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1. Karzai, Hamid, 1957- 2. Afghanistan—Politics and government—20013. Presidents—Afghanistan—Biography. I. Title.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
On Leadership
Leadership, it may be said, is really what makes the world go round. Love no doubt smoothes the passage; but love is a private transaction between consenting adults. Leadership is a public transaction with history. The idea of leadership affirms the capacity of individuals to move, inspire, and mobilize masses of people so that they act together in pursuit of an end. Sometimes leadership serves good purposes, sometimes bad; but whether the end is benign or evil, great leaders are those men and women who leave their personal stamp on history.
Now, the very concept of leadership implies the proposition that individuals can make a difference. This proposition has never been universally accepted. From classical times to the present day, eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no more than the agents and pawns of larger forces, whether the gods and goddesses of the ancient world or, in the modern era, race, class, nation, the dialectic, the will of the people, the spirit of the times, history itself. Against such forces, the individual dwindles into insignificance. So contends the thesis of historical determinism. Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace offers a famous statement of the case. Why, Tolstoy asked, did millions of men in the Napoleonic Wars, denying their human feelings and their common sense, move back and forth across Europe slaughtering their fellows? “The war,” Tolstoy answered, “was bound to happen simply because it was bound to happen.” All prior history determined it. As for leaders, they, Tolstoy said, “are but the labels that serve to give a name to an end and, like labels, they have the least possible
connection with the event.” The greater the leader, “the more conspicuous the inevitability and the predestination of every act he commits.” The leader, said Tolstoy, is “the slave of history.”
Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism of class. Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of human freedom—the assumption of free choice that underlies every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are by definition beyond their control. No one can live consistently by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this themselves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership.
More than that, history refutes the idea that individuals make no difference. In December 1931, a British politician crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City between 76th and 77th streets around 10:30 p.m. looked in the wrong direction and was knocked down by an automobile—a moment, he later recalled, of a man aghast, a world aglare: “I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry.” Fourteen months later an American politician, sitting in an open car in Miami, Florida, was fired on by an assassin; the man beside him was hit. Those who believe that individuals make no difference to history might well ponder whether the next two decades would have been the same had Mario Constasino’s car killed Winston Churchill in 1931 and Giuseppe Zangara’s bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Suppose, in addition, that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in 1895 and that Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916. What would the twentieth century have looked like now?
For better or for worse, individuals do make a difference. “The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously,” wrote the philosopher William James, “is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small,
and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow.”
Leadership, James suggests, means leadership in thought as well as in action. In the long run, leaders in thought may well make the greater difference to the world. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. . . . The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
But, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “Those only are leaders of men, in the general eye, who lead in action. . . . It is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.” Leaders in thought often invent in solitude and obscurity, leaving to later generations the tasks of imitation. Leaders in action—the leaders portrayed in this series—have to be effective in their own time.
And they cannot be effective by themselves. They must act in response to the rhythms of their age. Their genius must be adapted, in a phrase from William James, “to the receptivities of the moment.” Leaders are useless without followers. “There goes the mob,” said the French politician, hearing a clamor in the streets. “I am their leader. I must follow them.” Great leaders turn the inchoate emotions of the mob to purposes of their own. They seize on the opportunities of their time, the hopes, fears, frustrations, crises, potentialities. They succeed when events have prepared the way for them, when the community is awaiting to be aroused, when they can provide the clarifying and organizing ideas. Leadership completes the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history.
It may alter history for better or for worse. Leaders have been responsible for the most extravagant follies and most
monstrous crimes that have beset suffering humanity. They have also been vital in such gains as humanity has made in individual freedom, religious and racial tolerance, social justice, and respect for human rights.
There is no sure way to tell in advance who is going to lead for good and who for evil. But a glance at the gallery of men and women in Modern World Leaders suggests some useful tests.
One test is this: Do leaders lead by force or by persuasion? By command or by consent? Through most of history leadership was exercised by the divine right of authority. The duty of followers was to defer and to obey. “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.” On occasion, as with the so-called enlightened despots of the eighteenth century in Europe, absolutist leadership was animated by humane purposes. More often, absolutism nourished the passion for domination, land, gold, and conquest and resulted in tyranny.
