Afghanistan

The territory of modern Afghanistan has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times and lay at the crossroads of Central, South, and West Asian civilisations. Bronze Age urban settlements such as Mundigak and Shortugai connected the region to the Indus Valley, while by the first millennium BCE much of the area formed the satrapies of Bactria, Aria, and Arachosia within the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Alexander the Great conquered these lands in the 330s BCE, and after his death they passed to the Seleucids and then to the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, whose fusion of Hellenistic and local traditions later shaped Gandharan Buddhist art under the Kushan Empire of the first three centuries CE. Successive waves of Sasanians, Hephthalites, and Turkic rulers followed before Arab armies introduced Islam from the seventh century onward, a transformation consolidated under the Samanids and the Persianate Ghaznavid dynasty, which ruled from Ghazni in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The Ghurids, Khwarazmians, and Mongols of Genghis Khan all swept through the region, and in the late fourteenth century it became part of the Timurid realm centred on Herat, a celebrated capital of Persianate culture. From the sixteenth century the territory was contested between the Safavids of Iran and the Mughals of India, with the Pashtun Hotak dynasty briefly seizing Isfahan in the 1720s. The modern Afghan state is conventionally dated to 1747, when Ahmad Shah Durrani was proclaimed ruler at Kandahar and assembled the Durrani Empire, the largest Muslim polity of its time after the Ottomans.

Throughout the nineteenth century Afghanistan became the principal arena of the Anglo-Russian "Great Game." Three Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839 to 1842, 1878 to 1880, and 1919) ended British attempts at direct control; under Amir Abdur Rahman Khan the country's present borders, including the disputed Durand Line with British India, were fixed in the 1890s. Full sovereignty over foreign affairs was secured in 1919 under King Amanullah Khan, who pursued reforms before being overthrown in 1929. The Musahiban dynasty then governed until 1973, when Mohammed Daoud Khan abolished the monarchy and proclaimed a republic.

A communist coup in 1978 triggered the Soviet military intervention of 1979 to 1989, a devastating war that produced millions of refugees and a generation of mujahideen factions. The collapse of the Najibullah government in 1992 was followed by civil war among those factions and the rise of the Taliban, who captured Kabul in 1996 and imposed a strict Islamic emirate. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, a United States led coalition removed the Taliban from power, and the 2001 Bonn Agreement established a transitional administration. A new constitution adopted in 2004 created the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, with elected presidents Hamid Karzai and later Ashraf Ghani serving alongside an international military presence under NATO's ISAF and Resolute Support missions.

Following the withdrawal of foreign forces, the republic collapsed on 15 August 2021 as Taliban fighters re-entered Kabul. The movement re-established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, governed by an unelected leadership council and a supreme leader based in Kandahar, with executive authority in Kabul exercised by an acting cabinet. The present-day state is therefore a centralised Islamic emirate without a written constitution or legislature, and it remains formally unrecognised by the United Nations and most foreign governments.