CHAPTER 7
Overview
D
uring the last two decades of the twentieth century, Afghanistan certainly would
have appeared on any list of the world’s most conflicted countries. Since a polit-
ical coup in 1973, Afghanistan has experienced almost unending political turmoil,
foreign occupation, and civil war. Something of a respite arrived early in the twenty-first
century, when a new, democratically elected government took office and obtained inter-
national support for reconstruction of the country. A resurgence of violence in 2006, how-
ever, raised new doubts about whether Afghanistan could escape the demons of its past.
From Alexander the Great in ancient times to the British and the Soviets more
recently, Afghanistan has been the target of empire builders, not for its natural
resources—of which it has none of significant commercial value—but because of its
location at the intersections of Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle
East. For a century, between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s, Afghanistan and the
rest of Central Asia stood at the center of the “Great Game,” a geopolitical contest
between Britain and czarist Russia. The Russians looked to expand to the south, in
part to reach warm-water ports, and the British wanted to protect India, the recently
acquired crown jewel of their empire. The Russians gained some control over most of
Central Asia—the area now consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turk-
menistan, and Uzbekistan—but the British held much of Afghanistan into the early
twentieth century, punctuated by three bloody Anglo-Afghan wars.
Despite, or perhaps partly because of, its geographic desirability, Afghanistan devel-
oped a well-deserved reputation as a place that most rulers, especially outsiders, found
difficult to control. In recent times, nearly everyone who tried to govern Afghanistan
ultimately came to grief. Only the local Pashtun kings, the Durrani, who created
Afghanistan as an independent country in the mid-eighteenth century, endured for
long. The last Durrani king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, ruled for forty years until ousted
by his cousin Mohammad Daoud in 1973. The deposed king lived a long life, how-
ever, and returned as the symbolic “father of the nation” in 2002 to bless the new
democratic government, headed by Hamid Karzai, a fellow Pashtun. Zahir Shah died
in 2007, at the age of ninety-two.565