Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Tajikistan to the northeast, and China to the northeast and east. Occupying 652,864 square kilometers (252,072 sq mi) of land, the country is predominantly mountainous with plains in the north and the southwest, which are separated by the Hindu Kush mountain range. Kabul is the country's capital and largest city. Afghanistan's population is estimated to be between 35 and 50 million.
Human habitation in Afghanistan dates to the Middle Paleolithic era. The country's land has witnessed numerous military campaigns, including those by the Achaemenids, Alexander the Great, the Maurya Empire, Arab Muslims, the Mongols, the British, the Soviet Union, and a United States-led coalition. Afghanistan also served as the source from which the Greco-Bactrians and the Mughals, among others, rose to form major empires. Because of the various conquests and periods in both the Iranian and Indian cultural spheres, the area was a center for Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and later Islam. The modern state of Afghanistan began with the Durrani Empire in the 18th century under Ahmad Shah Durrani, although Dost Mohammad Khan is sometimes considered to be the founder of the first modern Afghan state. Afghanistan became a buffer state in the Great Game between the British Empire and the Russian Empire. From India, the British attempted to subjugate Afghanistan but were repelled in the First Anglo-Afghan War; the Second Anglo-Afghan War saw a British victory. Following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, Afghanistan became free of foreign political hegemony, and emerged as the independent Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1926; this monarchy lasted almost half a century.
Since the late 1970s, Afghanistan's history has been dominated by extensive warfare, including coups, invasions, insurgencies, and civil wars. This period of instability began in 1973 when King Zahir Shah was overthrown by his cousin Mohammad Daoud Khan, ending the monarchy and resulting in the establishment of the Republic of Afghanistan. Daoud Khan became the President of Afghanistan, ruling as an autocrat. In 1978 the conflict became a violent one when a communist revolution overthrew and assassinated Daoud Khan, establishing the socialist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Subsequent infighting prompted the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in 1979.
The mujahideen won against the Soviets in the Soviet–Afghan War, leading to the Soviets' withdrawal in 1989. The ensuing civil war overthrew the socialist republic and established the Islamic State of Afghanistan through the Peshawar Accord, which could not remain in force and resulted in a second civil war between mujahideen factions in 1992. The Taliban controlled most of the country by 1996, but their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan received little international recognition before its overthrow in the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban returned to power in 2021 after capturing Kabul, ending the 2001–2021 war. The Taliban government is widely unrecognized by the international community due to reported violations of human rights in Afghanistan, particularly regarding the treatment of women by the Taliban.
Afghanistan is rich in natural resources, including lithium, iron, zinc, and copper. It is the third largest producer of both saffron and cashmere. The country is a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and a founding member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Due to the effects of war in recent decades, the country has dealt with high levels of terrorism, poverty, and child malnutrition. Afghanistan remains among the world's least developed countries with its economic output per capita among the lowest of any country.
Some scholars suggest that the root name Afghān is derived from the Sanskrit word Aśvakan, which was the name used for ancient inhabitants of the Hindu Kush. Aśvakan literally means "horsemen", "horse breeders", or "cavalrymen" (from aśva, the Sanskrit and Avestan words for "horse").
Historically, the ethnonym Afghān was used to refer to ethnic Pashtuns in the Persian language. The Arabic and Persian form of the name, Afġān, was first attested in the 10th-century geography book Hudud al-'Alam. The last part of the name, "-stan", is a Persian suffix meaning "place of". Therefore, "Afghanistan" translates to "land of the Afghans", or "land of the Pashtuns" in a historical sense. According to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam:
The name Afghanistan (Afghānistān, land of the Afghans / Pashtuns, afāghina, sing. afghān) can be traced to the early eighth/fourteenth century, when it designated the easternmost part of the Kartid realm. This name was later used for certain regions in the Ṣafavid and Mughal empires that were inhabited by Afghans. While based on a state-supporting elite of Abdālī / Durrānī Afghans, the Sadūzāʾī Durrānī polity that came into being in 1160 / 1747 was not called Afghanistan in its own day. The name became a state designation only during the colonial intervention of the nineteenth century.
The term "Afghanistan" was officially used in 1855, when the British recognized Dost Mohammad Khan as king of Afghanistan.
Excavations of prehistoric sites suggest that humans were living in what is now Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, and that farming communities in the area were among the earliest in the world. An important site of early historical activities, many believe that Afghanistan compares to Egypt in the historical value of its archaeological sites. Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages have been found in Afghanistan. Urban civilization is believed to have begun as early as 3000 BCE, and the early city of Mundigak (near Kandahar in the south of the country) was a center of the Helmand culture. More recent findings established that the Indus Valley Civilization stretched up towards modern-day Afghanistan. An Indus Valley site has been found on the Oxus River at Shortugai in northern Afghanistan.
After 2000 BCE successive waves of semi-nomadic people from Central Asia began moving south into Afghanistan; among them were many Indo-European-speaking Indo-Iranians. These tribes later migrated further into South Asia, Western Asia, and toward Europe via the area north of the Caspian Sea. The region at the time was referred to as Ariana. By the middle of the 6th century BCE, the Achaemenids overthrew the Medes and incorporated Arachosia, Aria, and Bactria within its eastern boundaries. An inscription on the tombstone of Darius I of Persia mentions the Kabul Valley in a list of the 29 countries that he had conquered. The region of Arachosia, around Kandahar in modern-day southern Afghanistan, used to be primarily Zoroastrian and played a key role in the transfer of the Avesta to Persia and is thus considered by some to be the "second homeland of Zoroastrianism".
Alexander the Great and his Macedonian forces arrived in Afghanistan in 330 BCE after defeating Darius III of Persia a year earlier in the Battle of Gaugamela. Following Alexander's brief occupation, the successor state of the Seleucid Empire controlled the region until 305 BCE, when they gave much of it to the Maurya Empire as part of an alliance treaty. The Mauryans controlled the area south of the Hindu Kush until they were overthrown in about 185 BCE. Their decline began 60 years after Ashoka's rule ended, leading to the Hellenistic reconquest by the Greco-Bactrians. Much of it soon broke away and became part of the Indo-Greek Kingdom. They were defeated and expelled by the Indo-Scythians in the late 2nd century BCE. The Silk Road appeared during the first century BCE, and Afghanistan flourished with trade, with routes to China, India, Persia, and north to the cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva in present-day Uzbekistan. Goods and ideas were exchanged at this center point, such as Chinese silk, Persian silver and Roman gold, while the region of present Afghanistan was mining and trading lapis lazuli stones mainly from the Badakhshan region.