Afghanistan document photos online

In October 2002 Afghanistan did something almost no other country has dared: it scrapped its money overnight. The new afghani was swapped in at 1,000 old notes to 1, but the bills printed by warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum's northern faction were honored at only half that rate, 2,000 to 1, because so many were openly forged. For two months Afghans queued to surrender suitcases of worthless paper under international supervision, three zeros vanishing from every banknote. It remains one of the rare cases where a single state ran several rival currencies at once, then folded them all into one in a single stroke.

• Passport power The Afghan passport has sat at the very bottom of the Henley Passport Index for years, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to only around two dozen destinations, the weakest travel document on Earth.
• Mobility gap The distance between the top-ranked passport and Afghanistan's is roughly 169 destinations, the single widest mobility gap recorded anywhere in the index.
• Currency The afghani is nominally divided into 100 puls, yet no pul coin has circulated for decades, making the subdivision a purely theoretical fraction of the currency.
• Redenomination The 2002 reform wiped three zeros off the currency, retired banknotes issued by rival wartime governments, and reissued the afghani with no smaller denominations at all.
• Name origin Both the country and its currency take their name from the word Afghan, a term that historically referred specifically to the Pashtun people.
• Digital ID Afghanistan's biometric e-Tazkira ID card sparked years of political protest over a single field: whether to print each holder's ethnicity, a dispute that delayed the national identity rollout.
• Independence Afghanistan won full control of its own foreign affairs from Britain on 19 August 1919, in a war the Afghans themselves started and finished within months.
• Never colonized Famed as the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan has never been lastingly colonized despite repeated invasions, a record few nations on its scale can claim.
• Oldest oil paint The 7th-century Buddhist cave murals at Bamiyan contain the world's earliest known oil paintings, made with walnut and poppy-seed oils centuries before the technique reached Europe.