The history of Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a landlocked, mountainous country where the Hindu Kush divides the river plains of Central Asia from the valleys that run down to the Indus. For most of its history its lands were not a single state but the eastern edge of Persian empires, the western edge of Indian ones and the southern edge of the steppe, crossed by traders and armies alike. Buddhist kingdoms, Islamic sultanates based at Ghazni and Herat, and the Timurid court all left their mark before a Pashtun confederation under Ahmad Shah Durrani created the modern kingdom in 1747. Squeezed between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century, Afghanistan has since 1978 endured almost continuous war: a communist coup, Soviet occupation, civil war, two periods of Taliban rule and twenty years of US-led intervention.

Stone tools and a Neanderthal bone fragment from the cave of Darra-e Kur show that people lived here at least 50,000 years ago, and farming took hold early in the northern foothills. By the third millennium BCE towns had appeared. Mundigak, near Kandahar, grew into a walled settlement with a large mud-brick palace, part of a wider culture that traded with Iran and the Indus Valley Civilisation. On the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus), the site of Shortugai was the northernmost known outpost of the Indus cities, probably a trading post for the blue stone lapis lazuli, mined in Badakhshan and prized from Egypt to Mesopotamia.

Between about 2200 and 1700 BCE the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, also called the Oxus civilisation, built fortified towns across northern Afghanistan and its neighbours. In the second millennium BCE Indo-Iranian-speaking peoples spread through the region; their religious traditions fed into both the Vedic religion of India and the faith later reformed by Zoroaster, whom some traditions place in Bactria. The city of Balkh, which the Greeks called Bactra, was already ancient when written history begins.

In the sixth century BCE Cyrus the Great and later Darius the Great brought the region into the Achaemenid Empire. Its lands were organised into satrapies: Bactria in the north, Aria around Herat, Arachosia around Kandahar and Gandhara in the Kabul valley.

Alexander the Great arrived in 330 BCE in pursuit of the last Achaemenid claimants. Campaigning from 329 to 327 BCE, he met fierce resistance in Bactria and Sogdiana, married the Bactrian noblewoman Roxana, and founded garrison cities, among them Alexandria in Arachosia (Kandahar) and Alexandria in the Caucasus near Bagram. After his death the region passed to the Seleucid Empire, but around 305 BCE Seleucus I ceded the lands south of the Hindu Kush to Chandragupta Maurya. Under Ashoka, Maurya rule left one of the most striking documents of the ancient world: rock edicts at Kandahar urging moral conduct, inscribed in Greek and Aramaic for the region's mixed population.

Around 250 BCE the Seleucid governors of Bactria broke away to found the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. The city of Ai-Khanoum on the Amu Darya, with its theatre, gymnasium and Greek inscriptions, shows how far the Hellenistic world reached. Greek kings later pushed south into India, while in the north their realm fell around 130 BCE to nomads from the east, among them the Yuezhi. One Yuezhi clan, the Kushans, built an empire in the first century CE that stretched from the Amu Darya deep into northern India.

The Kushan Empire reached its height under Kanishka in the second century. It sat astride the Silk Road, linking China, India, Persia and Rome. Kanishka was a patron of Buddhism, and the Gandharan art of the period, which blended Greek and Indian styles, gave Buddhism some of its first images of the Buddha in human form. Monks travelling from these lands carried the faith to Central Asia and China.

From the third century the Persian Sasanian Empire took much of the west and north, ruling through Kushano-Sasanian governors. From the late fourth century waves of new rulers from the north, known collectively as the Huns (Kidarites, Alchons and Hephthalites), dominated the region. Buddhism continued to flourish: in the sixth century the people of the Bamiyan valley carved two colossal standing Buddhas, 55 and 38 metres high, into the cliffs, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described thriving monasteries there in the 630s.

Arab armies of the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates conquered the western lands around Herat and Sistan in the mid-seventh century, but the mountainous east resisted for two centuries. The Zunbils of the south and the Kabul Shahis of the Kabul valley, first Buddhist and later Hindu, fought off repeated Arab raids. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Islam spread steadily through the cities of Khurasan, and Balkh and Herat became centres of Persian Muslim culture. The decisive break came in 870, when Yaqub ibn al-Layth, founder of the Saffarid dynasty of Sistan, marched through Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul and Bamiyan. The Samanid Empire of Bukhara then ruled the north, presiding over a revival of the Persian language and learning.

