Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts

Saturday, August 31, 2024

Terrorism 2024

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24-8-22 Hamas’ Exploitation of Schools - IDF > .24-4-8 Ruscia, America, & West: Security Concerns = Islamic Radicalism - TBN > .
24-4-8 [Hamiganda]: How Terrorists in Gaza Manipulate the World - IDF > .
24-2-25 Iran's Bold Claim on Antarctica & Egypt's Gaza Barrier | TBN > .  23-2-27 Alternate Techniques to Fight Pirates in Mid-Ocean - Fluctus > .
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23-10-10 Hamas: Gazan terrorist militants behind atrocities in Israel | ABC > .
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24-4-25 Red Sea | US Strategy Against the Houthis - Shipping > .
Resisting Terrorists - αλλο >> .

Most modern terrorist attacks occur in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. 

This is your brain on terrorism - Vox > .


Versus Terrorism ..

Most terrorism experts would probably agree that terrorism is an ideologically non-specific tactic, used to achieve political change, and in play since prehistoric times. It is non-specific (neutral), although not necessarily acceptable, in that it has been used by militants embracing most political ideologies – except for pacifism – and by authoritarian as well as liberal states such as Great Britain, France and the USA.

Although no universally accepted definition exists, there is agreement about its main elements. Terrorism is the threat or use of violence, it is politically or ideologically motivated and the violence is used to communicate a message of political change and intimidation to individuals or groups beyond its immediate victims. In short, terrorism is best understood as violence used as a form of political communication manipulation.
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Although modern terrorism followed the emergence of modern mass politics and mass media, terrorist violence has probably been used as a political tactic since time immemorial. The Jewish Zealots and the Islamic Assassins were ancient terrorists. They used violence to communicate messages of freedom from opposition and resistance to submission.
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Terrorism’s modern meaning and use to label an intentional political tactic came with the French Revolution. During The Terror, Robespierre described it as a virtuous form of violence, to be used by the new revolutionary democratic state against its domestic enemies.

Following this, the labels of terrorism and terrorists were used by 19th century newspapers to describe intimidation and violence by states against their subjects, such as “the terrorism practiced by the police” in Russia and the “oppressive system of military terrorism” in Poland.

Modern terrorism, which implies the systematic use of violence against the state, rather than by it, emerged in Europe in the 1870s. The person generally recognised as the first terrorist was the 26-year-old social revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who shot the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878 to protest the Russian state’s repression of domestic political protest.
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The new violent political practice was soon institutionalised with the emergence of organised terrorist groups. First came Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), a group of Russian social revolutionaries and self-proclaimed terrorists, who in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II with a dynamite bomb.
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Britain's first bomb disposal expert: Colonel Vivian Majendie and the original ‘war on terror’.

On the last day of February 1884, the then home secretary Sir William Harcourt rose in the UK parliament to answer a question about a series of bomb attacks on two of London’s major railway stations. He read out details of an initial investigation of two bombs, one which had detonated at Victoria Station and another which had been discovered, unexploded, at Charing Cross.

The bombs, which had been deposited in the stations’ left luggage offices, were of a similar design, and resembled the remains of bombs that had detonated, Harcourt said, in Glasgow, Liverpool and elsewhere in London. The unexploded device, discovered by a vigilant ticket clerk at Charing Cross, and the remains of the bomb that had detonated at Victoria were rushed to the Woolwich Arsenal.
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It is almost impossible to pinpoint the very first act of terrorism carried out within British territory. The most famous incident in early modern history is probably the gunpowder plot of 1605 when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the House of Lords. And although he is the best remembered (on November 5), Fawkes did not act alone. He was part of a larger network of 13 conspirators who sought to destroy parliament and trigger a popular uprising.

In the second half of the 19th century, European anarchism introduced the idea of “propaganda by deed” as a tactic of anti-government resistance. This consisted of the assassination of government officials and bomb attacks in public places such as cafes and theatres.

Although anarchist attacks were actually more common in continental Europe, England was an important hub for anarchist thought. The less restrictive laws of the United Kingdom made it a haven for radicals fleeing political repression in their own countries.

