A conference on Afghanistan opened on Monday in the German city of Bonn. Here is a timeline of the main Afghan events of the last 10 years.
October 7, 2001: United States attacks Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, host to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
November 13: Anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces enter Kabul.
December 5: Afghan groups sign agreement in Bonn on interim government headed by ethnic Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai.
June 11, 2002: Loya Jirga, or grand assembly, opens and later elects Hamid Karzai as president of interim government. He is sworn in as president for 18 months on June 19.
October 9, 2004: Presidential election. Karzai declared winner and sworn in on December 7.
January 31, 2006: Afghanistan receives pledges of $10.5 billion to help it end poverty and fight the drug trade.
October 5: NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) takes responsibility for security across the country.
July 23, 2007: Former King Mohammad Zahir Shah, whose 40-year reign coincided with one of the most peaceful periods in the country’s history, dies.
June 12, 2008: Donors pledge about $20 billion in aid at a Paris conference but say Kabul must do more to fight corruption.
July 7: Suicide car bomb hits Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 58 people and wounding 141.
December 5: Karzai and new Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari promise to increase cooperation and agree a joint strategy to fight al Qaeda and others along their shared
border.
January 27, 2009: Thousands of U.S. troops move into two key provinces in eastern Afghanistan as part of strategy of outgoing Bush administration.
February 17: New President Barack Obama orders 17,000 more US troops to Afghanistan to tackle intensifying insurgency.
March 29: Karzai announces he will stay in office after his term officially ends on May 21 until elections in August. He later says he will run for re-election.
August 20: Presidential election.
October 19: US election observers Democracy International say a run-off vote is needed because, as a result of a U.N.-led probe into election fraud, Karzai has won less than 50 percent of the vote.
October 20: The Independent Election Commission (IEC) announces Karzai will face Abdullah Abdullah in a second round.
October 28: Five foreign UN staff are killed when militants attack a guest house used by foreigners. A rocket aimed at the presidential palace hits the Serena hotel.
November 1: Abdullah quits the November 7 run-off, saying the IEC and government have not met his demands, including the sacking of top election officials. Karzai is declared president again the next day and sworn in on November 19.
November 5: The UN says it will evacuate hundreds of its international staff for several weeks because of deteriorating security, a blow to Western efforts to stabilize the country.
December 1: President Obama decides to raise U.S. troop numbers by 30,000, bringing the total to 100,000.
June 2, 2010: A jirga gathering of tribal leaders and other notables approves a plan by Karzai to seek a peace deal with moderate elements of the Taliban.
July 20, 2010: Afghan forces should be leading security operations throughout the country by 2014, an international conference says.
November 20: Obama says for the first time his goal is to end the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and to reduce the number of U.S. troops deployed there by then.
May 2, 2011: Osama bin Laden is killed in Abbottabad, 60 km (35 miles) north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
July 12: Ahmad Wali Karzai, the younger influential half-brother of the president, is assassinated by a trusted guard.
September 13: Five Afghan police and 11 civilians are killed as insurgents shower Kabul’s diplomatic enclave with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire for 20 hours.
— The United States blames the attack, the most coordinated militant assault on Kabul since 2001, on the Taliban-linked Haqqani network based in northwest Pakistan close to the border with Afghanistan.
September 20: A man posing as a Taliban representative meeting former president and chief peace negotiator Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, detonates a bomb hidden in his turban and kills Rabbani at his Kabul home.
October 4: Karzai signs a wide-ranging agreement with India, deepening their ties, including an Indian commitment to help train Afghan security forces. India is one of Afghanistan’s biggest bilateral donors, having pledged about $2 billion since 2001.
October 7: The Taliban vows to keep fighting until all foreign forces have left Afghanistan, in a statement marking the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S. military campaign there.
October 19: Visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tells Afghan civil society leaders she has seen progress in their country.
October 31: Karzai rules out an early resumption of talks with the Taliban after a summit meeting with Pakistan which appeared to yield no breakthrough in a bitter rift between the two.
November 29: Pakistan pulls out of an international conference on Afghanistan after a NATO attack kills 24 of its soldiers.
December 5: The international conference opens in Germany and the hosts signal the West will stay the course with Afghanistan. Secretary of State Clinton says the United States will also resume paying into a World Bank-administered trust fund for Afghanistan.
