Afghanistan's Geography Will Surprise You

In the Western imagination, Afghanistan has been at war for so long that war has become synonymous with the country. If you turn on the news in the past few decades, you'd see that Afghanistan was in conflict. The Soviet invasion, the Mujahideen, the Taliban, 9-11. And because of this, the country exists in the Western mind as a sequence of catastrophes, each one replacing the last. The geography of the country, the culture, its ecology, and its history all compressed into a single word, conflict. But the land has not always been a battlefield. It was historically a crossroads, a place where the Silk Road's most critical routes converged, where the civilizations of Persia, Greece, India, and China extended their reach. Its mountains and valleys contain species that are among the rarest on Earth. It has been a cradle of urban civilization. Its cities are some of the oldest continuously inhabited places in Asia. And it is one of the most geographically complex, topographically dramatic, and ecologically extraordinary countries in Asia. Let me be very clear, in no way am I trying to downplay or hide the suffering and damage that has taken place here. I'm not completely setting that aside or ignoring that. But today, I refuse to let that be the only thing people know about Afghanistan. So for the next 30 minutes, we're going to ask and answer questions that the media usually does not cover. So let's talk about the geography of Afghanistan. So where exactly is Afghanistan located? And why does its location matter? Most Afghans would say that Afghanistan sits at the geographical heart of Asia. It's a landlocked country of 652,000 square kilometers bordered by six nations. Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and east, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north, and China through a narrow eastern corridor called the Wakhan Corridor. It's roughly the size of Texas. And while it does straddle the boundary between South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, most people believe that Afghanistan culturally is closest to Central Asia. So we know where Afghanistan is, but what does it look like? Well, the defining topographic feature of Afghanistan is the Hindu Kush, a mountain range of extraordinary scale running northeast to southwest across the country's center. These mountains divide the northern plains from the southern plateaus, and they effectively split the country into two ecological worlds. The Hindu Kush is not a single ridge, but a massive highland system. Its highest peaks exceed 7,400 meters in the northeast, where it connects to the Pamir Mountains. About half of Afghanistan is covered by the Hindu Kush mountains, and they do contain some of the most rugged terrain on earth, outside the Himalayas. These mountains cause climate variation, they act as barriers that isolate valleys, and they create corridors that connect people through specific irreplaceable passes. But by far the most important aspect of the Hindu Kush is the fact that they create the rivers of Afghanistan. Every major river in Afghanistan starts in the Hindu Kush. You have the Amu Darya, draining north into the Central Asian Republics, the Helmand, flowing southwest into the Hamun Wetlands, and the Kabul River cutting east towards the Indus River. The mountains are the water tower of this region. Their glaciers and snowfields release water in spring and summer that downstream populations across six countries depend on for survival. So is Afghanistan all mountains, or is the landscape a lot more varied? Well, Afghanistan has several different geographical and topographical zones, each with its own climate, ecology, and character. If we move north of the Hindu Kush mountains, the land drops, suddenly, to a region known as the Northern Plains. It's fertile, agricultural, and watered by rivers descending from the mountains. However, once we move west, we reach a high plateau of arid grassland and semi-desert landscape. Now this is closer in character to Iran than the mountains. The Helmand River, Afghanistan's longest, crosses this plateau before draining into the Hamun Wetlands on the Iranian border. A system of seasonal lakes that fills with snowmelt in wet years and dries to salt flats in drought years. However, if we move to the south of the Hindu Kush mountains, we reach an area called the Registan, a vast sand desert covering much of the Kandahar, Helmand, and Nimroz provinces, one of the most extensive sand seas in Asia. It is not empty. It has its own ecology of desert-adapted species, its own network of seasonal watercourses, and its own communities of nomadic herders who have been moving across it for centuries. Finally, we move to eastern Afghanistan. Now this is probably the most rugged part of the country. It's home to deep river gorges and dense forests. The valleys cutting through the mountains in dramatic drops towards Pakistan. The forests of Nuristan contain Afghan pine, cedar, and oak species that support one of the most distinctive highland ecosystems in the Hindu Kush region. These forests have been severely damaged by illegal logging, but what does remain is extraordinary. Dark, steep, and ancient in character. A landscape that feels more like the foothills of the Himalayas than the arid country most people imagine. But there is another part of Afghanistan. One that is not really well known. This narrow strip of territory extending towards China. What is this? Well, this is the Wakhan Corridor. And it's one of the most unusual geographical features in the world. A strip of Afghan territory not wider than 65 kilometers, but extending 350 kilometers northeast from the main body of the country to touch the Chinese border at the Wakchir Pass. It was created in 1893 