How did the insurgency against the Afghan government and international presence in Afghanistan start?
The Taliban were utterly defeated in 2001 and dispersed among remote villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan; some even sought refuge in Iran. Attempts to negotiate deals with some of the...
How do people in Afghanistan identify themselves?
To understand a society, it is important to understand the identities of its people; it is equally important to remember that there is no direct causality from identity to belief or action in politics, culture, economics, or...
Through much of the twentieth century Afghanistan seemed to be a distant concern in the United States. “Afghanistanism” used to be journalistic shorthand for stories about distant places, which editors dismissed as irrelevant. Afghanistan’s territory does include some remote, barely accessible regions, but it...
What is the origin of Afghanistan?
The place name “Afghanistan” occurs in the tenth-century Persian geography Hudud al-’Alam (Frontiers of the world), referring to the region that we would now call the AfghanistanPakistan border area. Much of today’s Afghanistan, including Kabul, Balkh,...
The 2014–19 term of President Ghani and the National Unity Government (NUG) overlapped with that of President Donald Trump. Trump struggled to reconcile his America-first impulses with the global hegemonic national security commitments and ideologies of Republican Party elites from whom he originally recruited...
How did narcotics become the largest industry in Afghanistan?
When the war started in late 1970s, most of the opium and heroin production in the world was in the Golden Triangle—Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos—with smaller levels of production in the Golden Crescent—Pakistan, Iran, and...
What happened in the run-up to 9/11?
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of al-Qaeda, returned to Afghanistan from Khartoum, Sudan, in May 1996. There they joined a small but growing group of international radical Islamists belonging to different groups. Uzbeks were...
What set off the 1992–96 civil war?
Various actors maneuvered to fill the power vacuum in Kabul left by the Soviet withdrawal. After the failure of the offensive on Jalalabad, the US moved away from the Pakistani position. It cut off aid to Hikmatyar...
How did the war start?
Since 2001, the war in Afghanistan has entered a new phase, but it began on April 27, 1978, when military officers belonging to the PDPA overthrew President Daud and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). This event marked...
What was the economic and social condition of Afghanistan at the start of the interim government?
When Hamid Karzai became the chairman of the interim government, Afghanistan was so poor and ungoverned that it could not produce data about its economic and social conditions....