The great revolution of modern times has been the revolution of equality. “Perhaps no form of government,” wrote the British historian James Bryce in his study of the United States, The American Commonwealth, “needs great leaders so much as democracy.” The idea that all people should be equal in their legal condition has undermined the old structure of authority, hierarchy, and deference. The revolution of equality has had two contrary effects on the nature of leadership. For equality, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his great study Democracy in America, might mean equality in servitude as well as equality in freedom.
“I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world,” Tocqueville wrote. “Rights must be given to every citizen, or none at all to anyone . . . save one, who is the master of all.” There was no middle ground “between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man.” In his astonishing prediction of twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship, Tocqueville explained how the revolution of equality could lead to the Führerprinzip and more terrible absolutism than the world had ever known.
But when rights are given to every citizen and the sovereignty of all is established, the problem of leadership takes a new form, becomes more exacting than ever before. It is easy to issue commands and enforce them by the rope and the stake, the concentration camp and the gulag. It is much harder to use argument and achievement to overcome opposition and win consent. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the difficulty. They believed that history had given them the opportunity to decide, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper, whether men are indeed capable of basing government on “reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend . . . on accident and force.”
Government by reflection and choice called for a new style of leadership and a new quality of followership. It required leaders to be responsive to popular concerns, and it required followers to be active and informed participants in the process. Democracy does not eliminate emotion from politics; sometimes it fosters demagoguery; but it is confident that, as the greatest of democratic leaders put it, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. It measures leadership by results and retires those who overreach or falter or fail.
It is true that in the long run despots are measured by results too. But they can postpone the day of judgment, sometimes indefinitely, and in the meantime they can do infinite harm. It is also true that democracy is no guarantee of virtue and intelligence in government, for the voice of the people is not necessarily the voice of God. But democracy, by assuring the right of opposition, offers built-in resistance to the evils inherent in absolutism. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to justice makes democracy necessary.”
A second test for leadership is the end for which power is sought. When leaders have as their goal the supremacy of a master race or the promotion of totalitarian revolution or the acquisition and exploitation of colonies or the protection of
Leaders have done great harm to the world. They have also conferred great benefits. You will find both sorts in this series. Even “good” leaders must be regarded with a certain wariness. Leaders are not demigods; they put on their trousers one leg after another just like ordinary mortals. No leader is infallible, and every leader needs to be reminded of this at regular intervals. Irreverence irritates leaders but is their salvation. Unquestioning submission corrupts leaders and demeans followers. Making a cult of a leader is always a mistake. Fortunately hero worship generates its own antidote. “Every hero,” said Emerson, “becomes a bore at last.”
The single benefit the great leaders confer is to embolden the rest of us to live according to our own best selves, to be active, insistent, and resolute in affirming our own sense of things. For great leaders attest to the reality of human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. And they attest to the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of us, which is why Abraham Lincoln remains the supreme example of great leadership. A great leader, said Emerson, exhibits new possibilities to all humanity. “We feed on genius. . . . Great men exist that there may be greater men.”
Great leaders, in short, justify themselves by emancipating and empowering their followers. So humanity struggles to master its destiny, remembering with Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities.”
• greed and privilege or the preservation of personal power, it is likely that their leadership will do little to advance the cause of humanity. When their goal is the abolition of slavery, the liberation of women, the enlargement of opportunity for the poor and powerless, the extension of equal rights to racial minorities, the defense of the freedoms of expression and opposition, it is likely that their leadership will increase the sum of human liberty and welfare.
A New Beginning
Tuesday, december 7, 2004, was a cold, overcasT morning in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. But for 46-year-old Hamid Karzai and the people of Afghanistan, it was a day bright with hope and promise. Karzai was about to be inaugurated as the first democratically elected president in Afghanistan’s history. It was a true milestone for the Afghan people.
