Afghanistan

The country where empires have gone to be worn down, though the phrase flatters the invaders more than it explains the place. Afghanistan sits on the routes between Persia, Central Asia and India, and Alexander, the Kushans, the Ghaznavids, Genghis Khan, Timur and Babur all passed through or ruled from it. The Durrani empire founded in 1747 is usually taken as the modern state's beginning. Britain fought three wars here in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during the Great Game with Russia, losing an entire retreating column in 1842, and drew the Durand Line in 1893 through Pashtun territory - a border Afghanistan has never accepted and that still divides the Pashtuns with Pakistan. The Soviet invasion of 1979 met a mujahideen resistance funded by the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 was followed by civil war and the Taliban's capture of Kabul in 1996. An American-led intervention after 2001 lasted twenty years and ended with the Taliban's return in August 2021. Girls' secondary education has been prohibited since. The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in 2001. Opium production has been successively the world's largest and then banned. The country has about forty-one million people and is landlocked. Pashto and Dari are both official, with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks the largest groups. The Hindu Kush runs through the centre. Herat, Balkh and Kandahar are among the oldest cities in the region. Lapis lazuli has been mined at Sar-e-Sang for six thousand years and reached Egypt and Mesopotamia from there. The country holds large untapped mineral reserves.

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