Kabul — Capital of Afghanistan

Kabul sits in a narrow valley on the Kabul River, more than 1,790 meters above sea level, which makes it one of the highest-altitude national capitals in the world. The location has been strategically important for millennia because it commands the mountain passes — most famously the routes toward the Khyber Pass — linking South Asia to Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, a corridor role that shows up in the city's history under the Achaemenids, the Kushans, the Mughals, and every empire since that wanted control of the trade and invasion routes through the Hindu Kush.

The city became the capital of a unified Afghan state under Timur Shah Durrani in 1776, when he moved the seat of the Durrani Empire there from Kandahar, partly to be more central to the empire's territory and partly to distance the new capital from Kandahar's association with rival tribal factions. Kabul has remained the political center of every Afghan state since, through the 19th-century Anglo-Afghan Wars, the 20th-century monarchy and republic, the Soviet-backed government of the 1980s, the civil war and first Taliban period of the 1990s, the 2001–2021 republic, and the Taliban government that returned to power in August 2021.

Decades of near-continuous conflict since the late 1970s have left a visible mark: much of Kabul's historic architecture was damaged or destroyed during the factional fighting of the early 1990s in particular, and the city's population swelled rapidly from roughly half a million in the 1970s to several million today as displaced Afghans from rural provinces settled there, straining infrastructure that was never built for that scale.

The Bagh-e Babur (Gardens of Babur), the resting place of the Mughal emperor Babur who died in 1530 and requested burial in Kabul, remains one of the city's most significant historic sites and has been restored multiple times, including a major renovation completed in the 2000s with international support.

Kabul University, founded in 1932, was for much of the 20th century one of the leading institutions of higher education in the region, though decades of conflict repeatedly disrupted its operations; under the current Taliban government, restrictions on women's access to university education imposed from 2022 onward have significantly changed the institution's character.

The Bala Hissar, a fortress overlooking Kabul from a ridge above the old city, has anchored the city's defenses in some form since at least the 5th century and served at various points as a royal residence, including under the Mughals and the 19th-century Afghan emirs; it was heavily damaged during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1879 after an uprising there killed the British resident, and it remains a military installation today.

In December 1979, Soviet forces entered Kabul and installed a new communist government, beginning a nearly decade-long occupation that turned the city into the seat of a Soviet-backed administration defending against mujahideen forces contesting most of the surrounding countryside; the Darul Aman Palace on Kabul's outskirts, built in the 1920s under King Amanullah as a symbol of modernizing ambition, was heavily damaged by shelling during the factional fighting of the 1990s and stood as a ruin for decades before a government-funded restoration was completed in 2019.

Decades of war have also made Kabul one of the world's largest sources of refugees and displaced people, with millions of Afghans having fled the city and country at various points since 1979 to Pakistan, Iran, and beyond; many have returned and left again repeatedly as conditions shifted, a cycle of displacement that shows up in Kabul's patchwork of informal settlements built by returnees who found the capital's housing stock unable to absorb them.