---
type: Place
title: Kandahar
description: The Taliban's birthplace and headquarters, and the city Harry calls both the most intense and the kindest he has been to — Pashtun hospitality, a nomad camp, and a flour mill worked by hand.
tags: [kandahar, afghanistan, taliban, pashtun, hospitality, nomads, history, education]
coordinates: {lat: 31.6206, lng: 65.7158}
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
---

# Kandahar

Southern city in [Afghanistan](/countries/afghanistan.md) where the Taliban
movement was founded in the 1990s and where its leadership is based —
"Taliban everywhere", in Harry's words, and the most intense stop of his
week. It is also one of the oldest continuously settled places in the world,
and Harry's verdict after a full day in it is that it is simultaneously the most
intense city he has been to and the kindest.

## The Pashtun south

Kandahar is Pashtun, and that shapes everything Harry records here.

- **Hospitality is the defining trait**, and it is a formal obligation rather
  than a mood: the guest is treated as God, and loyalty runs to the tribe. A
  butcher with no tea in the shop went out and bought some rather than not offer
  it.
- **The Taliban are all Pashtun** — Harry is told you have to be Pashtun to be a
  member.
- **You cannot easily tell who is Taliban.** Everyone here wears the Pashtun hat
  that usually identifies them elsewhere; the guns are the only reliable tell.
- **Far more conservative than the north.** There are no women on the streets at
  all, where in northern cities you see them.
- **Faces vary enormously** — Harry points out people who read as Indian,
  Pakistani, Iranian, Central Asian, and some who he says look English, which is
  why he is regularly taken for Afghan.
- **The language changes with the region**: Persian in the north, Pashto here.

## What the day looks like

- **Mud-walled houses with flat roofs**, uncovered sewers, and a dry desert heat
  — the visual he keeps reaching for is a film set.
- **A crowd forms wherever he stands still** for more than a minute. His method
  is simply to keep moving.
- **Gifts are pressed on him constantly**: sugar cane, tea, and a ring from a
  jeweller who flatly refused payment for it.
- **Ice is stored under insulation** rather than refrigerated, which is how it
  survives the heat.
- **Naswar**, a legal tobacco snuff held under the tongue, is offered free.
  He's warned first-timers feel sick from it. It stings immediately.
- **Military walls and watchtowers are everywhere and he films none of them** —
  filming them gets you in trouble.

## Children and work

The hardest material on the page, and Harry doesn't soften it.

- **A madrasa student** he speaks to studies only religion — no maths, no
  science, no English, no computing — knows the Quran by heart, and says he
  wants to be a mujahid when he grows up. Harry's reaction on camera is that the
  child has never been taught anything else.
- **Children under ten have been working all day**, which he reads off their
  faces at a trampoline park in the evening.
- **A boy at the flour mill works for his uncle and does not go to school.**
- **Most people cannot read or write in any language**, which Harry gives as the
  measure of the education system.

At the trampoline park he paid 500 afghani — about £5 — so that every child
present could get on. The boys pushed to the front, so he asked the owner to let
the girls on next, and did not film them. He also objected on camera to the
owner whipping the children to clear the trampoline, and says plainly that he
does not agree with it.

## The nomads

On the city's outskirts, a camp of nomadic Afghans — Harry didn't know the
country had any until his guide told him. He is received by the head of the
tribe in a clay-built, covered house that stays cool in the heat, floored with
rugs and cushions, with a goat pen and a mosque under construction alongside.

What he is told:

- **There is no plan for a day.** They go out and find out what they earn.
- **Land disputes happen often** when someone claims the ground they've stopped
  on.
- **The children don't go to school** — his guide's translation is that they
  don't see the worth of education.
- **They have no expectations of the future** and describe themselves as content
  with a simple life.
- **Marriages are arranged**, within the tribe.

Asked what his own life is like, Harry answers that he was lucky to be born
where he was, that he counts it daily, and that the reason he films in
Afghanistan is to change the perception that it is dangerous — because tourists
bring money to people like his host. He left about $100.

## The flour mill

Wheat tipped in by hand and flour out the other end, with almost no machinery
anywhere in the process.

- **A sack is 49 kg** and sells for around 1,700–1,800 afghani, about $22.
- **A 72-year-old is doing the manual labour**, and not complaining, in the
  heat. Harry's line: most people in the West have retired at that age.
- **His observation about it**: people here are too busy to think about
  happiness at all — it doesn't enter the equation.

## Other stops

- **The tomb of a Muslim saint** on the outskirts — Harry is told he performed
  miracles comparable to Jesus's — heavily decorated, in the mountains, and very
  peaceful.
- **A destroyed government guest house**, formerly a popular place to stay
  outside the city, wrecked by a suicide bombing and now rubble.
- **Roadside juice**: pomegranate pressed by hand and sugar cane through a
  machine with a Taliban flag on it, sold by the same man. Sugar cane is very
  sweet, pomegranate sour, and he rates the pomegranate.
- **NFC**, the Afghan version of KFC, where the thing to order is mantu —
  dumplings with yoghurt and tomato, which he calls the best dumpling he has
  ever eaten.
- **A Taliban group** invited his party over, and one member refused to shake his
  hand on learning he isn't Muslim — the only genuinely bad experience of the
  trip. Harry chose honesty over the advice to claim he was Muslim. Minutes
  later a local invited him home for dinner, the fifth invitation that day.

## The verdict

Harry's conclusion, given at the end of the day after a stranger at the next
table bought him a drink: he has been to 40 countries, and Afghanistan is number
one in the world for hospitality — explicitly knocking Pakistan off the top.

## Harry's tips

- **Go with a guide who knows the local dynamics** (see
  [travel with a local guide](/tips/travel-with-a-local-guide.md)) — this is not
  a wing-it city, and the nomad visit and every translation here depended on one.
- **Keep moving.** A stationary foreigner draws a crowd within a minute.
- **Don't film the military installations**, and don't film women or girls.
- **Expect intensity and don't take individual rudeness as the measure of the
  people.**
- **Say yes to the tea.** Refusing costs more than the ten minutes.

## Source

- [7 Days in the Most Dangerous Country in the World 🇦🇫](/videos/IXFVJx6BZ_Y.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXFVJx6BZ_Y
- [Inside the Taliban's Most Notorious City (Afghanistan) 🇦🇫](/videos/gkVBxlH4owk.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkVBxlH4owk