"The present-day wheel road map of Afghanistan is the worst guide possible to the traditional foot-path map, and the foot-path map is the one that has made history. But this traditional map has been transformed, almost out of recognition, by the advent of wheels, and of the explosives that have made wheel-roads possible by blasting fairways through previously impenetrable gorges."
- Arnold Toynbee, Between Oxus and Jumna

Print maps
Two commercially available print maps are recommended: Nelles Afghanistan (1:1.5 million) and GeoCenter Afghanistan & Pakistan (1:2 million). Other maps are available in Kabul, but they tend to be expensive as well as inferior.

For city maps, the most useful to general travellers can be found in Lonely Planet's Central Asia (2004), which contains good plans of Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Bamiyan. Nancy Hatch Dupree's An Historical Guide to Afghanistan contains a fold-out map of Kabul that is still surprisingly useful, as well as rough plans of Herat, Kandahar and Ghazni.

Online maps
The best source of online maps for Afghanistan is the Afghanistan Information Management Information Service (AIMS). An information hub for the development community, AIMS have a wide range of useful country maps, as well as detailed city maps of Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad, Mazar-e Sharif, Kunduz and Shiberghan. Useful for locating NGO and government offices, as well as orientation. The maps are updated on an irregular basis; some of the most recent city maps - most notably Herat and Mazar - include hotels and other landmarks. The maps can also be purchased as large-scale print-outs at the AIMS Kabul office.

Another great online source for maps of Afghanistan can be found at the website of the Perry Castenada Map Collection of the University of Texas.