Established in 1989 by Nancy Hatch Dupree in Peshawar, Pakistan, ACBAR incorporates the agency, Afghan Centre at Kabul University (ACKU), which houses a very comprehensive collection of materials relating to Afghanistan.

The Centre currently has 10,000 titles, of which 90% are about Afghanistan. Director Nancy Hatch Dupree is loathe to take them back to Kabul at this point as it would take ‘only one mullah with a match or one American daisy cutter’ to destroy the materials. The Centre holds newspapers from the time of the wars as well as letters and documents that were purchased on the street from traders who were using them to wrap fish. The writers are gone but their ‘diaries’ live on. As so many children grew up in camps or were internally displaced, they have a vacuum where their culture should be, so these documents will fill in the gaps.

The usefulness of this collection cannot be underestimated. Sharif Mohammadi, a historic monuments consultant in Mazar e Sharif, has made extensive use of this collection for reference about the monuments in the north. There are few other resources available to him as so many of the libraries and collections were destroyed or stolen during the wars.