Afghanistan's history: states made by assembly and ended by force

Which empires held the land before Afghanistan

Excavations at Darra-e Kur in 1966 recovered 800 stone implements and a fragment of Neanderthal bone. The History of Afghanistan article reads them as evidence of people living in what is now Afghanistan at least 52,000 years ago; Britannica dates the remains to about 30,000 years ago. Mundigak, near Kandahar, may have been an early city by 3000 BCE, and Shortugai on the Oxus is the northernmost known site of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

For the next two thousand years the land was a province of other people's states. Darius I ruled it through satrapies: Aria around Herat, Bactria around Balkh, Arachosia around Kandahar and Drangiana in Sistan. Alexander overthrew the Achaemenids and took most of these provinces before he left for India in 327 BCE. The Greek city at Ai-Khanoum, where the Kowkcheh meets the Amu Darya, had a theatre and a gymnasium until a nomadic raid about 130 BCE ended it. About 304 BCE the territory south of the Hindu Kush was ceded to the Mauryas of northern India, and Ashoka's inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic have been found at Kandahar and in Laghman.

Under the Kushans the region became a centre in its own right. Under Kanishka, in the 2nd century CE, their empire ran from Mathura in north-central India beyond Bactria to the edge of China, and a branch of the Silk Road passed through a transshipment centre at Balkh. The two standing Buddhas of Bamiyan were cut into a cliff during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. UNESCO gives their heights as 55 and 38 metres; Britannica gives 53 and about 40.

Islamic armies defeated the Sasanians at Nahavand in 642 and advanced east, but in the Afghan hills cities submitted only to revolt again once the armies had passed. Islam arrived for good through local dynasties. Mahmud of Ghazni came to the throne in 998 and made a provincial town the capital of an empire reaching into the Punjab. The Ghurids, from a mountain-locked region of the centre, sacked Ghazni in 1150, and a Ghurid sultan raised the 65-metre Minaret of Jam in 1194. The Mongols invaded in 1221; when Genghis Khan's grandson was killed at the siege of Bamiyan, the city was razed, and the ruin of the irrigation works pushed the weight of the country toward the hills. Herat recovered under the Timurids and became Shah Rukh's capital in 1405.

Babur made Kabul the capital of a principality of his own in 1504 and marched from it on Delhi in 1526. For roughly two centuries afterwards the Mughals of India held Kabul, the Safavids of Persia held Herat and Farah, and Kandahar changed hands between them.

How a tribal council chose the first Afghan shah

The first Afghan state of the modern period was a revolt against Persian rule. In April 1709 Mirwais Hotak, from an influential Kandahar family, rose against the Safavid governor Gurgin Khan, killed him and made southern Afghanistan an independent Pashtun principality. His son Mahmud led some 20,000 men against Isfahan in 1722, and the Safavid government surrendered after a six-month siege. The Hotak dynasty lasted barely a generation. Nader Shah drove the Afghans out of Persia after the battle of Damghan in October 1729 and took Kandahar in 1738 after a year's siege.

Nader Shah was assassinated in 1747, and his empire broke up. The commander of his 4,000-man Afghan bodyguard, Ahmad Khan Abdali, went back to Kandahar and was elected shah by a tribal council, which the History of Afghanistan article places near the city in October 1747 and calls a loya jirga. He took the title Durr-i Durran, "pearl of pearls", and his Abdali tribe has been known as the Durrani since. By 1751 his armies held the present country and much of what is now Pakistan, and at its widest the empire ran from Meshed to Kashmir and Delhi and from the Amu Darya to the Arabian Sea. He defeated the Maratha Empire at Panipat in 1761.

An empire whose founder was chosen by the chiefs depended on the chiefs, and it came apart when they stopped cooperating. Timur Shah, who succeeded in 1772, spent much of his reign putting down their rebellions, and because of that opposition he moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul in 1776. After his death in 1793 his sons settled the succession by what the History of Afghanistan article calls "a round robin of expulsions, blindings and executions". Zaman Shah was blinded and imprisoned in 1800. While the Afghans fought each other, the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh took most of the empire's eastern lands.

Why Britain fought three wars over Kabul

Dost Mohammad took Kabul and assumed the title of emir there in 1826, founding the Barakzai dynasty. Britain regarded Herat as the key to India, and when a Persian army with Russian support besieged the city in November 1837 and a Russian agent appeared in Kabul, the governor-general of India ordered an invasion to restore the deposed Shah Shuja. The British entered Kandahar in April 1839 and installed Shuja at Kabul in August.

