BOST

afghan city and ancient ghaznavid site.

The city of Bost, later renamed Lashkar Gah, was once the site of a Ghaznavid palace and soldiers' bazaar near the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers in southeastern Afghanistan. Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni built Bost around the year 1000. The city is now the capital of Helmand province and has a population of about 20,000 inhabitants. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bost and its surroundings became part of the Helmand Valley Project, in which the Helmand River, which drains over half of the Afghan watershed, was dammed and a series of canal projects diverted water for irrigation. Afghan farmers were resettled from other areas of Afghanistan to farm this new agricultural area. Although many eventually left and the project was viewed by some as a failure because of the technical problems encountered and the salination of the soil, many thousand acres of arable land were reclaimed from the desert.

During the years of Afghan civil war (1980–2001) the area around Bost was ruled by a series of war-lords. In addition, the drought of the late 1990s and early 2000s drastically reduced stream flows, restricting cultivation and leading to pockets of food shortages. The cultivation of opium poppies moved into this region by the early 1990s.

see also helmand river.

Bibliography

Dupree, Louis. Afghanistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Rubin, Barnett R. The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Grant Farr