Afghanistan

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is a landlocked country in South Central Asia with plains in the north and southwest. It is part of the US-coined Greater Middle East Muslim world, which lies between latitudes 29° N and 39° N, and longitudes 60° E and 75° E. The country's highest point is Noshaq, at 7,492 m (24,580 ft) above sea level.

Lying along important trade routes connecting southern and eastern Asia to Europe and the Middle East, Afghanistan has long been a prize sought by empire builders, and for millennia great armies have attempted to subdue it, leaving traces of their efforts in great monuments now fallen to ruin. The country’s forbidding landscape of deserts and mountains has laid many imperial ambitions to rest, as has the tireless resistance of its fiercely independent peoples—so independent that the country has failed to coalesce into a nation but has instead long endured as a patchwork of contending ethnic factions and ever-shifting alliances. Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan in the south and east; Iran in the west; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in the north; and in the far northeast, China. Its territory covers 652,000 square kilometers (252,000 sq mi) and much of it is covered by the Hindu Kush mountain range, which experience very cold winters. The north consists of fertile plains, whilst the south-west consists of deserts where temperatures can get very hot in summers.Kabul serves as the capital and its largest city.  the country's strategic location along the Silk Road connected it to the cultures of the Middle East and other parts of Asia. The land has historically been home to various peoples and has witnessed numerous military campaigns, including those by Alexander the Great, Mauryas, Muslim Arabs, Mongols, British, Soviet, and since 2001 by the United States with NATO-allied countries. It has been called "unconquerable" and nicknamed the "graveyard of empires".

 In the late 1970s, Afghanistan in a series of coups first became a socialist state and then a Soviet Union protectorate. This evoked the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s against rebels. By 1996 most of Afghanistan was captured by the fundamentalist Islamic group the Taliban, who ruled most of the country as a totalitarian regime for almost five years. The Taliban were forcibly removed by the NATO-led coalition, and a new democratically-elected government political structure was formed.

Afghanistan is a unitary presidential Islamic republic with a population of 35 million, mostly composed of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks. It is a member of the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Economic Cooperation Organization, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Afghanistan's economy is the world's 108th largest, with a GDP of $64.08 billion; the country fares much worse in terms of per-capita GDP (PPP), ranking 167th out of 186 countries in a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund.

Today, mostly as a result decades of political chaos and conflict, Afghanistan is in a state of severe environmental crisis. Even though some improvements and regulatory advances have been made after the fall of the Taliban such as the creation of the National Environmental Agency (NEPA) in 2005, and the passing of Afghanistan’s first Environmental Law in 2007, a lot more needs to be done. The major environmental issues today for Afghanistan are soil degradation, air and water pollution, deforestation at an alarming rate, overgrazing, desertification, and over population in its already fragile urban areas. There are also very limited, unequally distributed, and poorly managed natural fresh water resources in Afghanistan.