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When their client state in Kabul collapsed, what ensued was years of bitter civil war that destroyed many of the cities and led to the rise to power of the Taliban in 1996. The Soviets left the Afghan landscape permanently disfigured with the bombed-out husks of tanks, and the earth itself seeded with more mines than anywhere else on the planet.But their occupation was unbearable to a generation of Afghan insurrectionists who declared a holy war and enjoyed the extensive support of the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Soviets brought schools and roads, civil institutions and freedoms for women.The Soviets invaded in 1979 to try to quell a brewing civil war and prop up its allies in the Afghan government, and they limped out in 1989.But it was mistaken in assuming that the same programme could stick in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union spent the postwar period pacifying and modernising its Central Asian republics with great success.Finally, exhausted by the First World War, Britain gave up in 1919 and granted Afghanistan independence. Over an 80-year period, the British fought three wars in Afghanistan, occupying or controlling the country in between, and lost tens of thousands of dead along the way.Wars of the last three “empires” to invade Afghanistan coincided with the age of photography, leaving a rich record of their triumphs and failures, and an arresting chronicle of a land that seems to have changed little in the past two centuries.And in this century, it is the War on Terror, against a constantly shifting Taliban insurgency, with President Donald Trump promising a renewed military commitment. rivalry played out here in a bitter guerrilla conflict. At the end of the 20th century it was the Cold War, when the Soviet and U.S.In the 19th century, there was the Great Game, when the British and Russian empires faced off across its forbidding deserts and mountain ranges.Even without easily accessible resources, the country has still been blessed - or cursed, more likely - with a geopolitical position that has repeatedly put it in someone or other’s way. Perhaps a better way to put it is that Afghanistan is the battleground of empires.
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In truth, no great empires perished solely because of Afghanistan.Afghanistan has long been called the “graveyard of empires” - for so long that it is unclear who coined that disputable term.Yojana & Kurukshetra Important Articles.All India Radio News Analysis for UPSC IAS Examination.
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