afghanistanof the Kokcha river, gold is panned by sifting the gravel through the fleece
of a sheep.
Below Imam Sahib, the Amu Darya slows and widens into a fertile plain
watered by the Qunduz river and its tributaries. Once a notorious malarial
swamp, the region was drained in the 1940s and ’50s, and up until the recent
troubles Qunduz was Afghanistan’s most important cotton-producing
region. Qunduz was formerly known as Qataghan, after the predominant
Uzbek tribe of the region, but from the late nineteenth century the govern-
ment in Kabul encouraged thousands of Pushtun colonists from the south
to settle in the area and apportioned them smallholdings on reclaimed
marshland. In the 1920s and ’30s Uzbek, Turkman and Tajik refugees from
Bukhara, Ferghana, Dushanbe and other Soviet-controlled areas of Central
Asia also made their home here. Qunduz is renowned for its distinctive
tufted carpets, which are woven by the Uzbek women.
The Balkh plains, which spread westwards from Khulm to Maimana,
are watered by rivers that rise in the Tir Band-i Turkistan and the Hazarajat,
though all of them dry up before reaching the Amu Darya. The source of
the Balkh Ab, the most important river of the region, is the remarkable
blue lakes of Band-i Amir, north of Bamiyan. In its lower course the Balkh
Ab feeds an extensive and ancient irrigation system, the Hazhda Nahr,
or Eighteen Canals, which forms an inland delta that at its apex spreads
from north of Aqcha to west of Mazar-i Sharif. Today only ten canals are
functioning but despite neglect, poor management and increasing illegal
water extraction, double cropping is still commonplace at the head of the
Hazhda Nahr network and rice and cotton are grown in large quantities.
The melons of this region are particularly famous for their sweetness and
enormous size. Along the northern face of the Tir Band-i Turkistan lies a
belt of high, loess dunes, known as chul, which is one of the country’s most
important lalmi, or rain-fed, wheat growing areas. Walnuts and mulberries
are found in abundance in the lower valleys of this mountain range and
raw silk is produced here in large quantities. In the plains to the north,
marijuana and opium are widely cultivated.
There are large reserves of coal in the Tir Band-i Turkistan and there
are coal mines near Darra-yi Suf and Pul-i Khumri, but mining is on a
very small scale and coal is extracted using pre-industrial methods, mostly
pick and shovel. Conditions for the miners are appalling, health and safety
rules are virtually non-existent and there are frequent fatalities due to shaft
collapses. There are oil and gas fields in the Sar-i Pul and Shibarghan areas
and gas is piped to Shibarghan and Mazar-i Sharif for domestic use; in the
past it also supplied a fertilizer factory south of Mazar-i Sharif. The oil is