Ahmad Shah Durrani

Ahmad Shah Durrani founded the state that became Afghanistan and is called its father there. He was a Pashtun of the Abdali tribe who commanded the Afghan cavalry contingent in the service of Nadir Shah of Persia, and when Nadir was murdered by his own guards in 1747 the Afghan troops rode home with a share of the treasury, including the Koh-i-Noor. A loya jirga of tribal chiefs near Kandahar elected him leader that October - by tradition after a holy man placed wheat sheaves in his turban - and he took the title Durr-i-Durran, pearl of pearls, which renamed his tribe. What he built was not a bureaucracy but a coalition: the tribes kept their autonomy and he kept them paid, mostly out of India. He invaded it eight times. At Panipat in 1761 he destroyed the Maratha army in one of the largest battles of the eighteenth century, killing tens of thousands and ending Maratha hopes of succeeding the Mughals - which, by removing the strongest Indian power, cleared a good deal of ground for the East India Company. He also sacked Delhi and desecrated the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar, which is why he is remembered very differently on the other side of the Khyber. He died of a facial cancer that had eaten away his nose, and his empire fragmented within a generation while the Durrani line held Kabul for another century. The Koh-i-Noor passed from his line to the Sikhs and then to the British, and is in the Tower of London. Afghans still call him Ahmad Shah Baba. His tomb in Kandahar stands beside the shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet, and it is where Mullah Omar had the cloak displayed in 1996 to claim the same lineage of authority.

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