 AFGHANISTAN |
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Afghanistan's history as a country spans little more than two centuries, ... It was in Afghanistan that the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism began in the 6th century BC. Later, Buddhism spread west from India to the Bamiyan Valley, where it remained strong until the 10th century AD. The eastward sweep of Islam reached Afghanistan in the 7th century AD, and today the vast majority of Afghanis are Muslim. The rise of the Great Mogul empire lifted Afghanistan to heights of power. Babur had his capital in Kabul in 1512, but as the Moguls extended their power into India, Afghanistan went from being the centre of the empire to merely a peripheral part of it. In 1774, with European forces eroding the influence declining Moguls on the Indian subcontinent, the kingdom of Afghanistan was founded. Between 1839 and 1842, a British garrison was almost totally wiped out while retreating in the Khyber pass - out of 16,000 persons, only one man survived. The British managed to re-occupy Kabul and following local wars, from 1878 to 1880, Afghanistan agreed to become a protectorate of the British, In 1893 the British drew Afghanistan's eastern boundaries along the so-called Durand Line, neatly partitioning many Pathan tribes into what today is Pakistan. This has been a cause of Afghan-Pakistani strife for many years, and is the reason the Afghans refer to the western part of Pakistan as Pashtunistan. From WWI onwards Afghanistan's trade was tilted heavily towards the USSR. and a popular' revolution took place in 1979, and a Soviet puppet government was installed in Kabul, An Islamic jihad (holy war) was called and seven mujaheddin factions emerged. The Soviets soon found themselves mired in what later became known as 'Russia's Vietnam'. The war ground on through the 1980s. The CIA pumped up to US$700 million a year into the conflict. Soon the Soviet regime held only the cities, which were cut off as road convoys were ambushed and aircraft brought down with surface-to-air missiles. In the late 1980s Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring) allowed the Russian people to say what they wanted. ... They wanted out. |
30 provinces (velayat, singular - velayat); Badakhshan, Badghis, Baghlan, Balkh, Bamian, Farah, Faryab, Ghazni, Ghowr, Helmand, Herat, Jowzjan, Kabol, Kandahar, Kapisa, Konar, Kondoz, Laghman, Lowgar, Nangarhar, Nimruz, Oruzgan, Paktia, Paktika, Parvan, Samangan, Sar-e Pol, Takhar, Vardak, Zabol; note - there may be two new provinces of Nurestan (Nuristan) and Khowst
( THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 1-3 IN DARI )
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