as a deliberate buffer zone between the British Indian Empire and the Russian Empire. The Wakhan is one of Afghanistan's most ecologically intact landscapes. It's a high altitude valley running through the Pamir Plateau. At elevations between 2,800 and 5,000 meters, the Wakhi people who live in the corridor's lower valleys have maintained a pastoral lifestyle adapted to these extreme conditions for centuries. This rugged landscape means there's a host of wildlife in Afghanistan, one of which is the Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopard ranges across the high valleys of the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs. Its Afghan population is estimated at between 100 to 200 individuals only. It hunts Marco Polo sheep, the largest wild sheep in the world, whose curved horns can span up to 1.5 meters and whose range is almost entirely confined to the high Pamir Plateau of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China. Brown bears still inhabit the mountain forests of Nuristan and Barakshan. Wolves, golden eagles, and the Afghan pika persist in the more remote valleys. Deep in the central highlands of Afghanistan's Bamiyan province lies the Bande Amir National Park. This was Afghanistan's first national park, established in 2009. It's home to six deep blue lakes and a landscape of red sandstone and white travertine formed by natural carbonate dams. Their color is an intense, almost impossible blue against the red of the surrounding rock. It is easily one of the most visually striking landscapes in Central Asia and almost nobody outside of Afghanistan knows it exists. However, four decades of continuous conflict has severely impacted the environment here. The environmental damage of Afghanistan's wars is one of the least reported on aspects of the country's crisis. Nearly 70% of the original forest cover has been lost since the 1950s. The cedar pine forests of Nuristan have been particularly devastated by illegal logging. This is primarily because timber was one of the few commodities displaced communities could access and sell, creating a feedback loop of environmental destruction and economic desperation. Afghanistan sits at the headwaters of some of Central Asia's most important river systems. However, Afghanistan's glaciers on the Hindu Kush are slowly retreating. Studies document significant glacier loss across the Hindu Kush over the past few decades, with consequences for the seasonal flow of rivers that downstream populations in six different countries depend on. But in my opinion, the most fascinating part of Afghanistan is Afghanistan's urban geography. So what are Afghanistan's cities like and why are they where they are? Afghanistan's cities are almost all located for geographical reasons that predate their current political significance by centuries in most cases. They sit at junctions of mountain passes or the confluence of rivers. Let's start with Afghanistan's capital and largest city, Kabul. Kabul sits in a narrow valley at 1800 meters above sea level surrounded by mountains on all sides. It's at the junction of several river valleys that make it one of the most accessible points in the eastern Hindu Kush. The Kabul river flows through the city eastward towards Pakistan and the Indus river system. There are mountain passes in almost every direction connecting it to the north, south, east and west of the country. The population of Kabul has exploded since 2001, from an estimated 1.5 million to around 4 to 6 million. But why and how is Kabul growing so fast? Well, the growth has been driven primarily by rural displacement from conflict. But the concentration of international aid and economic activity in the capital and by the collapse of the rural economy in many of the provinces. The city's infrastructure like water, sanitation and electricity has not kept up with the city's growth. The informal settlements spreading up the surrounding hillsides house hundreds of thousands of people in conditions of extreme poverty and vulnerability. Their mud brick construction particularly susceptible to the earthquakes that regularly strike this seismically active region. Above the chaos of this ever-expanding city, the mountains are always visible. Kabul is characterized by the Hindu Kush on the horizon, with the snow line descending in October and retreating back up in April. Another major city in Afghanistan is Mazar-e-Sharif. Mazar-e-Sharif is in the northern plains near the Uzbek border. It's Afghanistan's fourth largest city and the economic hub of the northern region. Its position on the flat, fertile northern plains gives it a character entirely different from the mountain cities. It's more open, accessible and commercially oriented towards the Central Asian republics across the Amu Darya. The road north of Mazar-e-Sharif across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan is one of Afghanistan's most important trade arteries. Additionally, Mazar-e-Sharif is home to one of the most remarkable buildings in Central Asia. This is the Blue Mosque at Mazar-e-Sharif. One of the most beautiful mosques and buildings in general in all of Central Asia. Its turquoise and blue tilework shimmering against the flat plains and the vast sky of the north. It's also home to a shrine dedicated to Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shia Islam and one of the most respected and beloved individuals in all of Islam. Then there are the two poles of Afghanistan, the city of Herat and the city of Kandahar. Herat in the west on the Hari River near the Iranian border is probably the most Persian-influenced of Afghanistan's major cities. Its access to water, its position on the trade towards Iran and its mild climate produce a tradition of gardens, vineyards and melon orchards alongside