In the same period, the heavy death toll of the Great Famine in Ireland from 1846 to 1852 prompted calls for Irish home rule and resulted in the formation of networks of radical revolutionaries, the Fenians.

Although the largest Fenian campaigns were waged in Canada and in Ireland itself, attacks within England included the bombing of Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867, in which 12 people were killed and more than 100 injured. The result was a severe backlash by British authorities and the public, which undermined the political reforms that would have made future attacks less likely.
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Recent acts of spectacular violence, such as the mail bombs sent by a tRUMP-supporter to American anti-tRUMP critics, or the mass killings by Canadian “incel” misogynist Alek Minassian, demonstrate a widespread reluctance among media outlets, politicians and authorities to label some acts of ideologically motivated violence as “terrorism”. Such hesitations might give the faulty impression that “terrorism” is reserved purely for anti-Western or Islamist political violence. That is a wrong and dangerous conception.

The first examples of people being labelled “terrorists” were almost exclusively reserved for acts of non-Western terrorism. When terrorist tactics were used against governments and civilians in Western Europe or the USA – by Fenians and anarchists or anti-colonial separatists in British India, for example – "terrorism" was generally not mentioned. Instead, such violence was more often described in terms of "outrage" or "assassination".

This is despite the fact that these groups used the same terrorist tactics and technologies as the Russian terrorists. The new terminology was apparently reserved for the Russian revolutionary cause. It was only after WW1 that these other forms of terrorism in and against Western governments started to more generally be labelled as "terrorism".



Monday, January 31, 2022

What Cost War?

† The Fallen of World War II - NeHa > .
† Number of Dead In WW2 | Great War In Numbers | Timeline > .
† Numbers of deaths per nation in WW2 | Stats > .WW1: Loss of Life in WWI Visualized - Real > .† Simulation of a Nuclear Blast in a Major City - NeHa > .23-11-17 America's 3 New Nukes (weapons they counter) - Sandboxx > .
23-9-11 All The Times We Nearly Blew Up The World - Veritasium > .23-8-15 What If? P00ti's Nuke Targets - Show > .
22-12-4 [Dare Pooti] Use Nuclear Weapons? - Jake Broe > .22-10-21 Response if Russia uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine? - J K-L > .22-11-8 Predicted Impact of High-Altitude Nuclear EMP on Power Grid - Practical > .

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Autocracy - A History


To see how autocracy – the alternative to early democracy – functioned, we can find no better example than that of Imperial China. China’s earliest historical dynasties, the Shang and the Zhou (from the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE), had kings who ruled through an army and a bureaucracy, and there is no evidence of councils or assemblies of the people. Autocracy has been a near-constant feature of rule in China, suggesting that it wasn’t some aberration but instead simply a different path of political development from Western European societies. The culmination of the Chinese model, achieved during the Tang and Song dynasties (7th to 13th centuries CE), involved the incorporation of the political elite into the state via a system of meritocratic recruitment based on a civil service exam. The Chinese civil service exam – which Europeans with their weak states later marvelled at – served a purpose not so different from a parliament but in a fundamentally different way because it was not local people who chose the representatives.

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Democracy - A History


Lessons from all democracies:
 Democracy is not a torch passed from ancient Athens but a globally common form of government with much to teach us today

Today, many people see democracy as under threat in a way that only a decade ago seemed unimaginable. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed like democracy was the way of the future. But nowadays, the state of democracy looks very different; we hear about ‘backsliding’ and ‘decay’ and other descriptions of a sort of creeping authoritarianism. Some long-established democracies, such as the United States, are witnessing a violation of governmental norms once thought secure, and this has culminated in the recent [21-1-6] insurrection at the US Capitol. If democracy is a torch that shines for a time before then burning out – think of Classical Athens and Renaissance city republics – it all feels as if we might be heading toward a new period of darkness. What can we do to reverse this apparent trend and support democracy?

First, we must dispense with the idea that democracy is like a torch that gets passed from one leading society to another. The core feature of democracy – that those who rule can do so only with the consent of the people – wasn’t invented in one place at one time: it evolved independently in a great many human societies.

