Afghanistan has been called "the crossroads of Asia". Alexander the Great led his army through the Khyber pass, east of Kabul, on his way to India in 327 B.C. The region was converted to Islam in the later 7th century A.D. Genghis Khan destroyed Herat and other cities in 1222. Tamerlane overran all central Asia and advanced as far as Delhi at the end of the 14th century. Babur, coming originally from Samarkand, occupied Afghanistan and from there advanced through the Khyber pass into India where he founded the Mughal Empire in 1526. He was buried in Kabul. The glories of the Mughals never recovered from the sacking of Delhi by Nadir Shah of Persia, who invaded over the Khyber in 1526, thereby inadvertantly clearing the ground for the later British domination of India.
As the British and Russian empires were expanding in the 19th century, Afghanistan was merely the territory left between them which neither managed to conquer. The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839-41 was a complete disaster (and is the subject of the first of George Macdonald Fraser's "Flashman" novels), and there was a later British intervention in 1878-80. Britain became increasingly alarmed at Russian advances in the 1860s into the Central Asian emirates which are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and the others, and feared that India might be directly threatened. Kipling's splendid novel "Kim" deals with a Russian plot to take over Afghanistan in the late 19th century. A treaty was signed in 1919 leaving Afghanistan uneasily neutral.
This neutrality prevailed, more or less, until the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a pro-communist regime: an unwise action that sparked off a new intensification of the Cold War. The Afghan war was enormously expensive to the Russians in both casualties and money, and played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later. The Americans responded by sponsoring Islamic resistance movements, which in restrospect was equally unwise. The communist government was overthrown, but then after a civil war the Taleban took power and imposed a particularly strict form of Islam, leading eventually to the 2001 World Trade Centre bombing.
It looks as if the subsequent Western intervention has been no more successful in the long term than previous attempts.
I found this poster when I was in the Soviet Union in 1984.
The best book I know on the subject is "Afghanistan" by Bijan Omrani and Matthew Leeming: a very detailed combination of history and guidebook. See also "The Places in Between" by Rory Stewart, the former Member of Parliament and cabinet minister: an account of his extraordinary walk across Afghanistan in 2002.
At a more trivial level, the Khyber Pass provided an excellent opportunity for cockney rhyming slang. See the film "Carry on up the Khyber", made long before the coming of political correctness and falling very much into the "so-awful-that-it's-good" category. It features Kenneth Williams as a local potentate who bears, inevitably, the title of the "Kharzi".
