Preface

In December 1979 Soviet armed forces seized power in Kabul and installed their puppet, Babrak Karmal, as president. Six years later an estimated 115,00 or more Soviet military personnel continued to wage war against the Afghan people. About one-third of the country's pre-invasion population had fled the country, most of them to Pakistan. Numerous bands of mujahidiin (literally, holy warriors, also known as freedon fighters) continued in 1985 to inflict heavy damage on the Soviet forces and on the remnants of Afghanistan's armed forces, but the warriors, their people, and their homelands have also suffered massive damage and losses.

Afghanistan: A Country Study replaces the Area Handbook for Afghanistan, which was published in 1969 and updated and republished in 1973. Like its predecessor, the present book is an attempt to treat in a compact and objective manner the dominant historical, social, economic, political, and national security aspects of contemporary Afghanistan. Sources of information included scholarly books, journals, and monographs; official reports and domestic newpapers and periodicals; and interviews with individuals having special competence in Afghan affairs. Relatively up-to-date economic data were available from several sources, but the sources were not always in agreement. Most demographic data should be viewed as estimates based on fragmentary information.

Chapter bibliographies appear at the end of the book; brief comments on some of the more valuable sources for further reading appear at the conclusion of each chapter. Measurements are given in the metric system; a conversion table is provided to assist those who are unfamiliar with the metric system (see table 1, Appendix). A glossary of foreign and other words and phrases is also included.

The transliteration of various words and phrases posed a problem. For many words of Arabic origin-such as Muslim, Quaran, hadith, and zakat-the authors followed a modified version of the system adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographic Names for British Official Use, known as the BGN/ PCGN system; the modification entails the omission of diacritical markings and hyphens. The BGN/PCGN system was also used to transliterate other languages, such as Dari, Pashto, and Russian. The reader may note, therefore, the seeming contradiction between Tajik in reference to a major ethnic group in Afghanistan and Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union. The spellings of place-names generally adhere to those established by the United States Board on Geographic Names in its official gazetteers; the gazetteer for Afghanistan was published in July 1971. Finally, the reader should also note that the Khan that appears with numerous names--such as Genghiz Khan, Abdur Rahman Khan, Daoud Khan, and Ayub Khan-is an honorific and almost never a surname.

This page maintained by Luke Griffin and last updated on 01/14/2002 .