Kandahar

Kandahar sits on the corridor between the Iranian plateau and the Indus, and there has been a city here since antiquity. The Persians governed the region as Arachosia, Alexander the Great founded a city here around 330 BC, and in the 3rd century BC the Mauryan emperor Ashoka had an edict carved in Greek and Aramaic in the rock — a reminder that Hellenistic and Indian worlds met on this plain. The walled town below the ridge, now called Old Kandahar, was fortified again and again under later rulers.

From the 16th century it became a prize fought over by the Mughal emperors of India and the Safavid shahs of Persia, changing hands repeatedly. In 1709 Mirwais Hotak led a revolt that made Kandahar the seat of an independent Afghan power, and Hotaki armies went on to overrun Persia. Retribution came in 1738, when Nader Shah besieged and destroyed the old city. After his death in 1747 a council of Pashtun chiefs near Kandahar chose Ahmad Shah Durrani as king, and he built a new walled city on the plain east of the ruins, laid out on a grid around two crossing bazaar streets, with his own tomb at its centre.

The capital moved to Kabul in 1776, but Kandahar remained the Durrani heartland. British forces occupied it in both Anglo-Afghan wars, and in 1880 an Afghan army defeated a British brigade at Maiwand, west of the city. American aid built the airport and irrigation works in the 1950s and 1960s. The city was fought over during the Soviet war and the civil war, the Taliban movement emerged here in 1994, and the surrounding districts saw heavy fighting in the 2001–2021 war.

Kandahar is a Pashtun city and the home ground of the Durrani tribal confederation that produced Afghanistan's kings. Pashto in its southern Kandahari form is the everyday language, and social life runs on Pashtunwali, the tribal code whose obligations of hospitality, sanctuary, honour and revenge shape how disputes are settled and how guests are treated. Decisions that matter are often made by a jirga, a council of elders, rather than by an office.

The city has an old reputation for craft and dress. Kandahari men's shirts, collarless with dense embroidery down the front, are recognised across Pashtun country, and the city's embroidery, sandal-making and silk work were long traded from its bazaars. Pashto poetry is recited in ordinary company: the verse of the 17th-century warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak, the Sufi poems of Rahman Baba, and above all landay, anonymous folk couplets, many composed by women, that turn on love, war and exile. The attan, a circle dance to drums, is performed at weddings.

Religion is worn seriously here. The Shrine of the Cloak in the city centre holds a garment believed to have been the Prophet Muhammad's, shown in public only very rarely, and Kandahar's shrines draw pilgrims from across the south. Public life is male and formal; women's lives are lived largely within family compounds, and restrictions on schooling, work and travel since 2021 have been felt sharply. Guests are welcomed with unhurried courtesy and endless green tea, and refusing it outright would be read as an insult.

Kandahar has roughly 730,000 people and is one of Afghanistan's largest cities, the market and transport hub of the whole south. The old grid at the centre is dense and crowded; newer districts run out along wide avenues towards the airport road, and the planned township on the north-eastern edge holds walled villas built during the boom years after 2001. Beyond them the plain is dust and bare ridges, broken by the green strip of the Arghandab.

The economy rests on fruit, trade and transport. Orchards along the river produce pomegranates, grapes, apricots and figs, with drying and packing plants in the city and trucks running to Pakistan through Spin Boldak; wheat and vegetables come from the canal-fed villages. Bazaar trading, workshops, construction and haulage employ most of the rest, and remittances from relatives in Pakistan and the Gulf support many households.

Days begin before dawn to beat the heat, with bread from the tandoor and tea. The bazaars are busiest early and again in the evening, and the middle of a summer day empties the streets. Water is the city's central problem: the water table under the plain has fallen as wells have multiplied, drought has repeated through recent years, and orchards that took decades to establish have been lost. Electricity is intermittent, much of it imported, and generators and solar panels fill the gaps.

Southern Afghan cooking is plain, meat-heavy and generous, and Kandahar is its centre. Lamb and mutton are grilled over charcoal as sikh kebab or pressed onto skewers as minced kebab, and served on naan with raw onion. Palaw, rice steamed over lamb stock, is the dish for guests and celebrations; landi, mutton salted and dried in the autumn sun, is cooked with rice through the winter as landi palaw. Shorwa, a mutton broth into which bread is torn, is the everyday meal, and bread from a clay tandoor accompanies everything, beginning with breakfast.

Fruit is what Kandahar is famous for. Its pomegranates, especially the sweet thin-skinned kind grown in the Arghandab valley, are considered the best in the country, and its grapes — dried into raisins of several types — its apricots, figs and melons fill the markets from midsummer into late autumn. Dried fruit and nuts are kept for the winter and set out for visitors, and dried grape powder, ghora, is dusted on kebabs and stirred into stews for sourness.

Dairy carries the rest. Qurut, yoghurt dried into hard balls and soaked again, sharpens winter dishes; fresh yoghurt is eaten with bread and rice. Sweets run to halwa, sugared almonds and, in summer, sheer yakh, the hand-churned Afghan ice cream. Green tea, drunk scalding with cardamom and sugar held in the mouth, is offered at every shop and meeting; alcohol is prohibited.