As head of the powerful Popolzai subtribe, the group that had provided most of Afghanistan’s leaders since the 1770s, Karzai was born to be a leader, and actually had been serving as the country’s leader since December of 2001. He first served as chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority (AIA) for a sixmonth period. Then, he was elected president by a nationwide loya jirga (a traditional meeting of Afghanistan’s tribal leaders, representing every Afghan ethnic group). But today was different. Previously, Karzai had been named or appointed president
On October 9, 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected president of Afghanistan, becoming the first-ever democratically elected Afghan leader. In December of that year, Karzai was officially sworn in as president, an event that indicated a new beginning for the once-unstable nation. Above, Karzai is photographed in the capital city of Kabul, as he casts his ballot in the presidential election.
by a select group of people. This time, he’d been elected to the presidency by the entire nation. All eyes were upon him. The hopes and dreams of his exhausted and war-torn nation rested on his shoulders.
The use of the clichéd phrase “war-torn” is, in fact, a bit of an understatement. Hamid Karzai was about to be inaugurated as the first elected president of a nation on the verge of collapse. Years of misrule, war, and chaos had helped to make Afghanistan one of the poorest nations on the planet, with up to two-thirds of the population living on less than two dollars a day. Millions of its citizens were living as refugees. Its cities had been heavily bombed. In the countryside, landmines were an ever-present danger. And all throughout the country, criminals and warlords ruled.
“Chaotic” is a good word to describe Afghanistan’s recent political history. Since 1973 alone, it had seen its national leader deposed (1973), executed (1978), executed (1979), removed (1987), overthrown (1992), overthrown (1996), and finally, overthrown (2001).
Afghanistan had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. This brought about a 10-year revolt by the mujahideen (often defined as “holy warriors”) and forced nearly 5 million Afghans to flee their homes and become refugees in the neighboring countries of Iran and Pakistan. Following the Soviet defeat and withdrawal in 1999, six years of near-chaos followed, as various mujahideen factions, tribal groups, and warlords all fought and jockeyed for power. This turmoil led directly to the rise of the infamous Taliban.
With its promises to bring order and stability to Afghanistan, the Taliban seized power in 1996, eventually controlling up to 90 percent of the country. (The remaining 10 percent, mostly the northeast section of the country, was largely controlled by the Northern Alliance.) As soon as it took power though, the Taliban imposed its strict interpretation of Islamic law on the country, banning, among other things, television and music,
children’s toys, kite flying, and the Internet. The Taliban also made it illegal for women to go to school, to work, to show their ankles, to wear makeup, or even to laugh in public. In addition, the Taliban gave aid and refuge to numerous terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
The terrorist attacks by al Qaeda against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, spelled the beginning of the end for the Taliban. U.S. and allied military action, along with the opposition forces of the Northern Alliance quickly drove the Taliban from power, leading ultimately to Hamid Karzai winning Afghanistan’s first presidential elections, on October 9, 2004.
So it was that at 11:30 on the morning of December 7, 2004, Hamid Karzai entered the reception hall of the presidential palace. There he received a tumultuous standing ovation from 600 invited guests. Government officials, bearded tribal elders in traditional turbans, as well as foreign guests cheered the man whom they saw as the best hope of the Afghan nation. Karzai was accompanied into the hall by Mohammed Zahir Shah, 90 years old, the former king of Afghanistan whose ouster in 1973 had begun the nearly 30 years of unfortunate history that followed.
After placing his right hand on the holy Koran and taking the oath of office, Karzai gave his 15-minute inaugural address. Vowing to disarm regional militias, stomp out corruption, conduct fair parliamentary elections in 2005, and eliminate poppy cultivation (poppy cultivation had made Afghanistan the world’s leading opium producer), Karzai went on to acknowledge the past, but also to look hopefully to the future:
Every vote that was cast in the elections was a vote for Afghanistan whether I received it or another candidate. I am confident and proud that this nation is determined to rebuild Afghanistan and build it fast; to live in security, and to stand on its own feet.
On December 7, 2004, newly elected Afghan president Hamid Karzai (left), shakes hands with Afghan Supreme Court Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari (right) during his inauguration. Many public officials attended this memorable ceremony, including Afghanistan’s former king, Zahir Shah, and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.
