Afghanistan
Afghanistan is a landlocked and mountainous country about six
hundred miles by eight hundred miles, bordering on modern China,
Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
After the dissolution of Genghis Khan's empire, Afghanistan was a
loosely organized collection of individual principalities. Early
in the eighteenth century, the Persian Nader Shah took over
Afghanistan (wresting much of it from Mogul and Persian control).
His bodyguard, Ahmad Shah Durrani, assumed the leadership after
Nader Shah's death, and in 1747 consolidated
Afghanistan into a single country. After his death in 1772, however, the
country returned to decentralized control. The lack of a central
leadership effectively thwarted the efforts of both the British
and the Russians to integrate Afghanistan into their respective
empires: in spite of a number of wars with the British in the
nineteenth century (beginning in 1839), Afghanistan
remained unsubdued and independent of foreign imperial control.
