The Kabul River (Landai Sind): from the Unai pass to the Indus

At a glance

• The Kabul river rises at Sar Chashma, about 14,000 feet up in the Koh-e Baba north-west of Kabul, and joins the Indus a little above Attock. It is the only Afghan river that reaches the sea. [7]

• Its length depends on who measures: Wilde in the Encyclopaedia Iranica gives about 350 km, and the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 counts about 316 miles from the Unai pass to the Indus. [6, 7]

• In the lower valley the Pashto name is Landai Sind, "the short river". Raverty's dictionary of 1860 gives it for the river of Kabul, and the Gazetteer gives it to the stretch below Nisatta. [5, 6]

• Warsak dam, 30 km from Peshawar, was built with Canadian money under the Colombo Plan and began generating in 1960-61. [3, 9]

• The river carries about 17 million acre feet of water from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and when Pakistan proposed a treaty in 2017 the two countries had none. [10, 11]

From the Unai pass to Jalalabad

The river starts as a stream east of the entrance to the Unai pass, in the same high country where the Helmand, the Arghandab and the Hari Rud also rise. [7] It runs south-west through the hills of Maidan-Wardak, enters the central plain of Kabul at Rishikor, and goes through the capital in a narrow valley between the Koh-e Sher Darwaza on the south and the Koh-e Asmai on the north. [7] The Imperial Gazetteer says it can be forded as far as Kabul city. [6]

Four kilometres east of the city the Logar joins it from the south. The Logar valley is called the granary of Kabul. [7] Below that the river enters the Tang-e Gharu gorge, where the road from Kabul to Jalalabad runs beside it. Near Sarobi it takes in the Panjshir, its largest tributary at 320 km. [7] The Gazetteer lists the rest in order: the Tagao fifteen miles further, the Alingar and Alishang twenty miles below that, the Surkhab a few miles above Jalalabad, and just below the town the Kunar from the north. After these, it says, the Kabul "becomes a large river, nowhere fordable", and it hugs the north side of the valley until it enters the Mohmand hills. [6] The valley and its town are described in Jalalabad.

Near Dakka the river turns north and then east. It does not go through the Khyber. It cuts through the Safed Koh north of the pass and leaves Afghanistan. [7] The mountains it passes are described in The Pashtun lands and the pass in The Khyber Pass.

Across the Peshawar valley to Attock

The Gazetteer follows the river into British India at the fort of Michni, where it splits in two. The northern branch, the Adezai or Hajizai, is the main stream. It runs for twenty miles between the Peshawar and Charsadda subdivisions, and after another ten miles through Charsadda it rejoins the southern branch, the Naguman, at Nisatta, having taken in the Swat on the way. [6] The Swat's own floods are told in Charsadda and Hashtnagar. Below Nisatta the joint stream is the Landai. It flows between low banks for its first twelve miles, then cuts a deep, rocky channel below Nowshera, and after 36 miles it falls into the Indus at Attock. [6]

Dawn's Alizeh Kohari, writing in 2014, described "the startlingly red waters of the Kabul river" draining into the Indus. [10] Peshawar lies on this plain, and the Yusufzai reached it from Kabul around 1500; see The Yusufzai.

Landai Sind, Kubha and Cophen

Raverty, a British officer who spent years collecting Pashto, defines sind (a river, the sea, the ocean) in his dictionary of 1860, and under it gives landdaey sind, لنډي سيند: "The little river, the river of Kabul, which joins the Indus a little north of Attak." [5] In his preface he gives the title of an early Yusufzai history, by Shaykh Malli, which he dates to 1417, as a "History of his tribe and their conquests in the Peshawer Valley, and in the Sama'h or Plain, on the northern bank of the Landdaey Sind or Kabul River." [5] The Gazetteer of 1908 uses the name more narrowly, for the river below Nisatta: "the Landai or 'short' river". [6]

The older names are known from writers outside the Pashto world. Arrian, writing in Greek about Alexander's march into India, says that after crossing the Hindu Kush Alexander "advanced towards the Cophen" and sent word to Taxiles and the chiefs on this side of the Indus. [1] The translator, Chinnock, adds in a note that the Cophen is now called Cabul. [1] The Sanskrit name is Kubha. Griffith's translation of the Rigveda lists it among the rivers in the hymn in praise of rivers (X.75), and in his introduction he quotes Weber's reading that the Indian people of the oldest hymns were settled "on the Kubhā", the Kophen, "in Kabul". [2]

