About
About this site
The Roashans is a family website: a place to discuss Afghanistan, and to keep the writing of several generations of the Roashan family in one place.
What you will find here
Country Corner collects Dr. G. Rauf Roashan’s essays on Afghan politics and society, written between 2003 and 2014: the first years of the Karzai government, elections and corruption, the war and the peace talks, Afghanistan’s neighbours, and the security agreement with the United States.
My Ancestral Home is the memoir of Mohammed Khalid Roashan, Afghanistan, My Ancestral Home. In a preface and fifteen chapters he describes growing up in Kabul and Nangarhar, his schooling, journalism and government service, and the years of change that followed.
Art & Culture gathers poems and short prose by Dr. Rauf Roashan, Zalmai Roashan and Murtaza Roashan, in English and in Dari, together with verses by other Afghan poets.
Resources holds articles in Dari on Afghan history and culture, and a reading list of the news reports and analysis Dr. Roashan followed while writing Country Corner.
Afghanistan in pictures is a gallery of freely licensed photographs and works of art: the land, its monuments, the painting and calligraphy of Herat, crafts and treasures, and colour photographs of Kabul and Paghman from 1928. Some of them also appear at the top of each section and in the memoir. Their authors and licences are listed under Picture credits.
Finding your way
Every piece is listed by year in the Archive, and by writer on the Authors page. Search looks through the full text of everything on the site, in English and in Dari. New writing is announced in the RSS feed.
About the texts
The writing on this site was first published on the earlier version of roashan.com. When the site was rebuilt in 2026, every piece was carried over. Obvious typing and spelling slips were corrected, along with broken characters. Where an essay ended with the author’s own date, that date is now shown. The authors’ wording was not changed.
Articles from other publications that had been reposted in full now appear in Further reading as a short excerpt with a link to the original publisher. All other texts remain © their authors.
Old links
Links to the old site, such as index.php?article=…, still work and lead to the same piece in its new place.