Over several millennia and across multiple continents, early democracy was an institution in which rulers governed jointly with councils and assemblies of the people. From the Huron (who called themselves the Wendats) and the Iroquois (who called themselves the Haudenosaunee) in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, to the republics of Ancient India, to examples of city governance in ancient Mesopotamia, these councils and assemblies were common. Classical Greece provided particularly important instances of this democratic practice, and it’s true that the Greeks gave us a language for thinking about democracy, including the word demokratia itself. But they didn’t invent the practice. If we want to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our modern democracies, then early democratic societies from around the world provide important lessons.

The core feature of early democracy was that the people had power, even if multiparty elections (today, often thought to be a definitive feature of democracy) didn’t happen. The people, or at least some significant fraction of them, exercised this power in many different ways. In some cases, a ruler was chosen by a council or assembly, and was limited to being first among equals. In other instances, a ruler inherited their position, but faced constraints to seek consent from the people before taking actions both large and small. The alternative to early democracy was autocracy, a system where one person ruled on their own via bureaucratic subordinates whom they had recruited and remunerated. The word ‘autocracy’ is a bit of a misnomer here in that no one in this position ever truly ruled on their own, but it does signify a different way of organising political power.

Early democratic governance is clearly apparent in some ancient societies in Mesopotamia as well as in India. It flourished in a number of places in the Americas before European conquest, such as among the Huron and the Iroquois in the Northeastern Woodlands and in the ‘Republic of Tlaxcala’ that abutted the Triple Alliance, more commonly known as the Aztec Empire. It was also common in precolonial Africa. In all of these societies there were several defining features that tended to reinforce early democracy: small scale, a need for rulers to depend on the people for knowledge, and finally the ability of members of society to exit to other locales if they were unhappy with a ruler. These three features were not always present in the same measure, but collectively they helped to underpin early democracy.


Thursday, June 27, 2019

Balfour, Lady Eve - organic farming pioneer

Lady Evelyn Barbara Balfour, OBE (16 July 1898 – 16 January 1990) was a British farmer, educator, organic farming pioneer, and a founding figure in the organic movement. She was one of the first women to study agriculture at an English university, graduating from the institution now known as the University of Reading.


Lady Eve Balfour (1898 – 1990) is best known as the founder of The Soil Association, Britain's leading organic food and farming organisation. The Soil Association was born in 1946, following publication of Lady Eve Balfour's bestselling book about organic agriculture, The Living Soil (Faber & Faber 1943).

Balfour, one of the six children of Gerald, 2nd Earl of Balfour, and the niece of former prime minister Arthur J. Balfour. The Balfours of Whittingehame, East Lothian were one of Britain's most important political families.

By the age of 12, Eve Balfour had decided that she wanted to be a farmer. At age 17, she enrolled, as one of the first women students to do so, at Reading University College for the Diploma of Agriculture. After obtaining her Diploma in 1917,s he completed a year's practical farming. In 1918, claiming to be twenty-five, she secured her first job working for the Women's War Agricultural Committee, running a small farm in Monmouthshire. She managed a team of land girls, ploughing the land with horses and milking the cows by hand. 

She was subsequently appointed Bailiff to a farm near Newport, Wales under the direction of various war committees, notably the Monmouthshire Women's War Agricultural Committee whose Chairwoman was Lady Mather Jackson of Llantilio Court, Abergavenny.

After briefly managing a hill farm in Wales, Eve and her elder sister Mary Edith Balfour bought a farm in Suffolk. In 1919, at the age of 21 at the suggestion of family friend William E G Palmer of Haughley, she and her sister Mary used inheritance monies put into a trust by their father, to purchase New Bells Farm in Haughley Green, near Stowmarket, Suffolk.