As Merajuddin Patan, the governor of Khost province said in an interview shortly before the ceremony, “This is the birth of our nation. I believe the real history of Afghanistan— modern history—will begin with this.”
Karzai’s election and inauguration may have spelled a new beginning for Afghanistan, but a country can never completely break away from its past. A nation, in effect, is its past. All its history, the good as well as the bad, is what makes a nation what it is. And, Afghanistan’s history has made Hamid Karzai who he is. People are the products of their country: Its history and culture help make them who they are. (Compare, for example, George W. Bush of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Each man is very much a product of his country’s history and culture.) So to explain and to hope to understand the life of Hamid Karzai, we also have to learn about the history and culture of Afghanistan. We have to try to understand how it became the nation that gave rise to both the Taliban and Hamid Karzai. To do that, we’ll have to go over several thousand years of Afghan history and learn how geography helped make Afghanistan the country it is today. We’ll have to start at the beginning.
Roundabout of the Ancient World 2
GeoGraphy is destiny. Where a country is located and Who its neighbors are go a long way toward determining its history, culture, and, eventually, what a country ultimately becomes. Take the United States, for example. It is blessed with long, navigable rivers (the Mississippi for one) that provide easy transportation of goods and people. With only one major mountain range (the Rockies) it’s relatively easy to travel from one section of the county to another. The nation’s relatively temperate climate, rich soil, and abundant water make it an extraordinarily fertile area for a wide range of agriculture. It is a land rich in natural resources. Its Atlantic and Pacific coasts allow for easy shipping with both Europe and Asia. Yet, until 9/11, those same oceans and the nation’s distance from Europe and Asia also helped keep the U.S. mainland safe from foreign threat. This rich and
secure environment allowed the United States to develop into a world superpower.
Now consider Afghanistan. Its rivers are considered mostly unnavigable. The longest river is the Helmand, running southwest across the country from the Hindu Kush to the Iranian border. Its most famous river, the Kabul, runs along the capital and leads through the Khyber Pass (the most famous pass in the Hindu Kush mountain range), on to Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent. The country is crisscrossed with mountains. In fact, Afghanistan’s high mountain ranges have served through the centuries to make transportation and communication difficult, cutting off one group from another. This in turn led to a strong tribal culture, or tribalism. Tribalism means a sense of loyalty or connection to one’s group or tribe, rather than to the nation as a whole. This culture has made unifying and ruling the country difficult at best. (It also has made it difficult for any invaders to gain long-term control of the country.)
The country has a continental climate, meaning it has hot, dry summers and cold winters. There are some fertile mountain valleys in the eastern part of the country, as well as plains and grasslands in the north. But deserts and semideserts abound in the west and southwest. Despite the scarcity of fertile ground, the majority of the population still earns its keep from the land, by farming (mostly growing grains such as wheat, although cotton, fruit, and poppies for opium are grown as well), or by raising goats and sheep.
It’s a difficult existence. Water, even in the greenest area, is scarce, and severe droughts are frequent. In the center and northeast sections of the country, famine caused by drought has not been an uncommon occurrence. Even grazing land can be so scarce that approximately 2.5 million people, known as the Kuchis, live as nomads. They survive by moving themselves and their flocks from the uplands to the plains in search of vegetation. Most of the land is, in fact, so dry and barren that Martin Ewans, in his book Afghanistan: A Short History of its
People and Politics, described the landscape thusly: “From the air it resembles a vast moonscape, with only the occasional green of an oasis or a narrow patch of vegetation snaking along a valley.”
Geographically, Afghanistan, roughly the size of Texas, is a completely landlocked country, with no access to the sea. It is bordered on the north by the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Along the far northeast section of the country is a 50-mile (80-kilometer) border with China. From there runs the Durand Line, the border that divides Afghanistan from Pakistan. This border goes from southwest to west, until it finally meets the Iranian border, which is the western border of Afghanistan.
