Thirty-one times the size of El Salvador, landlocked Afghanistan traditionally served as a buffer between the Russian tsarist and British empires. The British leaders suffered a bitter defeat during the First Afghan War, 1839 –42, when they learned that it was much easier to occupy Afghanistan than to conquer it. The conflict ended with the destruction of the British garrison at Kabul, where a column of 16,500 soldiers and civilians fled the city for a garrison at Jalalabad, only 110 miles away. Of that expedition, one member alone made it to Jalalabad safely, although the British did recover some prisoners several months later. It was the worst British defeat until the fall of Singapore a century later. After World War II the British departed Afghanistan, but it was only a matter of time before other interventionist nations, the Soviet Union and United States, respectively, became embroiled in this disputed land.

Under the reign of King Mohammad Zahir Shah, who presided over the country from 1933 until his ouster in 1973, Kabul was a relatively modernizing and liberal capital. A university was open and the press was largely free; many Afghan students traveled abroad and new ideas about how to shape the Afghan state and society were ubiquitous. Communism and radical Islam attracted equal numbers of believers, and the two political movements held the country together in a stable, if ephemeral peace. In 1973, Zahir Shah’s cousin and former prime minister Mohammed Daoud overthrew the king in a bloodless coup. Daoud aligned with the communists and launched an undeclared war on Islamic radicals. Yet, when Daoud tried to check the increasingly powerful communists, he was assassinated.