Kabul

Kabul is very old — it appears in the Rigveda as Kubha and in Greek accounts as Kophen — and it grew where the routes from India through the Khyber, from Central Asia over the Hindu Kush and from Iran across the plateau all meet. Under the Kushans in the first centuries AD the valley lay near the centre of a Buddhist world, and the Bala Hissar fortress above the old town guarded the crossing for more than a thousand years. Arab armies reached the region in the 7th century, and the city changed hands between Hindu Shahi, Ghaznavid, Ghurid and Mongol rulers.

Babur took Kabul in 1504 and ruled from it for two decades before conquering northern India; he loved the place, laid out gardens on its slopes and asked to be buried here, which he was. Kabul spent the following centuries as a Mughal, then Persian, then Afghan city, and in 1776 Timur Shah Durrani moved the Afghan capital here from Kandahar. In the First Anglo-Afghan War a British garrison occupied the city, and its retreating force was destroyed on the road to Jalalabad in 1842; British troops returned in 1879, and in 1880 they destroyed the Bala Hissar.

The 20th century made Kabul a modernising capital: King Amanullah's Darul Aman Palace and the planned avenue leading to it date from the 1920s, and Soviet-built flats, a university and factories followed. That ended with the 1978 coup and the Soviet occupation. Between 1992 and 1996 rival militias shelled the city and destroyed large parts of it, above all in the west and the old quarters. After 2001 Kabul grew several times over, spreading up every hillside, until the Taliban took the city in August 2021 during the foreign evacuation from its airport.

Kabul is the most mixed city in Afghanistan. Dari, the Afghan form of Persian, is the common language of the streets, though Pashto is heard everywhere and the city has drawn people from every province — Tajik, Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek, Qizilbash and others — so that neighbourhoods carry the names and dialects of distant valleys. It was long the country's cultural capital: the home of Afghan classical music built around the rubab lute and the tabla, of the Kharabat musicians' quarter, of cinema, television, publishing and the art school. Much of that world has been silenced or has moved abroad since 2021, and public music and performance are heavily restricted.

Poetry carries a great deal of local identity. Persian verse is recited and quoted in ordinary conversation, and Kabul's own literary tradition runs from the 17th-century poets of the Indian style to 20th-century writers who wrote in Dari about the city itself. Kite-flying and kite-fighting, with glass-coated string, are a Kabul passion that fills the hills on Fridays, and buzkashi, the horseback game played with a calf's carcass, draws crowds to open ground north of the city in winter.

Manners are formal and warm. Greetings are long, guests are pressed with tea and fruit, and generosity to visitors is a point of honour even among the poorest families. Public life is male, women's lives are lived largely within family compounds, and the restrictions in force since 2021 on schooling, work and travel have weighed most heavily on a capital where many women were teachers, doctors and civil servants.

Kabul has an estimated five million residents — no reliable census has been taken — making it several times the size of any other Afghan city. Most of that growth came after 2001, when returning refugees and families displaced by drought and fighting built unplanned mud-brick and concrete houses far up the mountainsides. Those hillside districts often lie above the reach of piped water, and households buy from tankers or carry cans up long stairways.

The economy rests on government, trade, transport and services rather than industry. The bazaars of the old city and the wholesale market beside the river supply much of the country; money changers, construction, small workshops and a large informal sector employ the rest. The collapse of foreign aid and of the international presence after 2021 removed a great part of the city's income, and unemployment, poverty and hunger are severe.

The day begins early with bread from the neighbourhood tandoor, tea and heavy traffic. Bazaars fill by mid-morning and empty in the early evening; Friday is the day of prayer, family visits and picnics at Qargha or in the Babur Gardens. Winter brings the worst air pollution in the country, as households burn coal, wood and rubbish for heat in a bowl of mountains that traps the smoke, and water shortages are an increasing worry as the groundwater under the city falls.

Kabul lent its name to the national dish. Kabuli palaw is long-grain rice steamed over lamb stock and crowned with strips of carrot, raisins and slivered almonds or pistachios, served in a shared mound with a piece of lamb buried underneath, and no feast in the city is complete without it. Alongside it come mantu, delicate steamed dumplings of minced beef and onion under yoghurt and a split-pea and tomato sauce, and aushak, dumplings filled with chives or leeks and dressed the same way.

Bread rules the ordinary day. Naan-e Afghani, a long paddle-shaped loaf slapped onto the wall of a tandoor, comes hot from neighbourhood bakeries at dawn and is the basis of breakfast with tea. Bolani, a thin flatbread folded around potato, leek or pumpkin and fried, is sold from carts and griddles; shorwa, a mutton broth with bread torn into it, is everyday winter food; and kebabs of lamb, mince or liver are grilled over charcoal and handed over on naan with raw onion.

Sweet things and fruit matter as much. Kabul's dried fruit and nuts — raisins, apricots, mulberries, pistachios and almonds — fill whole bazaar streets, and the grape varieties brought in from the Shomali plain are a source of local pride. In summer sheer yakh, a hand-churned ice cream flavoured with cardamom and rosewater, is sold on the street, and firni, a cold milk pudding, ends a meal. Green tea, chai sabz, often with cardamom, and black tea sweetened heavily are drunk all day; alcohol is prohibited.