The historian Arnold Toynbee described the region where Afghanistan is situated as “the roundabout of the ancient world.” Over the centuries, waves of migrating people have passed through the region, each of them leaving their ethnic and cultural imprint. In more modern times, many of the world’s great armies have passed through the area as well. Sometimes these armies managed to gain temporary control. But no nation has ever, for long, been able to control and subdue the fierce independence of the Afghan people.
the people of afGhanistan
The people themselves come from many different ethnic groups, although there are only four major ones. The Pashtuns are the majority, estimated to be approximately 50 percent of the population. (Hamid Karzai himself is Pashtun.) Some historians trace the origins of the Pashtuns to the Indo-Aryan invasions of India. Others believe they are descendents of the Hun invaders of the fifth century a.d.
The Pashtuns are divided into different tribes. The two major tribes are the Durrani (who were formerly known as the Abdalis) and the Ghilzai. Both of these tribes are further subdivided into smaller subtribes, and then into even smaller
Afghan nomads called Kuchis travel toward lowgar, an eastern Afghan province, on March 26, 2002. the Kuchis are the nomadic sect of Pashtuns, an ethnic group that makes up approximately 50 percent of Afghanistan’s population. due to a history of war and ethnic conflict, approximately 200,000 Kuchis have been displaced, unable to continue their migratory lifestyle.
clans. For example, the Durrani are divided into nine different subtribes. The Popolzai subtribe, which Hamid Karzai and his family are from, contains the Saddozai clan, from which came Ahmad Shaw, the first ruler of the first dynasty of rulers of modern Afghanistan. To illustrate how far back the ties between the Popolzai and the rulers of Afghanistan go—consider this. In 1761, King Ahmad Shaw Durrani received a gift of land where he built the city of Kandahar. That gift of land came from the Popolzai.
All Pashtuns refer to themselves as “Afghans” and their language as “Afghan.” But the members of the other ethnic groups refer to themselves by their group name first, and as Afghans second, if at all. The Pashtuns live primarily in the south and east of the country, while an equal number (if not actually greater), live on the other side of the Durand Line, in the frontier areas of Pakistan. (These are the very areas where Osama bin Laden is purported to be hiding.)
The Pashtuns, like 99 percent of all Afghans, are Muslim. They also hold to a strict tribal code of conduct, called the Pushtoonwali. This code establishes tribal obligations for sanctuary (nanawati), hospitality (melmastia), and revenge (badal). The obligatory call for revenge, whether for matters of honor, or personal or financial disputes, has meant that vendettas and fighting have been a constant theme in Pashtun life.
After the Pashtuns, the next most numerous group is the Tajiks, at approximately 20 percent of the population. They are commonly believed to be of Persian origin and are scattered throughout the country, but they tend to be concentrated in the cities as traders and artisans.
In the northern part of the country are the Uzbeks. They share similar ethnic origins with the peoples who live directly across the northern border in the former Soviet states. The Uzbeks are mainly farmers and breeders of horses and sheep. Along with the Tajiks, they have a much weaker sense of tribal identity than the Pashtuns.
[Afghanistan] has long been a “highway of conquest” between west, central, and southern Asia.
The final major group is the Hazaras, who inhabit the mountainous areas of central Afghanistan. It was commonly believed that the Hazaras were descendants of Genghis Khan’s soldiers. But some historians now believe that they are the descendants of earlier migrations from central Asia. They are often sheep breeders, although some have moved into the cities. And, unlike the vast majority of Afghanistan’s Muslims, who are Sunni, the Hazaras are Shiite. (Sunnism and Shiism are the two major branches of Islam; Sunni are in the majority worldwide.)
early afGhan history
In any case, archaeological evidence shows that the region where modern-day Afghanistan now exists has been inhabited since the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. Agriculture was probably practiced there as long as 10,000 years ago. Precious stones like lapis lazuli and minerals like tin appear to have been traded from Afghanistan through the ancient world. So, even from the earliest times, the region’s commercial links spread both to the west and east.