Insurrections followed within months. On 6 January 1842 some 4,500 British and Indian troops and 12,000 camp followers marched out of Kabul, and the retreat ended in a massacre. Shuja was killed after they left. Dost Mohammad returned to Kabul in 1843 and spent twenty years taking the rest back: Kandahar in 1855, Balkh and the northern khanates in 1859, and Herat in 1863, less than a month before his death.

The second war, from 1878 to 1880, began when his son Sher Ali received a Russian mission and refused a British one on British terms. The Treaty of Gandamak of 26 May 1879 bound Sher Ali's son Yaqub Khan to conduct his foreign relations in accordance "with the wishes and advice" of the British government. The British envoy was murdered in Kabul that September, British troops occupied the city again, and Yaqub abdicated.

Abdur Rahman Khan, who proclaimed himself emir in 1880, fought some 20 small wars to convince the country's peoples that a strong central government existed in Kabul, and Britannica calls him the founder of modern Afghanistan. Britain and Russia drew the boundaries during his reign. The Durand Line of 1893 divided zones of responsibility between British India and the Afghan kingdom, and Britannica holds that it was never intended as an international boundary; the politics article follows what it became. From 1905 to 1919 the government of India paid the emir an annual subsidy of 18 lakh rupees and conducted nearly all Afghan foreign policy in return.

Habibullah Khan kept the country neutral through the First World War and was murdered on 20 February 1919. His son Amanullah seized power and launched the Third Anglo-Afghan War in May. The Treaty of Rawalpindi, signed on 8 August 1919, gave Afghanistan the conduct of its own foreign affairs, and 19 August is kept as Independence Day.

How the kings tried to reform from the top

Amanullah changed his title from emir to king in 1923 and opened a decade of reform. The first constitution, declared through a loya jirga, made elementary education compulsory in its Article 68; women were allowed to remove the veil, and co-educational schools opened. Religious and tribal leaders took offence. The Shinwari revolted in November 1928, and a Tajik leader known as Bacheh Saqqaw, "child of a water carrier", occupied Kabul and proclaimed himself emir. Amanullah abdicated in January 1929 and died in exile in Zürich in 1960.

Mohammad Nader Khan drove Bacheh Saqqaw from the throne in 1929 and a tribal assembly elected him shah. His constitution of 1931 followed Amanullah's but was written to satisfy the religious leaders. He was assassinated on 8 November 1933, and his 19-year-old son Zahir succeeded him.

Zahir Shah reigned from 1933 to 1973, and the forty years held their own reversals. Shah Mahmud, prime minister from 1946 to 1953, allowed free elections and a relatively free press, and a "liberal parliament" sat from 1949 to 1952. Conservatives then backed the king's cousin Mohammad Daud Khan into the premiership. Daud turned to the Soviet Union for aid, made the veil voluntary and abolished purdah, and pressed the claim to the Pashtun lands beyond the Durand Line until Pakistan closed the border in August 1961. He resigned in March 1963, and the border reopened in May.

In 1964 a Loya Jirga approved the constitution of a constitutional monarchy. The House of the People was to have 216 elected members and the House of the Elders 84, a third of them elected, a third appointed by the king and a third chosen by provincial assemblies. Elections followed in 1965 and 1969, and unofficial parties ran candidates in them, among them the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), founded in 1965 and soon split into Khalq and Parcham, and the Islamist Jamiat-e Islami, founded by Kabul University teachers in 1971. The king named five prime ministers between September 1965 and December 1972, and the independent Supreme Court the constitution called for was never appointed.

How six forms of state ended by force

What ended the monarchy and the first republic

Daud Khan seized power on 17 July 1973 in a virtually bloodless coup, while Zahir Shah was in Italy for medical treatment, and declared a republic. A Loya Jirga approved his new constitution in 1977. The two PDPA factions reunited against him, and after a party member was killed and its leaders arrested, officers organised by Hafizullah Amin staged a coup. Daud and most of his family were killed. Britannica dates the birth of the Democratic Republic to 27 April 1978; the History of Afghanistan article gives 28 April.