Eve farmed throughout the economically difficult inter-war period. New Bells Farm was a mixed farm, boasting arable crops, a dairy herd, sheep and, at times, pigs. In addition to farming, she pursued a wide variety of activities, including playing the saxophone in a dance band formed initially for her and her sister's own amusement. The band provided an extra source of income when it played at Saturday night dances in a nearby Ipswich hotel. She gained a pilot's licence in 1931 and crewed for her brother on his annual sailing trips to Scandinavia. She wrote three detective novels with Beryl Hearnden (under the pseudonym Hearnden Balfour), the most successful of which, The Paper Chase (1928), was translated into several languages. 

In the early 1930s Eve Balfour became a high-profile campaigner in the tithe protest movement, which saw financially-strapped farmers attack the Church of England for its continued reliance on tithe payments to supplement the income of rural clergy.

During the 1930s Lady Eve, became critical of orthodox farming methods, being particularly influenced by Viscount Lymington's text Famine in England (1938), which raised doubts about the sustainability of traditional farming techniques [and inspired sarcastic critiques]. Portsmouth's book inspired her to contact Sir Robert McCarrison, whose research had shown a positive relationship between health and methods of soil cultivation. Her interest in organic farming can also be traced to her contacts with Sir Albert Howard, a British scientist who developed the Indore process of composting based on eastern methods. 

Sir Albert Howard CIE (8 December 1873 – 20 October 1947) was an English botanist, and the first westerner to document and publish the Vedic Indian techniques of sustainable agriculture, now better known as organic farming. After spending considerable time learning from Indian peasants and the pests present in their soil, he called these two his professors. He was a principal figure in the early organic movement. He is considered by many in the English-speaking world to have been, along with Rudolf Steiner and Eve Balfour, one of the key evangelists of ancient Indian techniques of organic agriculture.

Having encountered ideas about compost-based farming, she lost no time developing plans to put organic agricultural concepts to the test by conducting a farm-based experiment on her own land in Suffolk. In 1939, she launched the Haughley Experiment, the first long-term, side-by-side scientific comparison of organic and chemical-based farming. She later became Chairman of Haughley Parish Council for many years and organised ARP precautions within the village. She campaigned vigorously against the payment of tithes to the church and was in opposition to the Vicar of Haughley the Rev W G White.

In 1943, leading London publishing house Faber & Faber published Balfour's book, The Living Soil (1943). Reprinted numerous times, it became a founding text of the emerging organic food and farming movement. The book synthesised existing arguments in favour of organics with a description of her plans for the Haughley Experiment. Reprinted nine times it became a classic text for the organic movement providing an influential synthesis of existing knowledge. It gave a persuasive account based on experiments in agriculture, botany, nutrition, and preventative medicine, and had far-reaching conclusions for agriculture and social policy. Following publication of The Living Soil and establishment of The Soil Association, Eve Balfour became one of organic farming's most important and determined campaigners. She had hoped that the government would provide support and funding for organic production, but the 1948 Agriculture Act committed Britain to a system of highly mechanized, intensive methods.

During the 1950s, she travelled to North America, Australia, New Zealand and many European countries, spreading the organic message and creating networks of supporters. She was also involved in the early days of the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM). In 1958, she embarked on a year-long tour of Australia and New Zealand, during which she met Australian organic farming pioneers, including Henry Shoobridge, president of the Living Soil Association of Tasmania, the first organisation to affiliate with the Soil Association.

Balfour continued to farm, write and lecture for the rest of her life. She is attributed with stating that, "Health can be as infectious as disease, growing and spreading under the right conditions".

Eve Balfour lived with Kathleen Carnley (1889-1976) for 50 years. Carnley joined Balfour at Haughley during the 1930s and was a skilful dairy worker. After the large farmhouse was rented out, they lived in a cottage at Haughley. Before Carnley, historians speculated about her relationship with Beryl Hearnden (1897–1978).

She moved to Theberton, near the Suffolk coast in 1963 and made regular visits back to the farm at Haughley. The farm was sold in 1970, owing to mounting debts incurred by the centre. In 1984, she retired from the Soil Association aged 85. She continued to cultivate her large garden. On 14 January 1990, she was appointed OBE in the 1990 New Year Honours list. In 1989, she suffered a stroke from which she died in Scotland, aged 90, on 16 January 1990. On 17 January 1990, the day after her death, the Conservative Government, under Margaret Thatcher, offered grants to encourage British farmers to change to organic methods.

