afghanistanboth men’s and women’s tunics. Currency exchange remains an important
activity and there are goldsmiths and silversmiths in the bazaar. Small-
scale industries include a fruit-canning factory and perfumery. However,
the most important cash crop in the Helmand-Kandahar area is opium.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, who is known as the Father of Afghanistan,
is buried in Kandahar and his tomb lies adjacent to Afghanistan’s most
import ant shrine, which contains the Khirqa-yi Sharif, or Blessed
Cloak, which is said to have been worn by Muhammad himself. East of
Kandahar lies a major airbase, originally built by American contractors as
an inter national civil airport. Today more than 13,000 personnel, mostly
Americans, live on this base, which is the most important centre of military
operations in southern Afghanistan.
In southwest Afghanistan the provinces of Farah, Nimroz and the
southern Helmand are mostly inhospitable deserts. They are sparsely
populated and agricultural activity is confined mainly to the banks of the
Farah, Khash and Helmand rivers and the irrigated areas around Giriskh
and Lashkargah. The Sistan Desert, the triangle of land between Iran,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, is criss-crossed with truck tracks, for this is a
major smuggling route for opium and other high-value products between
Iran and Pakistan. Zaranj and Zabul are located at the tail of the Helmand
and Farah rivers, where they form shallow lakes that provide irrigation for
farmers on both sides of the Iran–Afghanistan frontier. Riparian rights
to these waters and the Sistan have been a source of dispute and tension
between Iran and Afghanistan for more than two centuries and the dispute
over the British-demarcated Sistan frontier is still unresolved.
Around 200,000 Baluch nomads live in and around Zaranj. They
traditionally migrated into Iran and Pakistan-controlled Sistan, but the
frontier demarcation has hindered this traditional activity. A small enclave
of Brahuis, whose Dravidian language is closely related to those of south-
eastern India, live in Sorabak on the southwestern tip of the Registan
Desert. Before the Mongol armies destroyed the ancient irrigation system
on the lower Helmand, Zaranj was an important staging post on a caravan
route to southern Iran. In the early eighth century Arab Muslim armies
used this town as a base for the conquest of Sind and later it was the capital
of the Saffarid dynasty. Outside Zaranj is the imposing Iron Age fortress of
Nadd-i ‘Ali and surveys by American archaeologists in the Sistan identified
dozens of other Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements. The ruins around
Lashkargah and Bost, however, are of much later date, being the remains
of the winter capital of the Ghurid sultans. In 2009 a new sealed road was
opened linking Zaranj with the Herat–Kandahar highway and there are