Want

Want, written Wanat by the armies that fought there, is the village on the lower Waygal river where the valley opens towards the Pech, about eight kilometres above Nangalam and the Pech road. For as long as Nuristan has had districts the government offices for the whole Waygal valley stood here, which is why the district's official name was Want Waygal. On the road up from Nangalam it is the second village of the valley, after Shenigal: terraced fields along the river, houses stepped up the slopes, the forest above.

The world knows the name from one day. On 13 July 2008 some two hundred fighters attacked a newly built American outpost at the edge of the village, Combat Outpost Kahler, and in the fight that followed nine American soldiers were killed and twenty-seven wounded, with four Afghan soldiers wounded. The outpost was abandoned two days later, on 15 July, and the battle became one of the most examined of the whole war. Its people speak Waygali like the rest of the valley, farmers of the terraces and keepers of the forest, and the road, the school and the clinic reached them late.

In 2025 the authorities in Kabul split Want Waygal in two, keeping Want as the centre of the lower valley and creating a new Waygal district for the upper valley, a decision protested in Nuristan that summer over where the new centre should sit and what a line through one valley would do to its people. People in the valley now say Want district and Waygal district. No official boundary has been published yet, so the lines on our map are our own. Want takes the lower valley from Shenigal up to the mouth of the Jamach stream: Shenigal, Want itself, Kegal and Akun in the side valley that joins the river at Want, Muldesh, Nishigram and Jamach. Waygal has everything above it, from the Arans valley up. The government's 2014 map drew Nuristan's border across the valley above Want, leaving Shenigal, Want, Kegal and Akun in Kunar, so on this stretch our map moves the border down the valley to take them in.

Visitors reach Want from Asadabad on the Pech road, turning north up the Waygal at Nangalam; from Want the valley road climbs on towards the villages of the upper valley and Waygal itself. Our guides are from this valley, and they will tell you which of the two names to use.