Logar is the valley province immediately south of Kabul, shaped by the Logar River and the mountains that enclose it. Its floor is a patchwork of irrigated fields, gardens, rain-fed plots and rocky outcrops, and the roads from Kabul toward Gardez and Ghazni have long passed this way. Beneath its hills lies Mes Aynak, a major archaeological site, and in its side valleys stand shrines that recall centuries of Sufi learning.
Valley and river
The Logar River, one of the main tributaries of the Kabul River, gives the province both its name and its life. Mountains rise on every side, with higher ranges to the east and south toward Nangarhar and Paktia. Water comes from the river, from springs and from karez channels, and reservoirs such as those at Kharwar and Surkhab store it for the dry months.
In the south-west, the Charkh valley lies at about 2,000 metres in a basin that opens onto the Logar valley, watered by the Pengram stream and by springs. Its orchards were already known in the 14th century, when Ibn Battuta passed through, and today vines, apricot and almond trees still grow there alongside wheat and other field crops.
History and heritage
About 40 km south of Kabul, Mes Aynak spreads over some 4 square kilometres around a rocky hill, Kuh-e Baba Wali, on a rich copper deposit. Copper was mined and worked here probably from the Bronze Age and certainly from the 1st century BCE until the 7th century CE, and from at least the 1st century CE fortified Buddhist monasteries rose around the mines. First reported by the French geologist Albert de Lapparent in 1960 and excavated since 2009, the site has yielded thousands of unfired clay statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, wall paintings, wooden furniture, coins — some struck in a mint on the site — and birch-bark manuscripts of Buddhist sutras.
Charkh, on the old route between Kabul and Ghazni, has its own long story. In 977 the army of Sebüktegin won a victory there that opened eastern Afghanistan to the Ghaznavids. In Timurid times Charkh was the chief town of Logar, and eight shrines scattered through its basin bear witness to a lively Sufi life. The most venerated is that of Mawlana Yaqub Charkhi, who died in 1447 — a disciple of Baha al-Din Naqshband and the author of a well-known commentary on the Qur’an. A Ghaznavid-period mihrab of carved wood, with Kufic inscriptions, adorns a mosque in Charkh.
People and languages
Logar’s people are Pashtuns and Tajiks, with smaller Hazara communities and seasonal Kuchi herders. In Charkh the long-settled population is Persian-speaking, with a Pashtun minority along the valley edges. Near Baraki Barak, a few fortified hamlets kept alive Ormuri, an Eastern Iranian language; by the 1970s fewer than fifty people there still spoke it, while it remained stronger in Kaniguram in Waziristan.
Farming is the main livelihood. Wheat, maize, barley, potatoes and beans grow beside almonds, apricots, walnuts, grapes, apples and mulberries, and families keep sheep, goats and cows.