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Kabul. In a country where the recent past has unfolded like a war epic, officials think they have found a way to teach Afghan history without widening the fractures between long-quarreling ethnic and political groups: leave out the past four decades.

A series of government-issued textbooks funded by the United States and several foreign aid organizations do just that, pausing history in 1973. There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujaheddin, the Taliban or the US occupation. In their efforts to promote a single national identity, Afghan leaders have deemed their own history too controversial.

“Our recent history tears us apart. We’ve created a curriculum based on the older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognized as being great,” said Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s education minister. “These are the first books in decades that are depoliticized and de-ethnicized.”

As Western leaders look to wind down their part in the war, the inability of Afghans to agree on a basic historical record casts doubt on a much more complex exercise that is critical to the country’s future: the creation of a government that would unite Afghanistan’s disparate groups.

But Afghan officials insist that the new textbooks will be one of the government’s best state-building tools, offering a fresh perspective to a generation raised in the middle of a war but unencumbered by the biases of the past four decades. During much of that time, warring political and ethnic groups used their own course materials, imbued with their own ideologies and peppered with their own heroes and villains.

“That’s how we got our extremist ideas,” said Attaullah Wahidyar, director of publication and information for the Education Ministry. “Now, we’ve learned our lesson.”

Foreign powers only deepened divisions, distributing books to further their own agendas.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union printed books that stressed communism’s virtues and the importance of Marxist theory. During the last years of the Cold War, the United States spent millions on Afghan textbooks filled with violent images and talk of jihad, part of a covert effort to incite resistance to the Soviet occupation. During the Taliban’s reign in the 1990s, conservative Islamic texts were imported from Pakistan.

When educators, scholars and politicians gathered to overhaul the curriculum, beginning in 2002, they were intent on undoing the politics of Afghan historiography. But they could not agree on how to address the country’s descent into civil war or its various insurgent groups.

Educators suggested that the only solution would be to omit the period after King Mohammed Zahir Shah, whose toppling in 1973 ushered in an era of chronic political instability.

“We aren’t mature enough to come up with a way to teach such a sensitive history,” Wahidyar said.

The high school textbooks were funded by the US military’s foreign aid arm, the Commander’s Emergency Response Program.

Some Afghan scholars and educators have pushed back, claiming the new textbooks mark an abdication of responsibility.

“This will be the biggest treason against the people of Afghanistan,” said Mir Ahmad Kamawal, a history professor at Kabul University. “It will be a hindrance to all of our spiritual and material gains over the last four decades. All these young people will be deprived of knowing what happened during this period.”

The new history lessons will be taught even in villages still controlled by insurgents. Officials say that if they detailed the atrocities committed during five years of Taliban rule, the textbooks would almost certainly be disputed and discarded.

“We’re talking about community-building through education, and that includes the insurgency,” said Wardak, the education minister. “This curriculum needs to appeal to all Afghans.”

In one public building the minister visited on a recent tour, portraits of Afghan leaders over the past 200 years lined the wall. Wardak pointed to a photo of Mohammed Daoud Khan, who assumed power in 1973.

“That’s where the division started,” he said, “and that’s where our history books end.”

The Washington Post