Warsak and the dams

The first big dam on the river is in Pakistan. Work on Warsak, on the Kabul about 30 km from Peshawar, began in 1951 under the Colombo Plan with Canadian financing. In 1960-61 four 40 MW units were switched on, and two more of 41.48 MW followed in 1980-81, for 242.96 MW in all. [3] The dam is 250 feet high and 460 feet long, and its canals water 119,000 acres. [3] Dawn put the cost at $109.35 million and said in 2012 that heavy sediment in the river had run the generating units down. [9] WAPDA says the output fell to 150 MW, and Dawn reported that the project was being rehabilitated. [3, 9]

Upstream, the Kabul was dammed by foreign engineers in the same decades. Wilde lists Sarobi, built with German help and opened in 1957 to give Kabul electric power; Naghlu, finished by Soviet engineers ten years later; Darunta in the gorge west of Jalalabad, also Soviet; and a German-begun project at Mahipar in the 1960s. [7] He adds that since the 1990s droughts have repeatedly dried the river up in summer. [7]

A further dam is planned. In early November 2012 Afghanistan's water and power minister, Mohammad Ismail Khan, signed a design contract for Shahtoot dam, 18 km south of Kabul, with an Iranian firm, Poyab. He said it would give drinking water to more than two million Kabul residents and irrigate 4,000 hectares in Charasiab and Khairabad, at a cost of $305 million. [12] In February 2021 Afghanistan and India signed an agreement for it, which TOLOnews reported at about $236 million and about three years of work. [13]

Who owns the water

The Kabul brings Pakistan about 17 million acre feet a year, and part of it is held behind Warsak and used to irrigate the Peshawar valley, whose wheat, sugar cane and tobacco are, in Kohari's words, "economically strategic crops". Afghanistan, she wrote, had planned a series of hydroelectric projects on the river with Indian help, which "could affect water supply" to those fields. [10]

Pakistan's position was set out in January 2017, when The Nation reported that Pakistan was about to open talks on a bilateral treaty on the Kabul "to prevent any future water dispute with the brotherly western neighbour". It said Pakistan believed Afghanistan took some water from the Chitral area that would otherwise reach the Kunar, that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government suspected the Swat was being used too, which could not be confirmed, and that the move followed Indian statements about giving Kabul a reservoir on the river. [11] The same report puts Afghan concern on the other side: that Pakistan used the river's water without a formal accord. [11]

Afghan officials, for their part, describe Shahtoot as drinking water for Kabul and irrigation for its farmland. [12, 13] When Pakistan announced its plan for a treaty, no agreement between the two governments on the river had been reported. [11]

The floods of 2010

At the end of July 2010 monsoon rain fell on the Peshawar valley at a rate far above the normal for the month. Peshawar airport recorded 274 mm on 29 July, in a month whose normal is 46 mm, and Risalpur, near Nowshera, 280 mm that day and 121 mm the next. [4] The BBC's Lyse Doucet reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that the monsoon flooding was the heaviest since 1929. [14] Kohari recalls the flood of 1929, which covered the Grand Trunk Road from Khairabad to Nowshera and from Nowshera to Pabbi. [10]

NASA's Earth Observatory photographed Kheshgi, in Nowshera district, on 4 August 2010 and described the Kabul river there as thick with mud and spreading over the land. It quoted the provincial government as saying Nowshera had 500,000 people displaced and 161 dead as of 2 August, and the United Nations as calling it the worst-hit district in the province. [8] The floods also moved people. By the river at Nowshera Kohari found a squatter settlement of Punjabis and Sindhis who had left their homes after the 2010 floods and travelled north along the river, having heard that work was better there. [10]

Zubair Torwali, writing about the Swat river, whose water joins the Kabul in the Peshawar valley, says the flood of August 2022 was larger still, with flow and volume about 30 to 40 per cent above 2010. [15]

Rafts, boatmen and river life

The Gazetteer records that from Jalalabad down to Dobandi, the old name for Nisatta, travellers went by raft: "rafts of inflated skins", which in flood covered in twelve hours a journey that took ten marches by land. [6] Boats of 40 or 50 tons could use the river from Nisatta to Attock. [6] The boatmen of Lalpura, Jalalabad and Kunar were known as nilabi; the Gazetteer calls them "a peculiar race, keeping much to themselves", which is its writers' view of them. [6]

Raverty's dictionary has the word for the raft: jāla'h, جاله, which it glosses as "a raft of wood or inflated hides", beside its other senses of a bird's nest and a coarse sheet for catching mulberries. [5] It also lists jisr as a bridge of boats. [5] Kohari saw the same river culture at Nowshera in 2014: shrines and temples on the banks, among them that of Jhoolay Lal, the patron saint of travellers revered by Muslims and Hindus alike. [10]