its extraordinary architectural heritage. Then there's Kandahar in the south on the edge of the Raigistan Desert. It's the heartland of Pashtun culture. Its proximity to the Pakistani border and the Raigistan Desert have shaped a city and its surrounding culture defined by the specific demands of the semi-arid and tribal landscape. Lastly, you have the eastern city of Jalalabad. Sitting just 570 meters above sea level, dramatically lower than Kabul which sits at 1800 meters, barely 150 kilometers to the west. The descent from Kabul to Jalalabad along the Kabul River Gorge is one of the most dramatic road journeys in Afghanistan. Now, Jalalabad's position makes it strategically critical in a way that no other Afghan city quite replicates. Because it sits at the eastern end of the Kabul River Valley, controlling the approach to the Khyber Pass, the famous mountain corridor connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan. For centuries, this was the primary gateway through which goods, armies and people moved from Central making Jalalabad one of the most important cities in Afghanistan. Alexander the Great crossed into Afghanistan in 329 BCE. He spent three years there. That's because the Bactrians and the Sogdians resisted him in mountain guerrilla campaigns that his army was poorly equipped to counter. This was the first of the many lessons that the terrain of this region has taught invading armies. The Macedonian cities Alexander left behind created one of the greatest cultural syntheses in the ancient world, Gandharan art. A fusion of Greek sculptural tradition and Buddhist iconography that flourished in the valleys of eastern Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan from roughly the 1st to the 5th century CE. The Buddha depicted within Greek drapery, Mediterranean facial features, the curling hair of Hellenistic deities, is one of the most beloved and improbable artistic traditions in history, born from the collision of two civilizations in the mountain valleys of a landlocked country deep in the center of Asia. From the 2nd century onwards, Afghanistan became a major center of Buddhist civilization, a consequence of its position on the routes between India, Central Asia and China. Buddhist monasteries in the Bamiyan province attracted pilgrims from all over the Buddhist world. Two giant Buddha statues carved into the valley's sandstone cliffs in the 5th and 6th centuries, standing at 38 and 55 meters tall. These were among the most ambitious sculptures in the ancient world, visible from enormous distances across the high plateau, guiding travelers towards the monastery complex at their feet. Tragically, in March 2001, the Taliban destroyed them with explosives and anti-aircraft guns over several weeks. The act was a deliberate erasure of pre-Islamic history and an assertion of authority over the landscape itself. The niches where the statues stood do remain, but they're empty and enormous. Their scale is made more apparent by the absence of what used to fill them. The 15th century in Herat represents one of the peaks of Islamic civilization anywhere in the world. The Timurid Empire, ruling from this city in the western Afghan plains, presided over a golden age of art, architecture, poetry and science that produced the likes of the Great Mosque of Herat. The astronomer Ali Qushji worked here. The famous poet Jami worked here. The artist Kamal-ud-Din Behzad, considered by many art historians as the greatest miniature painter in the Islamic tradition, worked here. Herat, in the 15th century peak, was the cultural capital of the Islamic world. This is the fact that sits most oddly alongside the image of Afghanistan as a remote and ungoverned frontier, the land that the world associates with the Taliban produced just five centuries ago, some of the finest art in Central Asia. But there was another chapter in Afghanistan's history, because between the Buddhist civilizations and the Timurid dynasties came the Mongols. And the Mongol passage through Afghanistan in the 13th century was one of the most complete acts of destruction in the pre-modern world. Genghis Khan's campaigns across the region between 1219 and 1221 destroyed cities that had existed for centuries. Belk, the mother of cities, it was one of the great urban centers of the ancient world, was razed. The city of Herat was destroyed. Marco Polo, traveling through the region 50 years later, found landscapes described by previous travelers as prosperous, now reduced to largely emptied ruins. Afghanistan's human geography is probably just as complex as its physical geography, perhaps even more so. The country is home to several different ethnic groups, speaking an estimated 40 different languages. They're organized around tribal, clan, and valley-based identities that the physical landscape produced and still enforces. The mountain valleys isolated communities from each other, and the passes connected them in specific yet limited ways. The result is an extraordinary diversity of cultures within a relatively small land area. The Pashtuns, they are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, comprising roughly 40 to 45% of the population. It's important to understand that the last complete census was conducted in 1979 in Afghanistan, so many of the numbers I use in terms of demographic percentages are nothing more than estimates. The Pashtun are concentrated in the south and east, their territory straddling the Pakistani border in ways that make the 1893 Durand line one of most contested and controversial borders in all of Asia. Another ethnic group that's primarily found in Afghanistan and in small numbers in neighboring Pakistan are the Hazara. These are predominantly a Shia Muslim community occupying the central highlands of the Hazarajat. Another