A Brief History of Afghanistan

Interestingly enough, in the history of this small and extremely poor country the list of famous names abounds: Darius the Great, Alexander, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Babur, Marco Polo and many others. It is also interesting that those who came to Afghanistan to conquer this country rarely managed to hold on to their conquest for very long.

By 330 BC Alexander the Great has conquered the Persian Empire: on his way to invade Afghanistan. In Afghanistan he fell in love with Rokhsana (Roxanne) the daughter of a local chief; and they were married. When Alexander invaded India, he was gravely wounded and died at age 32. Not long afterwards, his wife and baby son were slain.

In 1219 two hundred thousand Mongols, lead by Genghis Khan, marched through Afghanistan to punish a chieftain. As they went, they destroyed everything in their path, changing forever a once fertile land into a desolate desert of dust and destruction.

Ahmad Shah DURRANI unified the Pashtun tribes and founded Afghanistan in 1747.

The country was like a buffer between the British and Russian empires until it won independence from national British control in 1919. A brief nod toward democracy ended in a 1973 coup and a 1978 Communist counter-coup.

The Soviet Union invaded in 1979 to support the weak Afghan Communist regime, touching off a long and destructive war.

The USSR withdrew in 1989 under pressure by internationally supported anti-Communist Mujahedin rebels.

Subsequently, a series of civil wars saw Kabul finally fall in 1996 to the Taliban, a ruthless, hard-line group that emerged in 1994 to end the country's civil war and anarchy. The merciless Taliban would not allow women to work or the girls to go to school.

Following the 9-11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, a US, Allied and anti-Taliban Northern Alliance military action toppled the Taliban for sheltering Osama BIN LADIN.

The UN-sponsored Bonn Conference in 2001 established a process for political reconstruction that included the adoption of a new constitution and a presidential election in 2004, and National Assembly elections in 2005.

On 7 December 2004, Hamid KARZAI became the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan.

The National Assembly was inaugurated on 19 December 2005.

Afghanistan is land-locked. There are limited natural fresh water resources; inadequate supplies of potable water; soil degradation; overgrazing; deforestation (much of the remaining forests are being cut down for fuel and building materials); desertification; air and water pollution. Cold, long winters and hot summers define its climate.