Towards a Sustainable Agriculture: The Living Soil by Lady Eve Balfour
This classic text on the organic movement is an address given by the late Lady Eve Balfour, author of the organics classic "The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment", to an IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) conference in Switzerland in 1977.

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

40-8-8 Yamato 45-4-7

.Naval Legends: Yamato. The largest battleship ever built - WoW > .

The Yamato battleship is the pinnacle of the battleship type. The biggest battleship in the world, and the best known Japanese Navy ship. Sadly remembered for her defeat in her last battle against 227 American aircraft, which became a demonstrative execution and ended with the giant being defeated and the hopes of the Japanese command crashed.
Built in secret, and at great expense, she emerged as the largest battleship in history.
Born to terrify her enemies, she'd cost eight billion USD to build in today's dollars. She represents the pinnacle of battleship building, but launched at a key turning point in naval warfare history. The rise of aircraft-based naval combat left her immensely powerful, but ill-equipped to fight sustained air attacks.

Yamato (大和) was the lead ship of her class of battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) shortly before World War II. A great effort was made in Japan to ensure the ships were built in extreme secrecy to prevent American intelligence officials from learning of their existence and specifications. She and her sister ship, Musashi, were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed, displacing 72,800 tonnes at full load and armed with nine 46 cm (18.1 in) Type 94 main guns, which were the largest guns ever mounted on a warship.

Named after the ancient Japanese Yamato Province, Yamato was designed to counter the numerically superior battleship fleet of the United States, Japan's main rival in the Pacific. She was laid down in 1937, launched on 8 August 1940, with Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Miyazato Shutoku in command, and formally commissioned a week after the Pearl Harbor attack in late 1941. Throughout 1942, she served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet, and in June 1942 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet from her bridge during the Battle of Midway, a disastrous defeat for Japan. Musashi took over as the Combined Fleet flagship in early 1943, and Yamato spent the rest of the year, and much of 1944, moving between the major Japanese naval bases of Truk and Kure in response to American threats. Although present at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, she played no part in the battle.

The only time Yamato fired her main guns at enemy surface targets was in October 1944, when she was sent to engage American forces invading the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. While threatening to sink American troop transports, they encountered a light escort carrier group of the U.S. Navy's Task Force 77, "Taffy 3", in the Battle off Samar. The Japanese turned back after American air attacks convinced them they were engaging a powerful US carrier fleet.

During 1944, the balance of naval power in the Pacific decisively turned against Japan, and by early 1945, its fleet was much depleted and badly hobbled by critical fuel shortages in the home islands. In a desperate attempt to slow the Allied advance, Yamato was dispatched on a one-way mission to Okinawa in April 1945, with orders to beach herself and fight until destroyed, thus protecting the island. The task force was spotted south of Kyushu by US submarines and aircraft, and on 7 April 1945 she was sunk by American carrier-based bombers and torpedo bombers with the loss of most of her crew.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Afghanistan

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23-12-1 Khorasan: Taliban vs ISIS K - Afghanistan still at war - Caspian > .22-8-22 Does Afghanistan have a future? - Caspian Report > .
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Afghanistan ..

Afghanistan and the Failure of Liberal Interventionism: If the Taliban are allowed to declare victory in Afghanistan, it means what? It means they beat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States and the United Nations in open warfare, and can boast about it. Well, that’s an outcome that’s not thinkable.

So said the late Christopher Hitchens in 2010, firmly reiterating why the United States and its NATO allies should stay the course in Afghanistan—and what the stakes were if the Taliban were allowed to reconquer Afghanistan and claim victory over a second superpower.

This is exactly what has just happened. After twenty years of war, Afghanistan is back in the hands of those Hitchens rightly described as “the scum of the earth.” In fact, the scum control more of the country than they ever did. The intervention and “nation building” project Hitchens supported in 2001 as one front in an existential struggle against Islamic jihadism has unravelled and been reduced to dust.