major ethnic group found in Afghanistan are the Tajiks. This is the same ethnic group that makes up the majority of the population in neighboring Tajikistan. They make up about 27% of the population. They are Persian speakers speaking a dialect known as Dari, and they're predominantly Sunni Muslim. They live primarily in urban centers in the north and northeast of the country. There are other smaller ethnic groups like the Turkmen and the Uzbek that are distributed around the country. Now, Afghanistan's diverse ethnic and religious makeup contributes significantly to its political and social tensions, leading to political power struggles and historical grievances among many of these groups. This has heavily influenced the country's ongoing conflicts. Now, unfortunately, we know that Afghanistan has been the home of many different conflicts across the last few decades. But what was Afghanistan like before these conflicts began? So, let's head back to the early 1970s. Afghanistan was a poor country by economic standards, but it was a functioning one. Afghan women were allowed to study at universities. The country had a tourism industry. The hippie trail from Europe to India passed through Kabul, drawn by the Hindu Kush landscape, the archaeological sites, the bazaars. Photographs from this period show a country that looks like in its cities more like a 1960s Tehran than anything we see today. The same tectonic forces that built the Hindu Kush also concentrated mineral wealth in Afghanistan's rocks on a scale that has only recently been quantified. A US geological survey recently identified and estimated $1 trillion worth of mineral deposits in Afghanistan. One of those deposits is the copper deposits at Masainak, just to the southeast of Kabul. This is one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits on earth. But Masainak is not only a copper deposit, it is one of the most significant archaeological sites in all of Central Asia. Because this site's history stretches back more than 5000 years. Interestingly, Masainak means little copper well in Dari, suggesting that the copper deposit was known and exploited in antiquity. Archaeological excavations have revealed a Bronze Age settlement dating to roughly 3000 BCE and above those Bronze Age remains and far more extensively documented lies one of the largest Buddhist complexes ever found in Afghanistan. This Buddhist city flourished between roughly the 2nd and the 7th century, a period of more than 500 years. However, there is some bad news. Because Masainak is currently under threat. Remember that copper deposit I mentioned earlier that's located underneath Masainak? There is currently plans in place to extract that copper. And the extraction means massive mining projects, and these threaten to demolish the remaining unexcavated ruins. Approximately 125 acres remain buried and that are currently vulnerable to future destruction. And thus, in my opinion, Afghanistan is home to two different stories. Number one is the land story. Extraordinary, complex, larger and more buried than any single image can contain. Mountains that can break armies, rivers to sustain millions of peoples, and deserts, forests, plateaus and lakes of stunning colors. Then there is the human story. 4000 years of civilization, built and destroyed and rebuilt on the same terrain. Greek statues of the Buddha, the beautiful artwork of Timurid miniatures, ancient cities that have been capitals of empires many people have never even heard of. The death, destruction and conflicts of recent decades are just the most recent chapter. And in no way are they the defining one. The land predates it by hundreds of millions of years. The human story predates it by thousands of years. Both will outlast it. But even after spending almost 30 minutes talking about Afghanistan, I realize that there is so much more to cover. But unfortunately, there is only so much information I can present in a video like this. But I wouldn't be a responsible channel that discusses human geography if I don't spend a few minutes talking about our next topic. And that is the systematic erasure of women from public spaces by the recent Taliban government. That's because the current government has deprived women and girls of almost all of their fundamental human rights. This means they're prevented from accessing education beyond the age of 12. They're prevented from working with UN agencies, NGOs and state institutions. They have no freedom of movement, expression and the freedom of political participation. The Taliban requires women must be accompanied by a male chaperone while traveling. Of course, this limits the woman's ability to work. Women and girls face increasing levels of gender-based violence at home and in public. The UN reported a 40% increase in the risk of violence against women and girls under the Taliban and that 14.2 million women needed protection and assistance. Now, politics is something I usually don't feature on my channel. But this goes way beyond politics. And thus, I cannot talk about Afghanistan without mentioning some of the human rights violations taking place there right now. If you'd like to learn more about what's happening in Afghanistan in terms of the human rights violations, I'll leave a link below in the description. And as always, if you like content like this, give this video a like. Let me know down in the comments below which other countries you'd like me to make a video on. I try to make a video like this at least two or three times a month. So if you like this video, I'm sure you'll like some of the upcoming content I have coming on this channel. But while you're here, why not check out two of these videos that are on your screen right now. I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.