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Facts of Afghanistan
Afghanistan, approximately the size of Texas, is bordered on the north by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, on the extreme northeast by China, on the east and south by Pakistan, and by Iran on the west. The country is split east to west by the Hindu Kush mountain range, rising in the east to heights of 24,000 ft (7,315 m). With the exception of the southwest, most of the country is covered by high snow-capped mountains and is traversed by deep valleys.
On Sept. 27, 1996, the ruling members of the Afghan government were displaced by members of the Islamic Taliban movement, who have declared themselves the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The UN has deferred a decision on the question of legitimacy. Mullah Mohammad Omar, known as the Emir al-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful), has served as the de facto leader since the Taliban came to power in 1996.
Darius I and Alexander the Great were the first to use Afghanistan as the gateway to India. Islamic conquerors arrived in the 7th century, and Genghis Khan and Tamerlane followed in the 13th and 14th centuries.
In the 19th century, Afghanistan became a battleground in the rivalry of imperial Britain and czarist Russia for control of Central Asia. Three Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839–42, 1878–80, and 1919) ended inconclusively. In 1893 Britain established an unofficial border, the Durand Line, separating Afghanistan from British India, and London granted full independence in 1919. Emir Amanullah founded an Afghan monarchy in 1926.
During the cold war, King Mohammed Zahir Shah developed close ties with the Soviet Union, accepting extensive economic assistance from Moscow. He was overthrown in 1973 by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, who was himself ousted in a 1978 coup by Noor Taraki. Taraki and his successor, Babrak Karmal, attempted to create a Marxist state. However, the new leadership was criticized by armed insurgents who bitterly opposed communism and hoped to create an Islamic state in Afghanistan. Fearing his government was on the verge of collapse, Karmal called for Soviet troops. Moscow responded with a full-scale invasion of the country in Dec. 1979.
The Soviets were met with fierce resistance from groups already energized by opposition to the Karmal government. The guerrilla forces, calling themselves mujahedeen, pledged a jihad, or holy war, to expel the invaders. Initially armed with outdated weapons, the mujahedeen became a focus of U.S. cold war strategy against the Soviet Union, and with Pakistan's help, Washington began funneling sophisticated arms to the resistance. Moscow's troops were soon bogged down in a no-win conflict with determined Afghan fighters. In April 1988 the USSR, U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan signed accords calling for an end to outside aid to the warring factions. In return, a Soviet withdrawal took place in Feb. 1989, but the pro-Soviet government of President Najibullah was left in the capital, Kabul.
By mid-April 1992 Najibullah was ousted as Islamic rebels advanced on the capital. Almost immediately, the various rebel groups began fighting one another for control. Amid the chaos of competing factions, a group calling itself the Taliban—consisting of Islamic students—seized control of Kabul in Sept. 1996. It imposed harsh fundamentalist laws, including stoning for adultery and severing hands for theft. Women were prohibited from work and school, and they were required to cover themselves in public from head to toe. By fall 1998 the Taliban controlled about 90% of the country.
On Aug. 20, 1998, U.S. cruise missiles struck a terrorism training complex in Afghanistan believed to have been financed by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Islamic radical sheltered by the Taliban. The U.S. asked for the deportation of bin Laden, whom they believed was involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998.
In 1999, the Taliban concentrated on defeating the forces of Ahmed Shah Masoud, their last significant hurdle in gaining complete control of Afghanistan.
The Taliban's scorched-earth tactics and human rights abuses have further isolated them from the international community. The country remains in dire poverty, with some 500,000 living in refugee camps. In July 2000 Mullah Omar banned opium cultivation; Afghanistan had once been the world's largest supplier of the drug.
In March 2001, despite worldwide protests, the Taliban destroyed several enormous Buddhist statues, dating from the second and fifth centuries A.D. The Taliban said they were destroying “graven images,” which were being worshiped in violation of Islam. In Sept. 2001, legendary guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Masoud was killed by Taliban suicide bombers, a seeming death knell for the anti-Taliban forces, a loosely connected group referred to as the Northern Alliance.
The Taliban is suspected of allowing terrorist organizations to run training camps in their territory, and since 1994 has provided refuge for Osama bin Laden and his radical al-Qaeda organization. The United Nations Security Council has passed two resolutions in 1999 and 2000 demanding that the Taliban cease their support for terrorism and hand over bin Laden for trial. Bin Laden is the primary suspect in Sept. 2001’s catastrophic bombing of New York's World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon.
On Oct. 7, after the Taliban repeatedly and defiantly refused to turn over bin Laden, the U.S. and its close ally Britain began air strikes against Afghan military installations and terrorist training camps. The immediate goal was to destroy Afghanistan's military resources and capture bin Laden and al-Qaeda members. Bombing continued on a daily basis. Five weeks later, with the help of U.S. air support, the Northern Alliance, the militia of mujahideen fighting against the Taliban, managed with breathtaking speed to take the key cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, the capital. On Oct. 7, when the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance controlled 10% of the country; by Nov. 13, it controlled 40%. By the end of Nov., only the cities of Kandahar and Kunduz had not surrendered to the Northern Alliance. On Dec. 7, the Taliban regime collapsed entirely when its troops fled their last stronghold, Kandahar. Their leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, remained at large. In the meantime, Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding somewhere in a cave complex in the mountains of Tora Bora.
The U.S. and the international community have vowed to assist Afghanistan in forming a stable government, and have pledged $25 billion for reconstruction. But complex political, ideological, and ethnic differences, deepened by decades of war, made the formation of a broad-based representative government challenging. The Northern Alliance, made up of minority ethnic groups (Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras) had no large popular base but was instrumental in routing the Taliban. Ex-king Zahir Shah, exiled since 1973 and now 87, has been suggested as a largely symbolic leader—he is a Pashtun, the ethnicity of half the population, including most of the Taliban. Pashtuns have historically dominated political leadership in Afghanistan.
Beginning Nov. 27, negotiations began in a UN-brokered meeting near Bonn, Germany, to discuss the formation of a new government, and on Dec. 5, Hamid Karzai was named to head an interim Afghan government. Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun from the city of Kandahar, is leader of the powerful 500,000-strong Populzai clan, which has supplied Afghanistan's kings since 1747. He was chosen partly based on his modern political skills and his traditional credentials. Karzai enjoys strong support from the west and has been embraced by a broad spectrum of factions in Afghanistan.