Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the context of "Afghan Arabs"

The Soviet–Afghan War took place in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Marking the beginning of the 46-year-long Afghan conflict, it saw the Soviet Union and the Afghan military fight against the rebelling Afghan mujahideen, aided by Pakistan. While they were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of the mujahideen's support came from Pakistan, the United States (as part of Operation Cyclone), the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, in addition to a large influx of foreign fighters known as the Afghan Arabs. American and British involvement on the side of the mujahideen escalated the Cold War, ending a short period of relaxed Soviet Union–United States relations.

Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside, as most of the country's cities remained under Soviet control. The conflict resulted in the deaths of one to three million Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Between 6.5 and 11.5% of Afghanistan's population of 13.5 million people (per the 1979 census) is estimated to have been killed over the course of the Soviet–Afghan War. The decade-long confrontation between the mujahideen and the Soviet and Afghan militaries inflicted grave destruction throughout Afghanistan, and has been cited by scholars as a significant factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is for this reason that the conflict is sometimes referred to as "the Soviet Union's Vietnam".

The Republic of Afghanistan (Pashto: د افغانستان جمهوریت, Dǝ Afġānistān Jumhūriyat; Dari: جمهوری افغانستان, Jumhūrī-yi Afğānistān) was the first republic in Afghanistan. It is often called the Daoud Republic, as it was established in July 1973 by General Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan of the Barakzai dynasty (alongside senior Barakzai princes) who deposed his cousin, King Mohammad Zahir Shah, in a coup d'état. The occasion for the coup was the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan which took power from most members of the royal family in favour of centralization under Zahir Shah and his offspring under the tenet of democracy. Daoud Khan was known for his autocracy and attempts to modernize the country with help from both the Soviet Union and the United States, among others.

In 1978, a military coup known as the Saur Revolution took place, instigated by the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, in which Daoud and his family were killed. The "Daoud Republic" was subsequently succeeded by the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

The Sino-Soviet split was the gradual worsening of relations between China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during the Cold War. This was primarily caused by divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War of 1947–1991. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the Soviet Union's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western Bloc, which Chinese leader Mao Zedong decried as revisionism. Against that ideological background, China took a belligerent stance towards the Western world, and publicly rejected the Soviet Union's policy of peaceful coexistence between the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc. In addition, Beijing resented the Soviet Union's growing ties with India due to factors such as the Sino-Indian border dispute, while Moscow feared that Mao was unconcerned about the drastic consequences of nuclear warfare.

In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin and Stalinism in the speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" and began the de-Stalinization of the USSR. Mao and the Chinese leadership were appalled as the PRC and the USSR progressively diverged in their interpretations and applications of Leninist theory. By 1961, their intractable ideological differences provoked the PRC's formal denunciation of Soviet communism as the work of "revisionist traitors" in the USSR. The PRC also declared the Soviet Union social imperialist. For Eastern Bloc countries, the Sino-Soviet split was a question of who would lead the revolution for world communism, and to whom (China or the USSR) the vanguard parties of the world would turn for political advice, financial aid, and military assistance. In that vein, both countries competed for the leadership of world communism through the vanguard parties native to the countries in their spheres of influence. The conflict culminated after the Zhenbao Island Incident in 1969, when the Soviet Union reportedly considered the possibility of launching a large-scale nuclear strike against China, and the Chinese leadership, including Mao, was evacuated from Beijing, before both sides eventually returned to diplomatic negotiations.

The Kingdom of Afghanistan and the Union of India established bilateral relations in January 1950. India was the only South Asian country to recognize the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, supporting it in the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) against the Afghan mujahideen. India remained mainly neutral during the 1990s Afghan civil wars, though was opposed to the Taliban government. Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, India aided overthrow of the Taliban and became the largest regional provider of aid to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. A major shift in India's position on the Taliban was reported by a top Qatar official in June 2021, revealing that an Indian delegation quietly visited Doha to meet the Taliban's leadership. This is a major shift that was several weeks in the making in the first half of 2021, and likely involved Qatari mediation between India and the Taliban. Although India does not recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, it maintains close informal ties with the ruling Taliban.

In April 2017 Shaida Mohammad Abdali, Afghanistan's former ambassador to India, pointed out that India "is the biggest regional donor to Afghanistan and fifth largest donor globally with over $3 billion in assistance. India has built over 200 public and private schools, sponsors over 1,000 scholarships, and hosts over 16,000 Afghan students." Relations between Afghanistan and India received a major boost in 2011 with the signing of a strategic partnership agreement, Afghanistan's first since the Soviet-Afghan War. The student visas were revoked in large numbers after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

The Afghan conflict (Pashto: دافغانستان جنګونه; Dari: درگیری افغانستان) is the series of events that have kept Afghanistan in a near-continuous state of armed conflict since the 1970s. Early instability followed the collapse of the Kingdom of Afghanistan in the largely non-violent 1973 coup d'état, which deposed Afghan monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah in absentia, ending his 40-year-long reign. With the concurrent establishment of the Republic of Afghanistan, headed by Mohammad Daoud Khan, the country's relatively peaceful and stable period in modern history came to an end. However, all-out fighting did not erupt until after 1978, when the Saur Revolution violently overthrew Khan's government and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Subsequent unrest over the radical reforms that were being pushed by the then-ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led to unprecedented violence, prompting a large-scale pro-PDPA military intervention by the Soviet Union in 1979. In the ensuing Soviet–Afghan War, the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen received extensive support from Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia in a joint covert effort that was dubbed Operation Cyclone.

Although the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the various mujahideen factions continued to fight against the PDPA government, which collapsed in the face of the Peshawar Accord in 1992. However, the Peshawar Accord failed to remain intact in light of the mujahideen's representatives' inability to reach an agreement on a power-sharing coalition for the new government, triggering a multi-sided civil war between them. By 1996, the Taliban, supported by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, had seized the capital city of Kabul in addition to approximately 90% of the country, while northern Afghanistan remained under the authority of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. During this time, the Northern Alliance's Islamic State of Afghanistan enjoyed widespread international recognition and was represented at the United Nations, as opposed to the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which only received diplomatic recognition from three nations. Despite the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the Northern Alliance continued to resist in another civil war for the next five years.

The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, known as the Armed Forces of the Republic of Afghanistan after 1986, was the national military of Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992.

The Afghan mujahideen were Islamist militant groups that fought against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent Afghan Civil War.

The term mujahid (from Arabic مجاهد [muˈdʒaːhid]) is used in a religious context by Muslims to refer to those engaged in a struggle of any nature for the sake of Islam, commonly referred to as jihad (جهاد [dʒiˈhaːd]). The Afghan mujahideen consisted of numerous groups that differed from each other across ethnic and ideological lines, but were united by their anti-communist and Islamist goals. The coalition of anti-Soviet Muslim militias was also known as the "Afghan resistance", and the Western press widely referred to the Afghan guerrillas as "freedom fighters", or "Mountain Men".

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.

Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken. Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979, was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987, described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency". The first CIA-supplied weapons were antique British Lee–Enfield rifles shipped out in December 1979 and by September 1986, the program included U.S.-origin state-of-the-art weaponry, such as FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, some 2,300 of which were ultimately shipped into Afghanistan. Funding continued (albeit reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen continued to battle the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan during the First Afghan Civil War.