Mohammad Zahir Shah in the context of "War in Afghanistan (1978–present)"

Dost Mohammad Khan Barakzai, (23 December 1792 – 9 June 1863) nicknamed the Great Emir, was the founder of the Barakzai dynasty and one of the prominent rulers of Afghanistan during the First Anglo-Afghan War. With the decline of the Durrani dynasty, he succeeded his brother Sultan Mohammad Khan, and became the Emir of Afghanistan in 1826. An ethnic Pashtun, he belonged to the Mohammadzai branch of the Barakzai tribe. He was the 11th son of Payandah Khan, chief of the Barakzai Pashtuns, who was killed in 1800 by King Zaman Shah Durrani.

At the beginning of his rule, the Afghans lost their former stronghold of Peshawar Valley in March 1823 to the Sikh Khalsa Army of Ranjit Singh at the Battle of Nowshera. The Afghan forces in the battle were led by Mohammad Azim Khan, half-brother of Dost Mohammad Khan. By the end of his reign, he had reunited the principalities of Kandahar and Herat with Kabul. Dost had ruled for a lengthy 36 years, a span exceeded only by Mohammad Zahir Shah more than a century later.

The 1973 Afghan coup d'état, also called by Afghans as the Coup of 26 Saratan (Dari: کودتای ۲۶ سرطان) and self-proclaimed as the Revolution of 26 Saratan 1352, was led by Army General and prince Mohammad Daoud Khan against his cousin, King Mohammad Zahir Shah, on 17 July 1973, which resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Afghanistan under a one-party system led by Daoud Khan.

For the coup, Daoud Khan led forces in Kabul along with then-chief of staff General Abdul Karim Mustaghni, to overthrow the monarchy while the King was convalescing abroad in Ischia, Italy. Daoud Khan was assisted by army officers and civil servants from the Parcham faction of the PDPA, including Air Force colonel Abdul Qadir. Daoud also had the support of air force personnel stationed in Kabul International Airport and Bagram Air Base, led by Lieutenant Abdul Hamed Muhtaat and Lieutenant Pachagul Wadafar, although the flying of military aircraft over the city was not called upon. Seven loyalist police officers and one tank commander, as well as three members of his tank crew, were killed in what was described at the time by staff from the United States National Security Council as a "well planned and swiftly executed coup".

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.

Afghans (Pashto: افغانان; Dari: افغان‌ها) are the citizens and nationals of Afghanistan, as well as their descendants in the Afghan diaspora. The country is made up of various ethnic groups, of which Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks are the largest. The three main languages spoken among the Afghan people are Dari (a variety of Persian), Pashto, and Uzbek. Historically, the term "Afghan" was a Pashtun ethnonym, but later came to refer to all people in the country, regardless of their ethnicity after the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan proposed by the King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah.

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 Barakzai dynasty, also known as the Muhammadzai dynasty ("the ruling sub-clan of the Barakzai"), ruled what is now Afghanistan from 1823 to 1978, when the monarchy ended de jure under Musahiban Mohammad Zahir Shah and de facto under his cousin Mohammad Daoud Khan. The Barakzai dynasty was established by Dost Mohammad Khan after the Durrani Empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani was removed from power. The Muhammadzai era was known for its progressivist modernity, practice of Sufism, peaceful security and neutrality, in which Afghanistan was referred to as the "Switzerland of Asia".

The 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan was the supreme law of the Kingdom of Afghanistan from 1964 to 1973. It was annulled following a coup d'état, though parts of the constitution were restored by future governments from 2002 to 2004 and from 2021 to 2022. It was drafted by a committee of foreign-educated Afghans, including Sardar Abdul Hakim Ziai and Sardar Abdul Rahim Ziai, appointed for the task by the then-king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah. The primary goals of the Constitution were to prepare the government and the people for gradual democratization and socioeconomic modernization. It also acknowledged freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and freedom of speech. A Loya jirga (grand council of notables) had debated, modified and approved its innovations, which included a bill of rights for all Afghans, explicitly including women. After public review, the constitution was put into effect in October 1964.

Although Afghanistan became a sovereign nation in 1747 under the rule of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the earliest Afghan constitution was written during the reign of Emir Abdur Rahman Khan in the 1890s followed by a 1923 version. The 1964 Constitution transformed Afghanistan into a modern democracy.

Mohammad Daoud Khan, (18 July 1909 – 28 April 1978), also romanized as Daud Khan or Dawood Khan, was an Afghan military officer and politician who served as prime minister of Afghanistan from 1953 to 1963 and, as leader of the 1973 Afghan coup d'état which overthrew the monarchy, served as the first president of Afghanistan from 1973 until he himself was deposed in a coup and killed in the Saur Revolution.

Born into the Afghan royal family and addressed by the prefix "Sardar", Khan started as a provincial governor and later a military officer before being appointed as prime minister by his cousin, King Mohammad Zahir Shah, serving for a decade. Having failed to persuade the King to implement a one-party system, Khan overthrew the monarchy in a virtually bloodless coup with the backing of Afghan Army officers, and proclaimed himself the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan, establishing an autocratic one-party system under his National Revolutionary Party.

The Afghan Air Force (Pashto: د افغانستان اسلامي امارت هوایي ځواک, Dari: قوای هوایی امارت اسلامی افغانستان) is the air force branch of the Afghan Armed Forces.

The Royal Afghan Air Force was established in 1921 under the reign of King Amanullah and significantly modernized by King Zahir Shah in the 1960s. During the 1980s, the Soviet Union built up the Afghan Air Force, first in an attempt to defeat the mujahideen and in hopes that strong Afghan airpower would preserve the pro-Soviet government of Mohammad Najibullah. When Najibullah eventually fell in 1992 the Afghan Air Force may have counted 350 aircraft. The collapse of Najibullah's government in 1992 and the continuation of a civil war throughout the 1990s reduced the number of Afghan aircraft to some 35–40. During Operation Enduring Freedom in late 2001, in which the Taliban government was ousted from power, all that remained of the AAF was a few helicopters.