Timur’s fourth son, Shah Rukh, built shrines, mosques and medressas throughout Khorasan, from Mashhad, in modern-day Iran, to Balkh. Herat continued to prosper under Sultan Hussain Baykara (died 1506), producing such great Central Asian poets as Jami and Alisher Navoi.

The rise of the great Mughal empire again lifted Afghanistan to heights of power. Babur had his capital in Kabul in 1512, but as the Mughals extended their power into India, Afghanistan went from being the centre of the empire to merely a peripheral part of it.

The 19th century was a period of often comic-book confrontation with the British, who were afraid of the effects of unruly neighbours on their great Indian colony. The rise of tensions and the weakness of the Afghan kingdom resulted in some remarkably unsuccessful and bloody wars being fought on extremely flimsy pretexts. The first, between 1839 and 1842, saw the British garrison almost totally wiped out while retreating to the Khyber Pass – out of 15,000 persons, only one man survived. The British managed to reoccupy Kabul and carried out a bit of razing and burning to show who was boss, but this again was short-lived.

Following another short war, from 1878 to 1880, Afghanistan agreed to become more or less a protectorate of the British, happily accepted an annual payment to keep things in shape and agreed to a British resident in Kabul. No sooner had the diplomatic mission been installed in Kabul, however, than all its members were murdered. This time the British decided to keep control over Afghanistan’s external affairs, but to leave the internal matters strictly to the Afghans themselves.

In 1893 the British drew Afghanistan’s eastern boundaries along the so-called Durand Line, neatly partitioning many Pashtun 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.

Modern History
From WWI onwards Afghanistan’s trade was tilted heavily towards the USSR and Soviet foreign aid to Afghanistan far outweighed Western assistance. Turkish-style reforms failed and the country remained precariously unstable for decades. The postwar kingdom ended in 1973 when the king was neatly overthrown while away in Europe. His ‘progressive’ successors were hardly any more progressive than he had been, but the situation under them was far better than that which was to follow.

After the bloody 1978 pro-Moscow revolution, Afghanistan rapidly deteriorated. A second revolution brought in a government that leaned heavily on Soviet support and the country lurched towards anarchy. The USSR decided that enough was enough. Another ‘popular’ revolution took place in 1979, and a Soviet puppet government was installed in Kabul, with what looked like half the Soviet army lined up behind it.

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. Afghan tribal warriors remained disorganised but determined; the CIA pumped up to US$700 million a year into the conflict in one of the largest covert operations in history. Soon the Soviet regime held only the cities and in the late 1980s Gorbachov finally pulled the Russians out.

The war had cost the Soviets over 15,000 men, and contributed significantly to the collapse of the USSR. More than a million Afghans lay dead and 6.2 million people, over half the world’s refugee population, had fled the country.

The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 weakened the government of President Najibullah and in 1992 Najibullah was ousted; a week later fighting erupted between rival mujaheddin factions in Kabul. An interim president was installed and replaced two months later by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a founder of the country’s Islamic political movement, backed by mujaheddin commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Source from: www.lonelyplanet.com