Introduction

Friendly, beautiful Afghanistan was once well known on the backpacking circuit as the place to stop for unparalleled hospitality, fantastic food, great hiking and...um...OK, we'll say it, that legendary hashish. Things, sadly, have changed.

More than 20 years of war and Taliban rule left the dramatic countryside peppered with landmines and reduced many of the finest monuments and minarets to rubble. The poverty left in war's wake has taken an impossible human toll and encouraged the theft and sale of priceless national treasures.

Between 1996 and 2001, everyone was kept under close watch by a skittish and heavily armed military theocracy that could not find legitimacy abroad. Then it became the focal point for the West's wrath because of suspected involvement in the September 11 attacks. The dust has not yet settled, and nobody's burning their burquas just yet. So say a prayer to Allah (or the deity of your choice) for peace, and perhaps beleaguered Afghans will once again be able to welcome the backpacking masses.

Warning

Afghanistan remains highly insecure, especially outside the capital, Kabul. US-led military operations against remnants of Taliban forces are ongoing. Acts of violence, often targeting foreigners, continue within and outside Kabul.

Landmines, banditry, and ethno-political conflict add to the grim picture. Visitors should maintain a very high level of security awareness, avoid demonstrations and policital gatherings, avoid travelling alone and in the dark, and contact their consular representative for the latest information.

When to Go

Afghanistan's mostly mountainous geography makes for varying degrees of harshness depending on the altitude. Most of the country experiences a harsh winter from December to February where 8°C (47°F) is a warm day and -8°C (18°F) a very cold night. A light to moderate wet season occurs from October to May with March and April being the only particularly wet months. Between June and September it is quite dry with average highs in the low 30°Cs (high 80°Fs) and apart from the arid winds along the Iranian border it can be quite pleasant. However May and September to October provide partiicularly comfortable mid 20°C days (around 80°F) and a little more moisture. Afganistan's lower areas have slightly warmer winters with the only significant rain for the year and summer days bake with an average high around 39°C (104°F) in July.

Events

Even if you're brave enough to visit Afghanistan these days, you should still avoid large gatherings, particularly those marking national and Muslim holidays. But, should curiosity get the best of you, cover yourself according to the strictest local custom and check out these celebrations.

One of the most important holidays in Afghanistan is Navrus (New Days), celebrated around March 21, on the spring equinox. It's an Islamic adaptation of far more ancient festivities, and special foods - wheat for the ladies and veal for the men - are prepared. Wine is traditionally part of the service, but that custom has been put on hold by the puritanical Taliban. Navrus is a family affair these days, though some communities still take it into the streets.

Liberation Day takes place on April 18, and probably isn't the party to flaunt any connections you might have with the West. It's followed by Revolution Day, April 27, making the whole month a great time for flag waving. May 1 means Labor Day, here as in all the former Soviet republics. Independence Day is celebrated August 18 with at least some fanfare.

The four major Islamic holidays are celebrated according to the lunar calendar, so check the dates and plan ahead. Eid-ul-Azha, the Feast of Sacrifice, marks the beginning of the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Those who can afford it buy and slaughter an animal, then share the meat with friends and strangers. Mawlid-an-Nabi, the Prophet Mohammed's birthday, is much more low-key.

Ramadan is the month of fasting. From sunrise to sunset devout Muslims who can physically handle it are asked to go without food, drink, cigarettes and just about everything else. It's illegal - not to mention very, very rude - to do any of these things in front of people observing this important holiday. Eid-ul-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, when friends and families gather to eat, eat and, if so inclined, smoke cigarettes.

The capital of Afghanistan was never a terribly attractive or interesting city, something that has certainly not improved during the last 20 years of conflict. The Soviets left the city reasonably intact in 1989, but since then Kabul has been virtually destroyed by bombardments and street battles, with an estimated loss of some 30,000 lives.

The Kabul Museum, which used to have one of the finest collections of antiquities in Asia, has had nearly three-quarters of its finest collections looted. It's still possible to see the remaining artifacts - those without any significant monetary value - but museum hours are erratic.

It was also once possible to walk the five-hour length of the crumbling walls around the ancient citadel, Bala Hissar, but they are now off limits and extremely dangerous due to unexploded bombs and landmines. The pleasant Gardens of Babur, at the time of writing also off limits, were once a cool retreat near the city walls.

