a 2026 analysis of Afghanistan’s war history — Cold War origins, Taliban rule, and UCDP-tracked casualties through early 2026
Afghanistan war history spans four decades of continuous organized armed conflict. In 2024, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan faced resistance from the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF) and attacks by Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K) on civilian sites in Kabul. The Afghanistan civil war persisted just above the 25-death threshold, while fighting also escalated along the Durand Line against Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
In 2025, violence in Afghanistan remained at comparatively low levels, with government forces fighting the Islamic State (IS) and the National Resistance Front (NRF), alongside border clashes with Pakistan. UCDP recorded 332 battle-related deaths, including 124 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Afghanistan’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Afghanistan is a landlocked, mountainous country at the meeting point of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Iranian plateau, split down its middle by the Hindu Kush, a great mountain range that funnels travel and trade into a handful of narrow valleys and passes. For more than two thousand years, armies, traders, and pilgrims moving between Persia, India, and China have had to cross this terrain, and the peoples who settled it — chiefly the Pashtun, who form the largest group, alongside Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, and smaller communities — did so in valleys separated by ranges that made durable central government difficult to build and easy to escape. Historians date the founding of a recognisably Afghan state to 1747, when a Pashtun cavalry commander named Ahmad Shah Durrani was chosen king at a tribal council in Kandahar and built the Durrani Empire, the polity from which the modern country descends; historians remember him as the father of the nation. The consensus reading treats Afghanistan’s history since as a recurring cycle: a strong ruler unifies the fractured valleys under Kabul or Kandahar, the union weakens or is broken by outside intervention, and the country fragments again before the cycle restarts.
Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010); Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (2004; 2nd ed. 2012).
Four thresholds reshaped the country’s structure. The first was 1747, when Ahmad Shah Durrani’s election as king in Kandahar created, for the first time, a single Pashtun-led state stretching from Persia toward India — the template every later Afghan government has claimed to continue. The second was the nineteenth-century contest historians call the “Great Game“, in which the British and Russian empires, each fearing the other’s advance toward India, turned Afghanistan into a buffer state: Britain fought two wars to control it (1839–42 and 1878–80) without annexing it outright, and in 1893 a British official, Sir Mortimer Durand, and the Afghan ruler agreed the border later named for him, the Durand Line, which still separates Afghanistan from Pakistan and cuts directly through Pashtun territory. The third was the Saur Revolution of 1978, a communist coup that provoked the Soviet invasion of 1979 and more than four decades of near-continuous war — anti-Soviet insurgency, civil war, Taliban rule, American invasion, and Taliban return. The fourth was 2021, when the United States withdrew and the Taliban retook Kabul, closing one cycle of foreign intervention and opening the country’s present, unresolved chapter.
Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010); Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (1995; 2nd ed. 2002).
In the mainstream account the state came first, and the nation has never fully caught up. Ahmad Shah Durrani built a state in 1747 by conquest and tribal alliance, centred on his own Pashtun confederation and ruling non-Pashtun regions — Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek — as subordinate territories rather than equal partners. The country’s very name reflects this: “Afghan” originally meant, specifically, “Pashtun”, and only in the twentieth century did “Afghanistan” come to be used, somewhat awkwardly, for all its peoples regardless of ethnicity. Successive rulers tried to build a wider “Afghan” national identity on top of this Pashtun-founded state — through shared Islam, a national army, and, after 1964, a constitution — but never fully persuaded non-Pashtun citizens that the nation and the Pashtun-led state were the same thing. Ethnic minorities today sometimes still describe themselves as “Afghanistani” (nationality) rather than “Afghan” (ethnicity), a small but telling protest. Here, as in few other countries, the state’s founding and the nation’s formation are separated by more than two centuries, and by an argument that has never fully closed.
Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan (2004); Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010).
The long-term force mainstream historians identify is Afghanistan’s repeated use, by neighbours and great powers alike, as a buffer and battleground whose internal cohesion has mattered less to outsiders than its strategic position. The Durrani state was itself born from the collapse of two neighbouring empires, Safavid Persia and Mughal India, and every century since has featured Afghanistan being fought over, propped up, or fought through by more powerful neighbours — British India, Tsarist and then Soviet Russia, Pakistan, and the United States — for reasons of geography rather than a considered interest in what happened inside its borders. What best explains the country’s trajectory, on this reading, is a state that has spent most of its existence serving other powers’ strategic purposes, and a governing centre in Kabul or Kandahar that has correspondingly never been left alone long enough to consolidate uncontested authority over its own mountains.
Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (1995; 2nd ed. 2002); Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan (2004).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading challenges the popular image of Afghanistan as the eternal “graveyard of empires“, a country no outside power has ever been able to hold. The scholar Nivi Manchanda has traced how that specific phrase, and the mythology behind it, crystallised out of one event — the destruction of a retreating British army near Kabul in 1842 — and was then projected backward across the whole of Afghan history as though it had always been true. In fact, on this reading, large parts of Afghan territory were successfully ruled for long stretches by the Persian Achaemenid empire, by Alexander the Great’s Greek successor states, by the Kushan empire, by Arab caliphates, by the Mongols, and by the Mughals; empires arrived, stayed, taxed, and were absorbed as often as they were expelled. The “graveyard” image, on this account, reveals less about what actually happened in Afghanistan across two millennia than about how one nineteenth-century British catastrophe was later turned into a timeless national character — Afghans as innately unconquerable — that flattered outside observers’ sense of the country’s exceptional strangeness rather than its ordinary, mixed history of conquest and accommodation. The counter-case is not empty, though: three empires in two centuries — British, Soviet, American — did in fact leave defeated, and how far that modern record redeems the older myth is still argued over.
Nivi Manchanda, “The Graveyard of Empires: Haunting, Amnesia and Afghanistan’s Construction as a Burial Site,” Middle East Critique (2019); Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (2020).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same sequence the mainstream uses — the Durrani founding of 1747, the nineteenth-century Anglo-Russian rivalry known as the Great Game, the Durand Line a British official drew in 1893 between Afghanistan and British India, and the wars since 1978 — but rereads several of these turns as acts of construction rather than natural unfolding. The Durrani state of 1747 is read less as a nation’s founding and more as one Pashtun tribal confederation’s conquest of others, precarious and contested from the outset by rival Pashtun claimants and unconsenting non-Pashtun regions. The Durand Line of 1893 is treated not merely as a border but as an act of category-making: colonial writers such as Mountstuart Elphinstone and, later, Olaf Caroe described Afghan society as fundamentally “tribal”, a term that hardened fluid, shifting local loyalties into fixed ethnic and clan boxes convenient for indirect colonial rule — categories Afghan and outside governments alike have used ever since. The economic historian Shah Mahmoud Hanifi adds a material dimension: nineteenth-century Afghanistan was not naturally poor or cut off, but was economically integrated with British India until colonial tariff and trade policy deliberately redirected commerce away from Afghan routes, manufacturing the isolation later observers treated as innate. Because it reweighs accepted events rather than inventing new ones, this is serious scholarship — though how much of Afghan “tribalism” and “isolation” was invented, as against pre-existing and merely sharpened, remains genuinely argued over.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (2011); Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan (2020).
In this reading, “Afghanistan” as a bounded nation is substantially a product of nineteenth-century imperial diplomacy rather than organic self-determination. The country’s borders were drawn not by its own peoples but by British and Russian negotiators anxious to fix a buffer between their empires; the 1893 Durand Line, in particular, split the Pashtun population in two without consulting them, creating the unresolved “Pashtunistan” question that still troubles Afghanistan’s relations with Pakistan today. The ethnic and tribal categories used to describe who belonged inside this new state — Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, and the many subdivisions beneath them — were themselves stabilised through colonial-era censuses, surveys, and ethnographic writing that need not have drawn the lines exactly where they did. On this account the Afghan nation was not gradually formed from the inside by a people or an idea and only afterwards fitted into a state; the state’s outer shape was substantially decided abroad first, and the nation has been negotiating what to make of that shape ever since.
Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan (2020); Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (2011).
The force this school foregrounds is not Afghan exceptionalism but outside powers’ authorship of the very categories through which Afghanistan has been understood and ruled. Colonial administrators needed a legible, governable Afghanistan and produced one on paper — tribal, buffer, ungovernable — whether or not it matched the shifting reality on the ground; those categories then shaped how the British, the Soviets, and later the Americans each planned their interventions, and shaped how Afghan rulers themselves governed, often reinforcing exactly the fragmented, tribal social order the categories assumed already existed. On this reading the deepest driver of Afghanistan’s modern history is not an ancient, unconquerable warrior culture but a long feedback loop between imperial knowledge and Afghan reality, in which outside description has repeatedly become self-fulfilling policy. How tight that loop really was remains disputed: mainstream scholars answer that valleys, tribes, and jihads were shaping Afghan politics long before any colonial surveyor described them.
Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan (2020); Nivi Manchanda, “The Graveyard of Empires” (2019).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through faith and custom, Afghanistan is above all a Muslim society in which religion has supplied a shared identity that cuts across the country’s ethnic divisions more completely than any political idea of “Afghan” nationhood has managed. The great majority of Afghans are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, one of the four traditional schools of Islamic religious law; a substantial minority, concentrated among the Hazara people of the central highlands, are Shia. Alongside formal religion runs Pashtunwali, an unwritten code of honour, hospitality, and revenge that governs much of Pashtun social life and has often carried more everyday authority than the laws of Kabul. Because Islam has repeatedly supplied the language in which Afghans have resisted outside rule — declared as jihad against the British in the nineteenth century and against the Soviets in the twentieth — cultural historians read religious identity, more than the state, as the thread that has held Afghan society together across its ethnic and geographic fractures.
Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (1986); Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban (2017), free open access.
Read through religion and custom, the turning points are moments when faith and political power collided. Islam reached the region in the seventh to ninth centuries, converting a Zoroastrian and Buddhist population and binding its diverse peoples into a shared religious framework that has outlasted every dynasty since. In 1929 King Amanullah‘s attempt at rapid, Western-style modernisation — unveiling women, opening secular schools, curbing clerical authority — provoked a religious and tribal backlash severe enough to drive him from the throne within months, an early demonstration that no Afghan government could reform faster than its clergy and tribal elders would tolerate. The Soviet invasion of 1979 turned resistance explicitly religious: the mujahideen, meaning those who wage jihad, drew their legitimacy and much of their funding from framing the war as a defence of Islam, and the commanders who emerged from it shaped Afghan politics for decades afterward. The rule of the Taliban — a movement of religious students, mostly Pashtun, that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s — first from 1996 and again since 2021, represents the fullest fusion yet of religious authority with the state, governing explicitly through their own strict reading of Islamic law rather than through a constitution.
Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (1986); Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam (2017).
On this reading, shared religion supplied a sense of common identity among Afghans long before, and more durably than, any shared political nationhood. To be Muslim bound Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek together in a way that language and ethnicity never did; village life across the country centred on the mosque, and religious scholars carried authority independent of whichever ruler sat in Kabul. But this same religious bond has also divided as much as it unites: the Sunni-Shia split leaves the Hazara minority vulnerable to persecution by both state and non-state actors, and different regions favour different schools and Sufi orders, devotional traditions of Islamic mysticism organised around spiritual teachers. The state that formed after 1747 therefore inherited a population already unified by faith but never by a single interpretation of it, and modern Afghan governments — monarchist, communist, mujahideen, or Taliban — have all had to define their legitimacy in relation to religious authority rather than simply legislate over it.
Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (1986); Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam (2017).
The enduring force, on this reading, is the persistent authority of religious and customary law as sources of legitimacy that rival, and often outlast, the modern Afghan state. Every government since 1929 has learned the same lesson Amanullah learned the hard way: reform pushed faster than clerics and tribal elders will accept invites collapse. Afghan political history can accordingly be read as a long contest over who is permitted to speak for Islam and custom — kings, secular reformers, communists, mujahideen commanders, and the Taliban have each, in turn, claimed that authority, and those who have claimed it most credibly, not simply those with the strongest army, have generally governed longest. What best explains Afghanistan’s trajectory, on this account, is this recurring struggle over religious and moral legitimacy, which no purely military or administrative victory has ever been able to bypass.
Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (1986); Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam (2017).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
Afghanistan’s shape on the map explains much of its history. Landlocked and split by the Hindu Kush, a mountain range whose highest peaks exceed 7,000 metres, the country sits directly across the routes historically used to move goods and people between Persia, Central Asia, India, and China — a network later romanticised as the “Silk Road“. For centuries this position brought wealth rather than poverty: cities such as Balkh and Herat, minor and war-scarred today, were once among the great cosmopolitan centres of the medieval world, their scholars contributing to a broader Central Asian golden age of science and learning between roughly 800 and 1100. On this reading, geography made Afghanistan valuable long before it made it strategic in the modern military sense — a mountain-fragmented territory that could tax passing trade even where it struggled to tax its own scattered valleys.
