The Czech Defense Ministry announced that some of the Czech troops currently stationed in Kuwait will be deployed in Afghanistan at the request of allies.
Afghanistan has three distinctive regions: the northern plains are the major agricultural area; the southwestern plateau consists primarily of desert and semiarid landscape; and the central highlands, including the Hindu Kush, separate these regions.
Afghanistan is bordered by Iran on the west, by Pakistan on the east and south, and by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan on the north; a narrow strip, the Vakhan (Wakhan), extends in the northeast along Pakistan to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China.
Afghanistan faces numerous problems, ranging from its devastated economy, the return of millions of refugees, continued warlordism, drug trafficking, and a new government that is struggling with the political forces trying to define the sort of country Afghanistan will become in the 21st century.
Afghanistan's last king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, took the throne at the age of 18 after his father, Mohammad Nadir Shah, was assassinated.
The withdrawal of Britain from South Asia and the rise of the Cold War brought Afghanistan gradually under the shadow of the Soviet Union in the 1950s, as the United States government was unwilling to match Soviet influence in the country.
The August bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blamed on bin Laden's group and led to U.S. cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan later that month.
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