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is a major political and ideological defeat for the United States, and especially for liberal interventionism. The United States will fully withdraw from Afghanistan in September 2021 without having eviscerated the Taliban, exported freedom and democracy or emancipated the women of Afghanistan—the main aims of liberal advocates of the war. The US was not defeated militarily, but the visceral reactions from sections of the pundit class to Biden’s withdrawal demonstrate the symbolic magnitude of this humiliation of American power. In the New York Times, Fred Kagan calls for the withdrawal to be delayed to push the Taliban back, while in the Atlantic Anne Applebaum restates the case for “fighting” for liberal democracy. .........

Afghanistan (Pashto/Dari: افغانستان, Pashto: Afġānistān, Dari: Afġānestān), officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central and South Asia. Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south; Iran to the west; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north; and China to the northeast. Occupying 652,000 square kilometers (252,000 sq mi), it is a mountainous country with plains in the north and southwest. Kabul is the capital and largest city. The population is around 32 million, composed mostly of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks.

Humans lived in what is now Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago. Settled life emerged in the region 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus civilization (Shortugai site), the Oxus civilization (Dashlyji site), and the Helmand civilization (Mundigak site) of the 3rd millennium BCE. Indo-Aryans migrated through Bactria-Margiana area to Gandhara, followed by the rise of the Iron Age Yaz I culture (ca. 1500–1100 BCE), which has been closely associated with the culture depicted in the Avesta, the ancient religious texts of Zoroastrianism. The region, then known as "Ariana", fell to Achaemenid Persians in the 6th century BCE, who conquered the areas to their east as far as the Indus River. Alexander the Great invaded the region in the 4th century BCE, who married Roxana in Bactria before his Kabul Valley campaign, where he faced resistance from Aspasioi and Assakan tribes. The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom became the eastern end of the Hellenistic world. Following the conquest by Mauryan Indians, Buddhism and Hinduism flourished in the region for centuries. The Kushan emperor Kanishka, who ruled from his twin capitals of Kapiśi and Puruṣapura, played an important role in the spread of Mahayana Buddhism to China and Central Asia. Various other Buddhist dynasties originated from this region as well, including the Kidarites, Hephthalites, Alkhons, Nezaks, Zunbils and Turk Shahis.

Muslims brought Islam to Sassanian-held Herat and Zaranj in the mid-7th century, while fuller Islamization was achieved between the 9th and 12th centuries under the Saffarid, Samanid, Ghaznavid, and Ghurid dynasties. Parts of the region were later ruled by the Khwarazmian, Khalji, Timurid, Lodi, Sur, Mughal, and Safavid empires. The political history of the modern state of Afghanistan began with the Hotak dynasty, whose founder Mirwais Hotak declared southern Afghanistan independent in 1709. In 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani established the Durrani Empire with its capital at Kandahar. In 1776, the Durrani capital was moved to Kabul while Peshawar became the winter capital; the latter was lost to Sikhs in 1823. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan became a buffer state in the "Great Game" between British India and the Russian Empire. In the First Anglo-Afghan War, the British East India Company seized control of Afghanistan briefly, but following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 the country was free of foreign influence, eventually becoming a monarchy under Amanullah Khan, until almost 50 years later when Zahir Shah was overthrown and a republic was established. In 1978, after a second coup, Afghanistan first became a socialist state, evoking the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s against mujahideen rebels. By 1996, most of the country was captured by the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, who ruled as a totalitarian regime for over five years; they were removed from power after the US invasion in 2001 but still control a significant portion of the country. The ongoing war between the government and the Taliban has contributed to the perpetuation of Afghanistan's problematic human rights record including complications of women's rights, with numerous abuses committed by both sides, such as the killing of civilians.

Afghanistan is a unitary presidential Islamic republic. The country has high levels of terrorism, poverty, child malnutrition, and corruption. It is a member of the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Group of 77, the Economic Cooperation Organization, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Afghanistan's economy is the world's 96th largest, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $72.9 billion by purchasing power parity; the country fares much worse in terms of per-capita GDP (PPP), ranking 169th out of 186 countries as of 2018. 

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...