S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (2013); Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (2011).
Traced through resources, trade, and terrain, the turning points follow the fortunes of the overland routes themselves. Between roughly 800 and 1100, Silk Road trade running through Balkh, Herat, and Kandahar financed a genuine flowering of cities, scholarship, and craft, a wealth later generations barely recalled. From the sixteenth century onward, European sea routes to India and China progressively bypassed Central Asia’s overland trade, and Afghan cities that had lived on caravan traffic entered a long economic decline centuries before any modern war touched them. The nineteenth-century Great Game then revalued Afghanistan for entirely different, geopolitical reasons — not as a trade corridor but as a barrier — and British colonial tariff policy, according to Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, deliberately cut the remaining commercial ties binding Kabul, Kandahar, and Peshawar (now across the border in Pakistan) into a single market, completing the country’s transformation from a wealthy crossroads into what outsiders came to see as a poor, isolated frontier. The prolonged wars after 1979 then wrecked what agricultural and commercial economy remained, pushing much of the countryside toward opium poppy cultivation, a crop suited precisely to fragmented, insecure, hard-to-govern terrain.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (2011); S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment (2013).
On this reading, geography set firm limits on how much of a single state Afghanistan’s rulers could ever really build. Mountains and deserts divided the country into valleys and oases that could sustain local power bases but made administering them from one centre exceptionally costly; the state Ahmad Shah Durrani founded in 1747 was, in economic terms, less a unified administration than a coalition of these geographically separate power centres, held together by tribute, marriage alliance, and the shared profits of trade and, later, subsidy from outside powers, rather than by a dense bureaucracy reaching into every valley. Where the mainstream account treats weak central authority as a political or cultural failing, the economic-geographic account treats it as close to a physical inevitability: no pre-industrial or early-industrial state could cheaply project power across terrain this broken, and Afghanistan’s rulers built the kind of loose, negotiated state its landscape allowed rather than the kind its neighbours might have preferred.
S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment (2013); Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (2011).
The long-term force this lens identifies is geography’s double edge: a landlocked, mountain-fragmented territory astride major trade and invasion corridors, which generated wealth and cosmopolitan learning while overland trade flourished, and which became a poor, contested frontier once trade shifted to the sea and outside powers found it valuable chiefly as a buffer rather than a market. The same mountains that once funnelled profitable caravan traffic through Balkh and Kandahar later made the country cheap to fight over and expensive to govern, sheltering smugglers and insurgents alike from whichever power currently held Kabul. What best explains Afghanistan’s long-run trajectory, on this account, is neither an unconquerable national character nor a single colonial invention, but a landscape that has repeatedly decided, more than any ruler has, how much wealth, and how much control, was ever actually available to be had.
S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment (2013); Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan (2011).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The status of “tribalism” is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat Afghanistan’s fragmented, locally rooted social order as old and organic — the natural politics of a mountain country that every state has had to work around. The revisionist reading treats much of that same picture as manufactured: categories nineteenth-century colonial administrators imposed on more fluid loyalties, which everyone since, Afghans included, has inherited as though they had always been there. Same society, opposite origins: ancient inheritance, or imperial paperwork.
Afghanistan’s reputation for defeating foreign powers divides the lenses just as cleanly. The consensus account roots it in terrain, the cultural account in the depth of religious and tribal resistance, and the economic-geographic account treats it more coolly, as the predictable arithmetic of supply lines in high mountains. The revisionist account denies the premise itself: the “unconquerable” reputation is a myth built from one British disaster in 1842 and projected backward across two thousand years in which empires held Afghan territory as often as they lost it.
On one point all four agree: the Afghan state has never held durable, uncontested authority over the whole of its territory. They part on why — a state built by conquest that outran its nation; categories of tribe and buffer authored abroad and treated as natural; religious and customary legitimacy that has always outcompeted the state’s own; or a landscape that priced deep central control out of reach from the start.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010); Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (2004; 2nd ed. 2012); Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (1995; 2nd ed. 2002); Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (2020) and “The Graveyard of Empires: Haunting, Amnesia and Afghanistan’s Construction as a Burial Site,” Middle East Critique (2019); Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (2011); Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (1986); Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban (2017); S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (2013). No thesis presented here rests on a single contested framework in the way Scott’s “Zomia” or Furnivall’s “plural society” do elsewhere in this series; the revisionist claims about the colonial construction of “tribe” and of Afghan economic isolation (Manchanda, Hanifi) are, however, themselves actively debated within Afghan studies and are presented as such throughout.