The modern town of Ghazni is just a pale shadow of its former glory. The city is only 150km (93mi) southwest of Kabul on the road to Kandahar, but poor roads mean the trip still takes most of the day. Ghazni today is known mainly for its fine bazar, featuring goods from Afghanistan and surrounding countries.

The carefully restored tomb of Abdul Razzak and the museum within are of interest. There are also some very fine minarets, the excavations of the Palace of Masud and, most surprisingly, a recently discovered Buddhist stupa that has survived from long before the Arab invasion of the 7th century.

Herat was once a small, provincial, relatively green, laze-about place that everyone seemed to like, an easy-going oasis after a lot of hassle and dry desert. In the 15th century, Herat was the Timurid centre of art, poetry, miniature painting and music, blending Persian, Central Asian and Afghan cultures to create one of Central Asia's cultural highlights. Today the city sits particularly uneasily under puritan Taliban rule.

The Friday Mosque, or Masjid-i-Jami, is Herat's number one attraction and among the finest Islamic buildings in the world, certainly the finest in Afghanistan. It has some exquisite Timurid tilework to complement its graceful architecture. Herat's ancient citadel, or qala (1305), was once a Taliban base. The covered bazaar in Char souq is a complex of all sorts of shops and artisans' workshops.

A short walk from the city centre are the remains of an old medressa (1417), built by the Queen Gaur Shad. The wife of Timurid ruler Shah Rukh, Gaur Shad was Timur's daughter-in-law and a remarkable woman in her own right, who kept the empire intact for many years. Her mausoleum still stands near the medressa, a carbon copy of the Gur Emir in Samarkand.

The shrine complex of Gazar Gah (1425) is about 5km (3mi) east of Herat. The tomb of Abdullah Ansar, a famous Sufi mystic and poet who died in Herat in 1088, is the main attraction. The Afghan King Dost Mohammed and the famous Persian poet Jami are also buried here.

The 65m-high (123ft) Minaret of Jam, 313km (194mi) from Herat and around 550km (341mi) from Kabul, is the second highest in the world, as well as one of the oldest, dating back some 800 years.

Kandahar is situated in the far south of the country, about midway between Kabul and Herat. It's the second-largest city in Afghanistan and lies at an important crossroads, where the main thoroughfare from Kabul branches northwest to Herat and southeast to Quetta in Pakistan.

Kandahar lies very much in the Pashto heartland and has gained modern significance as the power base of the Taliban militia. Kandahar's great treasure, a cloak that once belonged to the Prophet, is safely locked away from infidel eyes in the Mosque of the Sacred Cloak, known locally as Da Kherqa Sharif Ziarat.

A few kilometres from the centre of Kandahar towards Herat are the Chihil Zina, or Forty Steps. They lead up to a niche carved in the rock by Babur, founder of the Mogul empire, which is guarded by two stone lions.

Northeast of Kabul, Nuristan (Land of Light) is mountainous, remote, little-visited and of great ethnological interest - and memorably described in Eric Newby's hilarious A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Shahr-i-Zohak (The Red City) enshrines the remains of an ancient citadel which guarded Bamiyan, and is about 17km (11mi) before Bamiyan itself and 180km (112mi) northwest of Kabul. This was once the centre of the Ghorid kingdom.

Bamiyan was once home to the Great Buddhas, which stood 35m (114ft) and 53m (174ft) high, and were enclosed within dramatic shrines carved from the cliff walls. Built between the 2nd and 5th centuries, these ancient giants were destroyed by Taliban officials in 2001. Clerics interpreted Islamic law to mean that such artifacts were disrespectful to Allah, though the world (including the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia) begged them to reconsider. You can still visit the shrines, though little remains.

Shar-i-Gholgola is the most important ruined city in the valley. The name means 'city of sighs', and climbing to the top of a dramatic nearby cliff to look across the valley at the Buddhas used to be a popular activity. The sighs of visitors continue to echo from the peak, though their timbre has changed.

The incredible lakes of Band-i-Amir (Dam of the King) boast clear, cold blue water dammed by sulphurous deposits and surrounded by towering pink cliffs. It's located 75km (47mi) beyond Bamiyan.

History

Afghanistan's history as a country spans little more than two centuries, although it has contributed to the greatness of many great Central Asian empires. As with much of the region, the rise and fall of political power has been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of religions.

