Afghanistan 🇦🇫

Afghanistan is a sovereign country in Southern Asia, in the wider region of Asia. Treaties and official documents call it Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Government sits in Kabul.

The land area is 652,230 km², which ranks it 42nd of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Myanmar and just ahead of Somalia. For scale, it is a little larger than Kenya.

The population is about 42.6 million, placing it 36th of 250 by population — between Argentina above it and Canada below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 4th of 9 in size and 5th in population.

Afghanistan has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: China, Pakistan and Iran have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Afghanistan's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Afghanistan's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Afghanistan's borders, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇨🇳 China
• 🇵🇰 Pakistan
• 🇮🇷 Iran

The coordinates the dataset gives are 33.0° N, 65.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,674 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

China, Morocco and Tunisia sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

6 countries share a land border with it: Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. The largest of them by area is China, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 1.81 billion people.

It has no sea coast of its own. That is true of 45 of the 250 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. 3 of its neighbours, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Density comes out at around 65 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Afghan, so residents are Afghans.

3 languages carry official status: Dari, Pashto and Turkmen. Dari and Pashto are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Afghanistan.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 15th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 2.1% of everyone living in Southern Asia.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Asia and Afghanistan sits 5th of 9 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Iran just above and Nepal just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

India is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southern Asia has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇮🇷 Iran
• 🇳🇵 Nepal
• 🇮🇳 India

It uses the Afghan afghani (؋, AFN). It is issued for Afghanistan alone.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Afghanistan, the answer is Kabul.

The top-level domain is .af. Calls from overseas start with +93. In ISO terms it is af in two letters and AFG in three.

Afghanistan is one of the 193 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.

The Afghan afghani (AFN) is used only in Afghanistan among the 250 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Turkmen is listed for 2 entries here, Afghanistan among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.