A Turkic commander of the Samanids founded a new power at Ghazni in the 970s. His son Mahmud, who ruled from 998 to 1030, made the Ghaznavid Empire one of the strongest states in the Islamic world. Mahmud led some seventeen raids into India, sacking temples such as Somnath and carrying their wealth back to Ghazni, which he filled with mosques and scholars such as the polymath al-Biruni. The Ghaznavids lost their western lands to the Seljuk Empire after 1040.

In the twelfth century the Ghurids, a dynasty from the mountains of central Afghanistan, overthrew the Ghaznavids, burning Ghazni in 1150. Their soaring brick Minaret of Jam, built in the 1190s in a remote river valley, survives as their monument. Under Muizz al-Din Muhammad, the Ghurids conquered northern India, and his generals founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206.

The Khwarazmian empire briefly absorbed the region before the armies of Genghis Khan arrived in 1221. The destruction was immense. Balkh was razed, Herat's population was massacred after a revolt, and at Bamiyan, where Genghis's grandson was killed, the Mongols destroyed the city so thoroughly that it was remembered as the City of Screams. Irrigation systems were wrecked, and a century later Ibn Battuta still found Balkh in ruins. After the break-up of the Mongol Empire, Herat was rebuilt by the local Kart dynasty under Ilkhanate overlordship, while Kabul, Ghazni and Kandahar fell to the Chagatai Khanate.

Tamerlane conquered Herat in 1381. His son Shah Rukh moved the capital of the Timurid Empire from Samarkand to Herat in 1405, and over the following century the city became one of the great cultural centres of the Islamic world. Its court sponsored the painter Behzad and the poets Jami and Ali-Shir Navai.

In 1504 Babur, a Timurid prince driven out of Central Asia, seized Kabul. From there he invaded India in 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire; he asked to be buried in a garden in Kabul, where his tomb still stands. For two centuries the lands of Afghanistan were divided. The Mughals held Kabul, which Akbar made a province of the empire; the Shia Safavid Empire held Herat; the Uzbek khans of Bukhara held Balkh; and Kandahar changed hands repeatedly between Mughals and Safavids.

In 1709 Mirwais Hotak, a Ghilzai Pashtun chief, killed the Safavid governor of Kandahar and made the region independent. His son Mahmud invaded Persia, defeated the Safavid army at Gulnabad in 1722 and captured the capital Isfahan, ruling briefly as shah. The Persian general Nader Shah drove the Afghans out and took Kandahar in 1738.

When Nader Shah was assassinated in 1747, a tribal assembly near Kandahar chose a young commander of his Afghan cavalry, Ahmad Khan of the Abdali Pashtuns, as king. Taking the title Durr-i Durran, "pearl of pearls", Ahmad Shah Durrani built an empire that at its height ran from Khurasan and Kashmir to the Punjab and Sindh. He defeated the Marathas at Panipat in 1761 and raided northern India repeatedly. His son Timur Shah moved the capital to Kabul in 1776. Civil wars among Ahmad Shah's grandsons weakened the realm, and the Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh took Peshawar and the Punjab.

From 1826 Dost Mohammad Khan of the Barakzai family ruled Kabul. Afghanistan now lay between the expanding Russian Empire in Central Asia and the British Empire in India, a rivalry known as the Great Game. Fearing Russian influence, the British invaded in 1839 to restore a former king, Shah Shuja. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in disaster: an uprising in Kabul forced a British retreat in January 1842, and almost the entire force of soldiers and camp followers was killed in the winter passes. Dost Mohammad returned to the throne.

A second British invasion in 1878 led to the Treaty of Gandamak, which gave Britain control of Afghan foreign policy. The British recognised Abdur Rahman Khan as emir in 1880. Known as the Iron Emir, he ruled until 1901, building a centralised state by force. His campaigns against the Hazaras in the 1890s killed and displaced a large part of that Shia people, many of whom were enslaved or had their lands given to Pashtun settlers, and he forcibly converted the non-Muslim people of Kafiristan, renamed Nuristan. In 1893 he accepted the Durand Line, a border with British India that split the Pashtun lands and that no Afghan government has formally recognised. Anglo-Russian agreements fixed the northern frontier and created the narrow Wakhan Corridor as a buffer.