Afghanistan’s history remains violently and politically unresolved. The Taliban, an Islamist movement rooted in the Pashtun south, retook power in August 2021 as the United States withdrew after twenty years of war, and now governs as the self-declared Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the supreme leadership of Hibatullah Akhundzada, who rules from Kandahar alongside more pragmatic ministers based in Kabul; reporting through 2026 describes real friction between these two centres of Taliban power. No government in the world, including other Muslim-majority states, formally recognises the Islamic Emirate as Afghanistan’s legitimate authority. Since the Taliban’s return, women have been barred from secondary and higher education and from most employment, and public punishments including lashings have continued; the United Nations recorded 414 cases of corporal punishment in 2026 alone. Relations with Pakistan collapsed into open cross-border fighting in early 2026, killing more than 370 Afghan civilians in the first three months of the year before a fragile ceasefire was negotiated in China that April, and both Al-Qaeda and the rival Islamic State–Khorasan Province continue to operate from Afghan territory despite Taliban promises to prevent it. The country’s oldest problem — a centre in Kabul or Kandahar struggling to hold a fractured, contested whole — remains, at the time of writing, entirely unresolved.
Endpoint facts verified against 2026 reporting (Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, Military.com).
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (2010); Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (2004; 2nd ed. 2012); Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (1995; 2nd ed. 2002); Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (2020) and “The Graveyard of Empires: Haunting, Amnesia and Afghanistan’s Construction as a Burial Site,” Middle East Critique (2019); Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (2011); Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (1986); Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban (2017); S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (2013). No thesis presented here rests on a single contested framework in the way Scott’s “Zomia” or Furnivall’s “plural society” do elsewhere in this series; the revisionist claims about the colonial construction of “tribe” and of Afghan economic isolation (Manchanda, Hanifi) are, however, themselves actively debated within Afghan studies and are presented as such throughout.
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Afghanistan was founded in the 1700s and later became a “buffer” between the British and Russian Empires, gaining full independence in 1919. Political upheaval then grew: a 1973 coup ended the monarchy, and a 1978 coup helped trigger the 1979 Soviet invasion. After Soviet withdrawal, rival armed groups fought for power. The Taleban seized Kabul in 1996, were ousted in 2001, and later returned.
Since 15 August 2021, the Taleban have controlled Kabul and act as Afghanistan’s government, while armed resistance groups such as the National Resistance Front (NRF) and Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF) continue attacks, often through ambushes and mines. Another major threat is Islamic State’s Khorasan branch (IS), which fights the Taleban and increasingly targets civilians, including Shia Muslims and Hazaras. In 2024, border tensions with Pakistan over the Durand Line also escalated.
According to UCDP, overall fighting has dropped sharply since 2021, and in 2024 the conflict over government was low-intensity, just above the 25-death threshold used to record armed conflict. However, reports describe executions and other abuses linked to campaigns against suspected opponents. IS attacks on “soft targets” in places like Kabul add fear and instability. Internationally, Afghanistan matters because of cross-border tensions, terrorism risks, and the Taleban’s lack of diplomatic recognition.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Afghanistan’s central location positions it as a vital bridge linking Central Asia’s energy resources with South Asia’s markets, often termed the ‘Heart of Asia’ or Eurasian crossroads. Under Taliban rule, regional states like Uzbekistan increasingly view it as integral to Central Asia due to shared geography, history, and infrastructure. Projects like the TAPI pipeline highlight its potential to channel Turkmen gas southward, bypassing rivals like Iran and Russia. Taliban pragmatism emphasizes economic integration, fostering stability through transit fees and countering extremism, despite persistent security challenges from terrorist groups.
Sources: The Diplomat, Council on Foreign Relations, Asian Institute of Research
The Taliban pursues a pragmatic foreign policy centered on neutrality, non-interference, and sovereignty, prioritizing diplomatic engagement over ideological export. It has shifted from bilateral ties to trilateral formats, such as the May 2025 China-Pakistan-Afghanistan meeting on security and infrastructure, and UN Doha summits since June 2024. Central Asian states are key priorities, with Afghanistan hosting further trilateral talks in August 2025. This strategy seeks legitimacy, economic gains, and regional integration while addressing neighbor concerns over terrorism, without formal broad recognition except from Russia.