Why a Soviet army came and went

The PDPA replaced religious law with secular law and carried out land reform, and its repression killed some 10,000 to 27,000 people, most of the prisoners passing through Pul-e-Charkhi. By spring 1979 revolt had reached 24 of the 28 provinces, and an uprising in Herat that March killed Soviet advisers. Amin overthrew and killed his party leader, Nur Muhammad Taraki, in September. The Soviet Army invaded on 27 December 1979; Amin was killed and replaced by Babrak Karmal.

Soviet strength reached about 115,000 by the mid-1980s, holding the cities and the main roads while the mujahideen fought from the countryside with Pakistani, American, Saudi and other support. Between 6.5% and 11.5% of a population counted at 13.5 million in 1979 is estimated to have been killed, and about 6 million people fled to Pakistan and Iran. The Geneva Accords of April 1988 set a timetable, and the last Soviet column crossed into the Uzbek SSR on 15 February 1989.

Who fought over Kabul after the Soviets left

Najibullah's government outlasted the withdrawal by three years and was ousted in April 1992, after the break-up of the Soviet Union ended its aid. The mujahideen parties set up an interim government with a rotating presidency. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi held it for two months; Burhanuddin Rabbani took it and refused to hand it on when his two-year term expired. Over the next three years Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's rockets destroyed large parts of the capital.

The Taliban appeared in Kandahar in the autumn of 1994, recruiting from madrasa students, and won their first following by clearing the predatory militias off the trade roads. They took Herat in September 1995 and Kabul on 27 September 1996, the day after Ahmad Shah Massoud ordered a retreat, and Mazar-e Sharif in August 1998. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognised their Islamic Emirate. The UN seat stayed with the government they had driven out.

How the first emirate fell

The Taliban's edicts kept women from work and from school, and in March 2001 they destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. Massoud was assassinated on 9 September 2001, two days before the attacks on New York and Washington. When the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the United States and Britain began bombing, and Northern Alliance troops with US special forces opened a ground offensive in mid-November. The Taliban surrendered Kandahar, their last city, on 7 December 2001.

What the republic built between two emirates

Anti-Taliban groups meeting in Bonn named an interim administration, installed in December 2001. In June 2002 a Loya Jirga selected a transitional government, and in December 2003 another met to debate a draft constitution. It approved the text in January 2004 after three weeks: a directly elected president and a two-chamber legislature. Women voted in the presidential election of October 2004, and the legislative elections of 18 September 2005 were the first in more than thirty years.

The republic held elections and each one was disputed. In 2009 the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission threw out votes from more than 200 polling stations and cut Hamid Karzai's share to 49.7%, and his challenger withdrew from the run-off. The 2014 election went to a run-off, then an audit, and ended in an agreement of 21 September 2014 that made Ashraf Ghani president and created a chief executive's post for his opponent. The Wikipedia account records it as the first democratic transfer of power in the country's history.

The war went on beside the ballots. NATO took command of military operations across the whole country in 2006, and its troops peaked at nearly 150,000 in 2010 by Britannica's count. The combat mission ended in December 2014. On 29 February 2020 the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement for a withdrawal over 14 months. The Costs of War Project, as cited in the Wikipedia country article, counts 176,000 people killed in the conflict from 2001 to 2021, 46,319 of them civilians.

How the Taliban returned and who recognises them

The US withdrawal resumed in May 2021 and the Taliban advanced as the government's forces collapsed. They entered Kabul on 15 August 2021, and the president left the country. On 7 September they announced an interim government made up entirely of their own members, all of them men, and the Ministry of Women's Affairs was abolished. Secondary schools for girls were due to reopen in March 2022; the order was withdrawn shortly before, and as of 2026 UNESCO estimated that 2.4 million girls remained excluded from secondary education.

A loya jirga met from June to July 2022, the latest in a line that runs back to 1747. A decree of 15 August 2025 dropped the word interim and made the acting ministers permanent.

Recognition has come one state at a time. China accredited a Taliban diplomat as ambassador in December 2023 and said this was not recognition. Russia removed the Taliban from its list of terrorist organisations in April 2025 and on 3 July 2025 became the first state to recognise them formally as the government of Afghanistan. The UN has said recognition is impossible while the restrictions on female education and employment remain, and the Wikipedia country article, revised in September 2026, still recorded Russia as the only state to have recognised the Islamic Emirate. Pakistan accuses the Taliban of sheltering the Pakistani Taliban, which they deny, and the tension between the two led to direct war in February 2026.