The Afghan government has published new textbooks for schoolchildren that shun the country's modern history of conflict in an effort to promote national unity, an official said on Tuesday.
"In the past four decades we have had some topics that were controversial," education ministry spokesman Amanullah Iman said -- referring to Soviet occupation, civil war, the rise of the Taliban and a US-led invasion.
"We have decided not to include them in the new curriculum," he said.
The books, published with the help of international donors who are believed to be mostly American, aim to avoid inflaming old enmities, he said.
They are expected to be distributed in time for the beginning of the school year in spring.
"In the new textbooks we have avoided naming individuals and parties who were involved in conflicts in the past four decades -- we have omitted topics that would create divisions among people," said the spokesman.
"We cannot let education be a battleground between people and parties. And the solution is to omit the names of these people and parties from textbooks in order to protect national unity."
Afghanistan's education system has been through many changes since the country's last monarch, King Zahir Shah, was overthrown in 1973, leading to an invasion by the Soviet Union in December 1979 and 30 years of war.
When Soviet troops were in Afghanistan in the 1980s, textbooks that preached communism were printed and taught in schools.
In turn, they were countered by books backed by the United States that were filled with anti-communist ideas of resistance against the Soviets.
Then, during the rule of the hardline Islamist Taliban from 1996 until their overthrow by a US-led invasion in 2001, schoolbooks were dominated by the promotion of jihad, or holy war.
Girls were banned from going to school and madrassas or religious schools became the main source of education for boys.
"The education in Afghanistan should be non-political, and we are trying to depoliticize it," Iman said, rejecting the idea that the new books were themselves political.
Since the fall of the Taliban, education in Afghanistan has expanded rapidly and the education ministry says there are now around 8.2 million students in school, up from around 1.2 million 10 years ago.