introductionThe Kabul river and the Kabul–Jalalabad highway looking downstream to Sarobi. This road
was badly cut up during the Soviet era but is now repaired and resealed.Sherzads and Shinwaris. To the southwest are the Jaji and Mangal tribes of
Khost, while the high, snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush to the
east are the homeland of the Nuristanis. Formerly known as Kafiristan,
these tribes were polytheists whose religion bore similarities to Vedic
and ancient Indo-Aryan tradition. In the 1890s the Amir of Afghanistan
invaded the area, forcibly converted its inhabitants to Islam and renamed
the region Nuristan, Land of Light. Another ethnolinguistic minority, the
Pashais, live at the mouth of the Kunar river and in Darra-yi Nur.
The Amu Darya river, or Oxus, as it is known in classical sources,
rises in the Pamir range of northeastern Afghanistan on the border with
China and Tajikistan. This is one of Central Asia’s most important rivers
and forms Afghanistan’s northern international frontier. Due to pressure
from the ussr, and more recently from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan has never exploited the Amu Darya for irrigation, though
on the other side of the frontier its waters are diverted into vast canals
that feed Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan’s water-thirsty cotton fields. In
the Wakhan, the extreme northeastern finger of Afghanistan where the
Amu Darya rises, only a few Kyrgyz live and are mostly reliant on their
herds. In Badakhshan only limited agriculture is possible due to long and
bitter winters, but the province has considerable mineral wealth. Lapis
lazuli, emeralds, rubies and other precious and semi-precious stones have
been mined here for millennia and recent geological surveys indicate the
province has substantial copper, iron and marble reserves. At the mouth