The British occupation of Afghanistan

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On August 19, 1919 AD, the British occupation of Afghanistan ended as per the Treaty of Rawalpindi, following the end of the 3rd Anglo-Afghan war. The term Afghanistan was used for the first time in 1857 as official name of a country, although the local tribes were known as 'Afghans' from pre-Islamic times and the independent Afghan state was established in 1747 for the first time by Ahmad Khan Durrani – an ethnic Pashtun general of Nader Shah Afshar of Iran – who on the latter's death seized control of the eastern parts of Iranian Khorasan and the Pashto-speaking regions of the former Moghul Empire of India as well as the Punjab to declare himself King Ahmad Shah Abdali.
British attempts to meddle in Afghanistan led to the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-to-1842. Thereafter, a seesaw struggle ensued between the two sides with the British aggressively pushing their colonial policies in Kabul through threats, diplomacy, and wars, until formal independence in 1919.
Afghanistan, which is under US occupation for the past 12 years, was throughout history part of the Persian Empire with its eastern parts occasionally under Indian rule. Today it shares borders with Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and covers an area of 647,000 sq km.