It was in Afghanistan that the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism began in the 6th century BCE. Later, Buddhism spread west from India to the Bamiyan Valley, where it remained strong until the 10th century AD. The eastward sweep of Islam reached Afghanistan in the 7th century AD, and today the vast majority of Afghanis are Muslim.

Between 1220 and 1223, Genghis Khan tore through the country, reducing Balkh, Heart, Ghazni and Bamiyan to rubble. After damage was repaired, Timur swept through in the early 1380s and reduced the region to rubble again. Timur's reign ushered in the golden Timurid era, when poetry, architecture and miniature painting reached their zenith.

Timur's fourth son, Shah Rukh, built shrines, mosques and medressas throughout Khorasan, from Mashad, in modern-day Iran, to Balkh. Heart continued to prosper under Sultan Hussain Baykara (died 1506), producing such great Central Asian poets as Jami and Alisher Navoi.

The rise of the Great Mogul empire again lifted Afghanistan to heights of power. Babur had his capital in Kabul in 1512, but as the Moguls extended their power into India, Afghanistan went from being the centre of the empire to merely a peripheral part of it. In 1774, with European forces eroding the influence declining Moguls on the Indian subcontinent, the kingdom of Afghanistan was founded.

The 19th century was a period of often comic-book confrontation with the British, who were afraid of the effects of unruly neighbours on their great Indian colony. The rise of tensions and the weakness of the Afghan kingdom resulted in some remarkably unsuccessful and bloody wars being fought on extremely flimsy pretexts. The first, between 1839 and 1842, saw the British garrison almost totally wiped out while retreating in the Khyber pass - out of 16,000 persons, only one man survived. The British managed to re-occupy Kabul and carried out a bit of razing and burning to show who was boss, but this again was short-lived.

Following local wars, from 1878 to 1880, Afghanistan agreed to become more or less a protectorate of the British, happily accepted an annual payment to keep things in shape and agreed to a British resident in Kabul. No sooner had the diplomatic mission been installed in Kabul, however, than all its members were murdered. This time the British decided to keep control over Afghanistan's external affairs, but to leave the internal matters strictly to the Afghans themselves.

In 1893 the British drew Afghanistan's eastern boundaries along the so-called Durand Line, neatly partitioning many Pathan tribes into what today is Pakistan. This has been a cause of Afghan-Pakistani strife for many years, and is the reason the Afghans refer to the western part of Pakistan as Pashtunistan.

From WWI onwards Afghanistan's trade was tilted heavily towards the USSR. Soviet foreign aid to Afghanistan far outweighed Western assistance. Only in tourism did the West have a major influence on the country. Turkish-style reforms failed and the country remained precariously unstable for decades. The post-war kingdom ended in 1973 when the king - a Pathan, like most of those in power - was neatly overthrown while away in Europe. His 'progressive' successors were hardly any more progressive than he had been, but the situation under them was far better than that which was to follow.

After the bloody 1978 pro-Moscow revolution, Afghanistan rapidly deteriorated. Its pro-communist, anti-religious government was far out of step with the strongly Islamic popular movements in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, and soon the ever-volatile Afghan tribes had the countryside up in arms. A second revolution brought in a government that leaned even more heavily on Soviet support and the country lurched towards anarchy. The USSR decided that enough was enough. Another 'popular' revolution took place in 1979, and a Soviet puppet government was installed in Kabul, with what looked like half the Soviet army lined up behind it.

An Islamic jihad (holy war) was called and seven mujaheddin factions emerged. The Soviets soon found themselves mired in what later became known as 'Russia's Vietnam'. The war ground on through the 1980s. Afghan tribal warriors remained disorganised but determined, brave and increasingly well-equipped; the CIA pumped up to US$700 million a year into the conflict in one of the largest covert operations in history. Soon the Soviet regime held only the cities, which were cut off as road convoys were ambushed and aircraft brought down with surface-to-air missiles. In the late 1980s Gorbachev finally pulled the Russians out.

The war had cost the Soviets over 15,000 men, galvanised Central Asian nationalism and contributed significantly to the collapse of the USSR. More than a million Afghans lay dead and 6.2 million people, over half the world's refugee population, had fled the country. Afghanistan, once again, was reduced to rubble.

The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 weakened the government of President Najibullah, who proposed a government of national unity. The mujaheddin declined. In April 1992 Najibullah was ousted; a week later fighting erupted between rival mujaheddin factions in Kabul. An interim president was installed and replaced two months later by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a founder of the country's Islamic political movement. The fighting continued, doing more damage than the Soviet occupation.