As Martin Ewans points out, however, due to its prime location along the trade routes, it has long been a “highway of conquest” between west, central, and southern Asia. The country itself has long been incorporated into numerous empires, as streams of migrations and invasions have moved into and through it.
Afghanistan first appears in recorded history in the sixth century b.c. It was then that the Persian monarchs Cyrus the Great and his son Darius conquered these areas at the beginning of the century. Persian rule continued until Alexander of
the first recorded rulers of Afghanistan were Persian monarchs cyrus the Great and his son darius i. in 331 b.c., Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, defeated darius iii and conquered the Persian empire in the battle of Guagamela. in the painting above, darius iii engages in battle.
Macedonia, more commonly known as Alexander the Great, conquered the region.
In 330 b.c., Alexander conquered the area on his march of conquest toward India. As he advanced, he founded cities,
including Alexandria Ariana near what is now Herat, and what he considered his most remote city, Alexandria-Eschate (“Alexandria at the end of the world”). After conquering the area, Alexander moved toward, and then into what is now India. Eventually though, tired of war, his troops rebelled. Alexander was forced to return to Greece, but he died along the way, in Babylon, in 323.
Following Alexander’s occupation, the Hellenic (Greek) states of the Seleucids and then the Bactrians controlled the area. At the same time, the Indian Marayan Empire, under its great king Asoka, moved into the southern part of the region, introducing Buddhism before being beaten back by the Bactrians. The Bactrians, in turn, fell to the Parthians and various rebellious tribes (primarily the Saka).
Up until this point, the migrations and invasions had primarily been from the east to the west, but the area that would become Afghanistan now saw the first great migrations of people out of central Asia. Why did these people suddenly begin migrating? Historians speculate that climate changes may have caused their traditional pasturelands to dry up. Also, with the recent construction of the Great Wall of China, they were unable to move their flocks to the east.
So, during the first and second centuries of what is known as the Christian era, the Yueh-chih, or the Kushans, as they came to be known, extended their rule over a large part of India, through Afghanistan, and north to the Caspian and Aral seas. Their great king, Kanishki, built a northern capital of his empire, near what is Peshawar. During this time, trade with the Mideast revived, along with the Silk Route east to China.
In a largely forgotten part of the area’s history, Buddhism was once the dominant religion of the region. Monasteries flourished as sites of education. Beautiful statues were built in a combination of Greek and Buddhist styles known as Gandharan. Two of the most famous and spectacular examples of this art were the sandstone images of Buddha at Bamiyan.
Carved into the side of a cliff in the third century, the taller statue stood 175 feet (53 meters) high, the second one 120 feet (36.5 meters). These statues, which withstood nearly 2,000 years of wind, sand, and time, were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.
The Kushan Empire lasted for nearly five centuries, until it began to break up into smaller, arguing dynasties. This left them fragmented and unable to resist the invasion of the White Huns in the fifth century. Previous invaders had moved through the country, adjusting themselves to what was already there. Not so the Huns. They went on a war of destruction, decimating the cities and killing everyone in their path. They also destroyed the Buddhist culture, which never recovered.
The White Huns, also known as the Ephthalites, ruled for almost 100 years. They in turn were defeated by a combined army of the Sassanids and the Turkish people of central Asia. That’s how things stood until the middle of the seventh century. It was then that a major change was to take place in the region. Arab armies were about to introduce Islam.
the introduction of islam
The first Arab forays into the country were rather tentative, with important battles against the Sassanids in 637 and 642. By the year 650, they were in control of the major cities of Herat and Balkh. Their forward movement into Afghanistan was slow. It wasn’t until the Ghaznavid Dynasty (962–1149) that Islam was firmly established throughout the region.
The Ghaznavid Empire was founded by a local Turkic ruler from Ghazni. His name was Yamin ul-Dawlah Mahmud, and his empire ultimately expanded over a huge area from Kurdistan to northern India. The empire weakened somewhat after the death of its greatest ruler, Mahmud (998–1030), and was supplanted by the Ghorids, who sacked the city of Ghazni in 1150 and moved their capital to Herat. This empire, too, would not last. The years 1219–1221 saw the
