History of Afghanistan

Republic of Afghanistan

Daud’s Republic of Afghanistan was a self - declared republic in Central Asia etablished by Mohammed Daoud Khan in 1973 after a coup.
Daud beca,e Afghanistan’s first president in the Daoud Republic.
He is know for his attempts to modernise the country with help from the Soviet Union and the United States. 

During Daoud's presidency, relations with the communist countries abroad, especially the Soviet Union and the Afghan communists in the country deteriorated. The Soviet Union saw Daoud's shift to a more western friendly as dangerous, since Daoud was trying to distance himself and Afghanistan from the Soviet Union. He removed and kicked out Soviet military and economic advisers.
In 1976 Daoud established a seven year economic plan for the country. He started military training programs with India for example and started economic development talks with Iran. Daoud also turned his attention to the oil rich Middle Eastern nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait among others for financial assistance.
Daoud had achieved little of what he had set out to accomplish in 1978. The Afghan economy hadn't really made any real progess and the Afghan standard of living had not risen. Daoud had also garnered much criticism for his one-single party constitution in 1977 which alienated him from his political supporters. At this time Communist army officials were planning a military coup against Daoud's government.

On April 27, 1978 the military-communist coup started. The coup started with military troops from the military base at Kabul International Airport starting to move towards the center of the city. It took only 24 hours to consolodate power in the the capital. Daoud and most of his family was executed in the presidential palace in Kabul the following day

Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978-1979)

On 27 April 1978 the PDPA, led by Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Amin Taha overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud, who was killed along with his family. The uprising was known as the Great Saur Revolution ('Saur' corresponds to parts of 'April' and May). On 1 May, Taraki became President , Prime Minister and General Secretary of the PDPA. The country was then renamed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), and the PDPA regime lasted, in some form or another, until April 1992.
Once in power, the PDPA implemented a liberal and socialist agenda. It moved to replace religious and traditional laws with secular and Marxist ones. Men were obliged to cut their beards, women couldn't wear a burqa, and mosques were placed off limits. It carried out an ambitious land reform, waiving farmers' debts countrywide and banning usury.
The government also made a number of decrees on women’s rights, banning forced marriages, giving state recognition of women’s right to vote, and introducing women to political life. A prominent example was Anahita Ratebzad, who was a major Marxist leader and a member of the Revolutionary Council. Ratebzad wrote the famous New Kabul Times editorial, May 28, 1978 which declared:
“Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country .... Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention.”

The PDPA invited the Soviet Union to assist in modernizing its economic infrastructure (predominantly its exploration and mining of rare minerals and natural gas). The USSR also sent contractors to build roads, hospitals and schools and to drill water wells; they also trained and equipped the Afghan army. Upon the PDPA's ascension to power, and the establishment of the DRA, the Soviet Union promised monetary aid amounting to at least $1.262 billion and Soviet troops withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1988.

The majority of people in the cities including Kabul either welcomed or were ambivalent to these policies. However, the secular nature of the government made it unpopular with conservative Afghans in the villages and the countryside, who favoured traditionalist 'Islamic' restrictions on women's rights and in daily life. Many groups - partly led by members of the traditional establishment who lost their privileges in the land reform - were formed in an attempt to reverse dependence on the Soviet Union, some resorting to violence and sabotage of the country's industry and infrastructure. The government responded with heavy-handed military reprisals and arrested, exiled and executed many Mujahideen "holy Muslim warriors". The Mujahideen belonged to various different factions, but all shared, to varying degrees, a similarly conservative 'Islamic' ideology.
The U.S. saw the situation as a prime opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government (under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) began to covertly fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), with the intention of provoking Soviet intervention, (according to Brzezinski).
In March 1979 Hafizullah Amin took over as prime minister, retaining the position of field marshal and becoming vice-president of the Supreme Defence Council. Taraki remained President and in control of the Army. On 14 September, Amin overthrew Taraki, who died or was killed.

Soviet intervention (1979-1992)
In 1979, with the Afghan army unable to cope with the large number of violent incidents, the Soviet Union sent troops to crush the uprising, support the government. On December 25, 1979, the Soviet army entered Kabul.

This was the starting point of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which ended only in 1989 with a full withdrawal of Soviet troops under the Geneva Accords reached in 1988 between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For over nine years, the Soviet Army conducted military operations against the Afghan mujahideen rebels. The American CIA, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia assisted in the financing of the resistance because of their anti-communist stance.
Among the foreign participants in the war was Osama bin Laden, whose Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) (Office of Order) organization trained a small number of mujahideen and provided some arms and funds to fight the Soviets. Bin Laden played only a limited part in this conflict and, in 1988, he broke away from the MAK with some of its more militant members to form Al-Qaida, in order to expand the anti-Soviet resistance effort into a worldwide Islamic fundamentalist movement.

The Soviet Union withdrew its troops in February 1989, but continued to aid the government, led by Mohammed Najibullah. Massive amounts of aid from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to the mujahideen also continued.

1990
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Najibullah government was overthrown on April 18, 1992 when Abdul Rashid Dostum mutinied, and allied himself with Ahmed Shah Massoud, to take control of Kabul and declare the Islamic State of Afghanistan. When the victorious mujahideen entered Kabul to assume control over the city and the central government, internecine fighting began between the various militias, which had coexisted only uneasily during the Soviet occupation. With the demise of their common enemy, the militias' ethnic, clan, religious, and personality differences surfaced, and civil war continued.
An interim Islamic Jihad Council was put in place, first led by Sibghatullah Mojadeddi for two months, then by Burhanuddin Rabbani. In reaction to the anarchy in the country, and the lack of Pashtun representation in the Kabul government, the Taliban, a movement of religious scholars and former mujahideen, emerged from the southern province of Kandahar. These Taliban took control of approximately 95% of the country by the end of 2000, limiting the opposition mostly to a small corner in the northeast. The opposition formed the Afghan Northern Alliance, which continued to receive diplomatic recognition in the United Nations as the government of Afghanistan.

2000
In response to the Taliban's refusal to hand over Al Qaida operatives without the provision of tangible evidence linking Al Qaida to the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Taliban's refusal to assist the U.S. in prosecuting Al Qaida, the United States and its coalition allies launched an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban government.
Sponsored by the UN, Afghan factions met in Bonn, Germany and chose a 30 member interim authority led by Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from Kandahar. After governing for 6 months, former King Zahir Shah convened a Loya Jirga, which elected Karzai as president and gave him authority to govern for two more years. Then, on October 9, 2004, Karzai was elected as president of Afghanistan in the country's first ever presidential election.