Sources: The Diplomat, Council on Foreign Relations
Afghanistan remains a hotspot in US-China-Russia rivalry due to its strategic position and resources like copper and lithium. Post-2021 Taliban takeover, China and Russia have accredited diplomats and pursued economic ties, with Russia granting formal recognition in July 2025. Neighbors like Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asian states balance stability interests against influence-seeking, wary of unrest or extremism spillover. The Taliban navigates this by emphasizing economic pragmatism, limiting Western roles while engaging multilaterally to enhance legitimacy amid unresolved security issues.
Sources: Council on Foreign Relations, Munich Security Conference, The Diplomat
Ahmad Shah DURRANI unified the Pashtun tribes and founded Afghanistan in 1747. The country later served as a buffer between the British and Russian Empires.
Afghanistan won independence from notional British control in 1919.
A brief experiment in increased democracy ended in a 1973 coup and a 1978 communist countercoup. The Soviet Union invaded in 1979 to support the tottering Afghan communist regime, triggering a long and destructive war.
Internationally supported anti-communist mujahidin rebels forced the USSR to withdraw in 1989. Subsequent civil wars culminated in the fall of Kabul in 1996 to the Taliban, a hardline Pakistani-sponsored movement.
Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, US and Allied military action toppled the Taliban for sheltering Usama BIN LADIN. A UN-sponsored Bonn Conference in 2001 established a process for political reconstruction, including a new constitution, a presidential election in 2004, and National Assembly elections in 2005.
In 2004, Hamid KARZAI became the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan and was reelected in 2009. Ashraf Ghani AHMADZAI succeeded him in 2014 after a disputed election, while the Taliban conducted an insurgency for two decades against the Afghan Government and forces from the United States and other countries. In February 2020, the US and the Taliban signed an agreement that led to the withdrawal of international forces in exchange for counterterrorism commitments and other assurances, and the Taliban took over Afghanistan on 15 August 2021.
The Taliban established an all-male interim leadership structure dominated by Pashtun clerics under the leadership of Haivatrullah AKHUNDZADA. The Taliban issued numerous edicts constraining women’s mobility, ability to study and work, and access to education beyond primary school.
To date, no country has recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.
According to UCDP conflict dyads, Afghanistan is affected by several overlapping armed contests: the Government of Afghanistan fights multiple insurgent actors (AFF, IS, and NRF), while Pakistan faces separate conflicts with HGB and TTP, alongside a state-to-state dyad between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These simultaneous confrontations are rooted in struggles over political authority, territorial control, and security, including militant safe-havens and cross-border retaliation that widen the conflict beyond a single front.
UCDP records substantial civilian harm connected to both battlefield dynamics and direct targeting. The data segment lists 73 civilian deaths recorded as collateral in state-based violence (including 52 in intrastate fighting), showing the risks civilians face from clashes, raids, and indirect fire. It also records 90 deaths from one-sided violence: 37 attributed to the Government of Afghanistan and 53 attributed to IS. Together, these patterns point to a mix of incidental harm and intentional attacks on civilians.
The UCDP dyads include an interstate conflict between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan alongside each country’s internal fighting. This matters because border areas can become escalation points where domestic insurgencies and state-to-state tensions reinforce each other. Militancy linked to HGB and TTP, and Afghanistan-based insurgent challenges, can trigger cross-border accusations and security operations that affect communities on both sides. The result is a conflict environment where civilians face risks tied to both internal instability and international friction.
Sources: UCDP data.
The Afghan state fights multiple armed challengers for control and security. UCDP records both collateral civilian deaths in state-based fighting and deliberate one-sided killings attributed to the government in this dataset segment.
The AFF is an anti-government armed actor challenging Kabul’s authority. In this dataset segment, UCDP does not attribute one-sided civilian killings to the AFF, though civilians can still be harmed by fighting and insecurity around contested areas.
IS is a jihadist insurgent actor opposing the Afghan authorities. UCDP records IS as responsible for deliberate one-sided killings of civilians in this dataset segment, indicating a high direct threat to non-combatants.
The NRF is an armed opponent of the Afghan government, linked to resistance efforts against the current rulers. In this dataset segment, UCDP does not record one-sided civilian killings attributed to the NRF, but civilians may face displacement, reprisals, and risks from armed clashes.
