To begin with, Afghanistan is a complex place; there are 20 major ethnic groups and more than 50 total, with over 30 languages spoken, although most also speak either Pashtun and/or Dari.
This reflects its geographical position at a cultural crossroads, as well as its mountainous topography, which isolates different ethnic groups from one another. In the 1700s, when Afghanistan was just forming as a nation, two of the world’s major powers of the time were advancing towards it from opposite directions. England was busy conquering India between 1757 and 1857, and Russia was spreading its control east and was on Afghanistan’s border by 1828. This overview will focus on first England’s and then America’s part in shaping modern Afghanistan.
One of the most lucrative products that England exported from its new colony India was opium.1
By 1770 Britain had a monopoly on opium production in India and saw to it that cultivation spread into Afghanistan as well (the boundary between the two was ill-defined until 1893). Anxious to protect their drug trade and concerned the Afghan king Dost Mohammad was too friendly with the Russians, the British sent an expeditionary force of 12,000 soldiers into Afghanistan in 1839 to dethrone him and set up their own hand-picked king, Shah Shoja. They built a garrison in Kabul to help prop him up. However the Afghan populace resisted this occupation, and in the winter of 1842 the British were forced into an attempted retreat back to the east. Within days of leaving Kabul 17,000 British soldiers and support staff lay slaughtered in the snow between Kabul and Jalalabad after a battle with Afghan forces.2
Dost Mohammad returned to power, but the Afghan government did not have the resources to protect its borders, and England soon took control of all Afghan territory between the Indus River and the Hindu Kush, including Baluchistan in 1859, denying Afghanistan access to the sea.3 Still worried about the Russians, England invaded Afghanistan again in 1878; overthrew the standing king and forced the new government to become a British protectorate. England considered slicing up Afghanistan according to what London had determined was the “scientific frontier” of its Indian empire, but settled for an Afghan government over which it retained control of the economy and all foreign policy.4
The British invasions embittered the Afghan people, creating a sense of xenophobia that created powerful resistance to Western-style reforms put forward by Afghan leaders in years to come.
In order to consolidate its gains, England created the Durand Line in 1893, an arbitrary 1500-mile border between “British” India and Afghanistan that made permanent its previous territorial gains and laid claim to the Northwest Frontier Provinces, long considered part of Afghanistan. This boundary was made “permanent” in a 1907 Anglo-Russian convention, without consulting the Afghan government.5
Taking these provinces divided the Pashtun people, who since time immemorial had been considered part of the Afghan homeland, between two separate nations, Afghanistan and India. This created a deep animosity among the Pashtuns that survives in full force today, 120 years later. In fact all Taliban are Pashtuns.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan afterward ever gained full control of the Northwest Provinces, and they later became the source of the Islamic radicalism that spawned both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is into the Northwest Provinces that majority of the American drone missiles are fired today. This antipathy has its genesis in the drawing of the Durand Line.
A strongly anti-colonial young King Amanullah ascended to the Afghan throne in 1919, and declared Afghanistan’s independence from Britain’s “protectorate” status in his inaugural speech. He attempted to regain the Pashtun lands east of the hated Durand line by organizing uprisings in the Northwest Provinces and supporting them with Afghan troops. Reacting to this provocation, the British attacked once again, embarking on the third Anglo-Afghan war in eighty years in June 1919. The British suffered early setbacks and responded by bombing Kabul and Jalalabad by air. Neither side had the stomach for a long war, and in August of 1919 a peace treaty was signed which granted Afghanistan full independence, but maintained the status quo of the Durand Line.