The two bitter rivals were, however, forced into an alliance in May 1996 by the spectacular military successes of a group of Islamic fighters called the Taliban, a group of ethnic Pashtuns ('talib' means 'religious student' or 'seeker of knowledge') backed by Pakistan. They took Kandahar in 1994 and in September 1996 entered Kabul unopposed - Rabbani and Hekmatyar's forces had already fled north.

The Taliban were pushed further south by the US-backed Northern Alliance in 2001. On the international field the Taliban they seemed to enjoy playing the part of the pariah. In 1998 the US bombed the southeast in an attempt to flush out terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden. In retaliation a UN official was murdered in Kabul and all UN staff and aid agencies temporarily pulled out of the country. That same year tensions with Iran almost spilled over into war. The Taliban also made themselves infamous by their sadistic repression of women and dissidents as well as their destruction of the country's cultural heritage.

Following terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC in September 2001, the USA and its allies began military operations in Afghanistan to find terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and quash the al Qaeda terrorist network, allied to the Taliban. The Taliban disbanded, thus ending one of the world'd most repressive regimes, although they have since resumed guerilla operations.

Since December 2001 a UN-appointed interim government has brought a thin veneer of stability to the government. With no end in sight to the military operations, and ethnic unrest and banditry a serious problem, the outlook for Afghanistan remains bleak. In September 2002 an assassination attempt was made on President Hamid Karzai, highlighting the country's precarious state of affairs.

Culture

Afghanistan is an intensely Muslim country. Although the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif is one of the most important Shia Muslim shrines, the country is 85% Sunni. The Hazaras of central Afghanistan form the bulk of the Shias, and as such have strong links to Iran. The country has historically been a great centre of Sufism.

In 1959, Afghan leadership stopped enforcing the seclusion and veiling of women, something that the Holy Qu'ran is often interpreted to require. However, the Taliban's accession to power has brought back the burqua with a vengeance. Afghan women are flogged or otherwise punished for refusing to wear the shuttlecock-shaped accouterment, or for being on the street without the company of a male relative, or for painting their nails. Women can only attend single-sex hospitals (of which there are few) and are not allowed to seek employment or education. Female visitors to Afghanistan should take great care: dress even more carefully than you would in Iran, keep a man close by whenever you take to the street, and do not enter mosques.

Afghanistan's Islamic heritage is also the basis of its famous hospitality: if you - male or female, Muslim or not - are invited into a home, expect to be treated with a respect not often understood in the West. Though a family may clearly be putting themselves under financial strain to provide a meal for you (the honoured guest), refusing the invitation or offering to bring food would be a grave insult. A gift of fruit, flowers or something small from home would be appreciated, however.

Afghanistan's geographical position - for centuries crisscrossed by armies, empires and trade routes - combined with its varied geological terrain have given rise to the great diversity of foods, arts, languages and traditions that make up this country's cultural heritage. Unfortunately, many of the country's artistic treasures have been surreptitiously sold on the global market, while 2001 saw the destruction of the Great Buddhas in Bimiyan by the Taliban. The Afghan people have, in some ways, sacrificed such luxuries in order to survive. However, no country with as rich and plentiful a heritage as Afghanistan could forget this source of strength and expression. If and when this country is blessed with a little peace, expect to be dazzled by its contributions to the world's culture once again.

Environment

Afghanistan's dramatic landscape encompasses a variety of biomes, from arid steppes to alpine fields. The seismically active mountains of the Hindu Kush, where most of the country's water falls as snow, are home to many plants and animals that exist nowhere else on Earth. The steppes and intermediary ecosystems are also of interest to the amateur biologist.

But, as with many places in the former USSR, land and water mismanagement led to the destruction of many of these unique natural habitats. While unruly Afghanistan was spared the worst of this trend - not even the Soviets wanted to risk a nuclear jihad - the constant, high-tech bloodshed of the last 20 years has left no environment undisturbed.

Unexploded artillery, landmines of every vicious sort and other implements of destruction are hidden in hill and vale; no one in their right mind would hike here without pushing a very large, very light metal detector in front of them.

Though Afghanistan's tough wildlife would likely recover given just a moment of peace, that moment doesn't seem like it's coming soon. Consider postponing your studies of Central Asian daisies for a few more years.