Pakistan’s state forces fight both cross-border tensions with Afghanistan and internal militant challengers. UCDP records civilian deaths from state-based violence in this setting, reflecting the risk of civilians being harmed during operations and clashes even when not directly targeted in one-sided violence data.
HGB is a Pakistani militant actor fighting the Pakistani state. This dataset segment does not attribute one-sided civilian killings to HGB, but its insurgency contributes to insecurity that can expose nearby communities to retaliatory violence, displacement, and harm during raids and firefights.
The TTP is an insurgent movement targeting the Pakistani state and security forces. While UCDP does not list one-sided civilian killings by TTP in this dataset segment, civilians remain at risk from attacks near populated areas, militant coercion, and government counterinsurgency actions.
Afghanistan’s violence reflects overlapping struggles for state control and armed opposition to the authorities, alongside jihadist insurgency and a separate Pakistan-based militancy conflict. Tensions across the Afghanistan–Pakistan border add an interstate dimension, as both states contest security threats and responsibility for cross-border attacks.
Afghanistan secures large-scale aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States, building roads, dams, and military capacity while avoiding formal alignment. These rival patronage networks, especially Soviet security links, later shape the army factions that drive coups and invite foreign intervention.
Former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan topples King Zahir Shah and proclaims a republic. His authoritarian rule, Pashtun nationalism, and tension with leftist parties and Islamists generate instability that sets the stage for the communist coup and subsequent long-term armed conflict.
The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan seizes power, killing Daoud Khan. Radical reforms and brutal repression spark widespread rural revolt. This ideological polarization and state collapse draw in Islamist insurgents and foreign powers, laying foundations for decades of insurgency and fragmentation.
The USSR invades to support the communist government, while the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others arm Islamist mujahideen. The war devastates state institutions, militarizes Pakistani sanctuary areas, and empowers jihadist networks that later evolve into the Taleban and other armed groups.
After Soviet withdrawal and regime collapse, mujahideen factions seize Kabul but soon fight each other, devastating the capital along ethnic and factional lines. This destructive civil war discredits many commanders and enables the rise of the Taleban as a disciplined alternative order.
Islamist students and former mujahideen, backed by Pakistani networks, capture Kandahar and advance rapidly. Many war-weary Afghans accept their strict rule in exchange for security. Their conquest of most of Afghanistan shapes later conflicts, including their enduring rivalry with Northern-based resistance fronts.
The Taleban seize Kabul, declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and enforce hardline Islamic rule while hosting al-Qaida. Their exclusion of rivals and international isolation, plus al-Qaida’s use of Afghan territory, set up the U.S.-led intervention after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Following 11 September, the United States and allies, working with the Northern Alliance, overthrow the Taleban government. Many Taleban retreat to Pakistan. The intervention reconfigures Afghan power balances, embeds foreign military presence, and pushes Taleban and jihadist networks into a long insurgency.
A loya jirga approves a constitution creating a strong presidential system, Islamic Republic framework, and formal rights guarantees. Power is concentrated in Kabul while warlords retain influence locally. These centralization and legitimacy problems later weaken the state against insurgents and internal rivals.
Taleban forces reorganize from Pakistani sanctuaries, exploiting corruption, local grievances, and weak governance to regain territory, especially in the south and east. Intensifying rural conflict, drone strikes, and civilian casualties deepen fragmentation, creating patterns of violence and safe havens that persist into today’s wars.
Disaffected Taleban and foreign jihadists establish Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), initially in eastern Afghanistan. ISKP conducts mass-casualty attacks on civilians and state targets, including in Kabul. Its rivalry with both the Republic and later Taleban authorities fuels ongoing multiparty violence and urban terrorism.
Direct negotiations between the United States and the Taleban culminate in the February 2020 Doha Agreement on troop withdrawal and Taleban counterterrorism pledges. The Afghan government is sidelined, weakening its leverage and setting the conditions for rapid collapse and renewed Taleban control.
As US and NATO forces withdraw, the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces collapse and the Taleban seize Kabul, restoring the Islamic Emirate. Former officials flee or regroup, while resistance pockets emerge, framing today’s civil war between Taleban authorities and anti-Taleban groups.
Taleban authorities face armed resistance from groups like the National Resistance Front and sustained ISKP attacks on civilians, while border clashes with Pakistan grow along the Durand Line. These overlapping conflicts drive the continuing, relatively low-level but deadly violence recorded into 2026.