Habibullah Khan kept Afghanistan neutral in World War I and was assassinated in 1919. His son Amanullah Khan attacked British India in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, and the Treaty of Rawalpindi of August 1919 restored Afghanistan's full control of its foreign affairs. Amanullah, impressed by Atatürk's reforms in Turkey, launched an ambitious modernisation: a constitution, schools for girls and moves against the veil. A tribal and religious revolt drove him into exile in 1929, and the Tajik rebel Habibullah Kalakani held Kabul for nine months before Mohammad Nadir Shah took the throne.

Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1933, and his son Mohammad Zahir Shah reigned for forty years. The country stayed neutral in World War II. After the partition of India in 1947, Afghanistan's claim to the Pashtun lands of Pakistan, the Pashtunistan issue, soured relations with its new neighbour. During the Cold War both the Soviet Union and the United States funded roads, dams and airports. The 1964 constitution created an elected parliament and allowed political parties to form, among them the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which split into the rival Khalq and Parcham factions.

In 1973 Mohammad Daoud Khan, the king's cousin and former prime minister, abolished the monarchy and made himself president. On 28 April 1978 PDPA officers overthrew and killed Daoud and most of his family in the Saur Revolution. The new regime pushed through land and marriage reforms and violently repressed its opponents, killing thousands of religious leaders, landowners and intellectuals, many at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. Revolts broke out across the country. In September 1979 Hafizullah Amin seized power from Nur Muhammad Taraki, and in late December the Soviet Union invaded, killed Amin and installed Babrak Karmal.

The war that followed was among the most destructive of the late twentieth century. The mujahideen, Islamist resistance groups based largely in Pakistan, were armed and funded by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's intelligence service. Soviet forces bombed villages and mined fields; estimates of Afghan deaths range from around 560,000 to 2 million, and about 6 million people fled to Pakistan and Iran. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords in 1988 and completed its withdrawal on 15 February 1989, having lost about 15,000 soldiers.

The government of Mohammad Najibullah survived the Soviet withdrawal but lost its support after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and fell in April 1992. The mujahideen parties then turned on each other. Rocket fire between the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other commanders destroyed much of Kabul and killed tens of thousands of its people.

The Taliban, a movement of religious students led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, emerged near Kandahar in 1994 and, with Pakistani support, swept through the south. They captured Kabul on 27 September 1996, hanged Najibullah and declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They barred women from work and girls from school, banned music and television, and carried out massacres, especially of Hazaras, as at Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE recognised them. Massoud's Northern Alliance held out in the north-east. In March 2001 the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, which had moved to Afghanistan in 1996, assassinated Massoud on 9 September 2001, two days before its attacks on the United States.

On 7 October 2001 a US-led coalition began bombing, and with the Northern Alliance it drove the Taliban from Kabul within weeks. The Bonn Agreement made Hamid Karzai interim leader; a loya jirga adopted a new constitution in 2004, and Karzai won the first presidential election that year. Girls returned to school, women entered public life and millions of refugees came home.

The Taliban regrouped in Pakistan and from 2005 waged a growing insurgency, using suicide bombings and roadside bombs, while the government was weakened by corruption, disputed elections and dependence on foreign money. US troop numbers peaked at about 100,000 in 2010–2011, and bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011. NATO ended its combat mission in 2014, the year Ashraf Ghani succeeded Karzai. In February 2020 the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in Doha providing for the withdrawal of foreign troops. As the withdrawal proceeded in 2021, the Taliban overran provincial capitals in a matter of weeks; Ghani fled and Kabul fell on 15 August 2021. During the chaotic airlift that followed, an Islamic State suicide bombing at the airport killed around 170 Afghans and 13 US service members.

The restored Islamic Emirate, led by its supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada from Kandahar, appointed an all-male government and abolished the ministry of women's affairs. Girls were barred from secondary school and, from December 2022, women from universities, and women's work and movement have been steadily restricted. Foreign aid collapsed with the government's assets frozen abroad, and the economy shrank sharply; by 2025 the United Nations described one of the world's worst hunger crises, worsened by drought and by the mass return of Afghans expelled from Pakistan and Iran. In July 2025 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Akhundzada and the chief justice over the persecution of women and girls. That same month Russia became the first country to formally recognise the Taliban government.

Relations with Pakistan, which accuses the Taliban of sheltering the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), a charge Kabul denies, broke down into open fighting. Clashes along the Durand Line in October 2025 ended in a temporary truce mediated by Qatar, but in late February 2026 the two countries fought again, with Pakistani airstrikes on Kabul and Kandahar and Afghan attacks on border posts, before a further pause in March. Afghanistan entered late 2026 isolated, impoverished and under one of the most restrictive governments in the world.