher Navoi.
The rise of the great Mughal empire again lifted Afghanistan to heights of power. Babur had his capital in Kabul in 1512, but as the Mughals extended their power into India, Afghanistan went from being the centre of the empire to merely a peripheral part of it. In 1747, with European forces eroding the influence of the Mughals on the Indian subcontinent, the kingdom of Afghanistan was founded by the still revered Ahmad Shah Durrani.
The 19th century was a period of often comic-book confrontation with the British, who were afraid of the effects of unruly neighbours on their great Indian colony. The rise of tensions and the weakness of the Afghan kingdom resulted in some remarkably unsuccessful and bloody wars being fought on extremely flimsy pretexts. The first, between 1839 and 1842, saw the British garrison almost totally wiped out while retreating to the Khyber Pass - out of 15,000 persons, only one man survived. The British managed to reoccupy Kabul and carried out a bit of razing and burning to show who was boss, but this again was short-lived.
Following another short war, from 1878 to 1880, Afghanistan agreed to become more or less a protectorate of the British, happily accepted an annual payment to keep things in shape and agreed to a British resident in Kabul. No sooner had the diplomatic mission been installed in Kabul, however, than all its members were murdered. This time the British decided to keep control over Afghanistan's external affairs, but to leave the internal matters strictly to the Afghans themselves.
In 1893 the British drew Afghanistan's eastern boundaries along the so-called Durand Line, neatly partitioning many Pashtun tribes into what today is Pakistan. This has been a cause of Afghan-Pakistani strife for many years, and is the reason the Afghans refer to the western part of Pakistan as Pashtunistan.
From WWI onwards Afghanistan's trade was tilted heavily towards the USSR and Soviet foreign aid to Afghanistan far outweighed Western assistance. Turkish-style reforms failed and the country remained precariously unstable for decades. The postwar kingdom ended in 1973 when the king - a Pashtun, like most of those in power - was neatly overthrown while away in Europe. His 'progressive' successors were hardly any more progressive than he had been, but the situation under them was far better than that which was to follow.
After the bloody 1978 pro-Moscow revolution, Afghanistan rapidly deteriorated. Its procommunist, antireligious government was far out of step with the strongly Islamic popular movements in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, and soon the ever-volatile Afghan tribes had the countryside up in arms. A second revolution brought in a government that leaned even more heavily on Soviet support and the country lurched towards anarchy. The USSR decided that enough was enough. Another 'popular' revolution took place in 1979, and a Soviet puppet government was installed in Kabul, with what looked like half the Soviet army lined up behind it.
An Islamic jihad (holy war) was called and seven mujaheddin factions emerged. The Soviets soon found themselves mired in what later became known as 'Russia's Vietnam'. The war ground on through the 1980s. Afghan tribal warriors remained disorganised but determined, brave and increasingly well-equipped; the CIA pumped up to US$700 million a year into the conflict in one of the largest covert operations in history. Soon the Soviet regime held only the cities, which were cut off as road convoys were ambushed and aircraft brought down with surface-to-air missiles. In the late 1980s Gorbachov finally pulled the Russians out.
The war had cost the Soviets over 15,000 men, galvanised Central Asian nationalism and contributed significantly to the collapse of the USSR. More than a million Afghans lay dead and 6.2 million people, over half the world's refugee population, had fled the country. Afghanistan, once again, was reduced to rubble.
The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 weakened the government of President Najibullah, who proposed a government of national unity. The mujaheddin declined. In April 1992 Najibullah was ousted; a week later fighting erupted between rival mujaheddin factions in Kabul. An interim president was installed and replaced two months later by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a founder of the country's Islamic political movement, backed by legendary mujaheddin commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. The fighting continued, doing more damage than the Soviet occupation.
Mujaheddin in-fighting was thrown into sharp relief in the mid-90's by the spectacular military successes of a group of Islamic fighters called the Taliban ('talib' means 'religious student' or 'seeker of knowledge'), a group of ethnic Pashtuns backed by Pakistan. They took Kandahar in 1994 and in September 1996 entered Kabul unopposed - Rabbani and Massoud's forces had already fled north.
The international recognition the Taliban craved never arrived. They made themselves infamous by their sadistic repression of women and dissidents as well as their destruction of the country's cultural heritage, and almost pushed Iran into a regional war. Showing little interest in trying to govern and rebuild Afghanistan, they instead played host to terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden (attracting UN sanctions in the process), becoming enthralled by the radical Islamism of his Al-Qaeda network. On 9 September 2001 Massoud was assassinated by Al-Qaeda, an act thought to be the trigger for the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC. The USA and its allies began military operations and quickly overthrew the Taliban, who appeared to literally melt into the mountains. An intermin government, dominated by Massoud's Northern Alliance was quickly installed in Kabul.
Post-Taliban reconstruction has been patchy at best. Progress on the political front has been rapid, with elections leading to a parliament and president in the shape of the Pashtun Hamid Karzai. At the same time however, the slow pace of physical rebuilding is a source of much frustration among Afghans. In particular, a lack of reconstruction in the south has allowed a Taliban insurgency to flare up again, accompanied by a huge increase in opium production. The expansion of Nato troops in the region hopes to address this, but Afghanistan clearly has a long road to travel back to stability.
