Panjshir Valley in the context of "Bagram"

Charikar, also known as Imam Abu Hanifa or Imam Azam, is the capital of Parwan Province in northern Afghanistan. It also serves as the district center of Charikar District, which has a population of around 171,200 residents. They include nearly all ethnic groups of Afghanistan. The city was officially renamed in December 2022 to honor the 8th-century Sunni Muslim theologian and jurist Abu Hanifa, who is also sometimes called Imam Azam ("The Great Imam") and was the founder of the Hanafi school of Islamic law.

Charikar lies on the Afghan Ring Road, 69 km (43 mi) from Kabul along the route to the northern provinces. Travelers would pass the city when traveling to Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz or Puli Khumri. Despite the proximity to Kabul, slightly more than half of the land is not built-up. Of the built-up land, almost equal parts are residential (37%) and vacant plots (32%), with a grid network of road coverage amounting to 19% of built-up land area, as of 2015. The city is at the gateway to the Panjshir Valley, where the Shamali plains meet the foothills of the Hindu Kush, and is known for its pottery and high-quality grapes.

Panjshir (Pashto: پنجشېر, Dari: پنجشیر, lit. 'five lions'), commonly known as Panjsher, is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, located in the northeastern part of the country containing the Panjshir Valley. The province is divided into seven districts and contains 512 villages. The main inhabitants of the province are Shamali Tajiks, who speak Dari. As of 2021, the population of Panjshir province was about 334,940. Its current governor is Mohammad Agha Hakim.

Panjshir became an independent province from the neighboring Parwan Province in 2004. It is bordered by Baghlan and Takhar in the north, Badakhshan and Nuristan in the east, Laghman and Kapisa in the south, and Parwan in the west.

Ahmad Shah Massoud (2 September 1953 – 9 September 2001) was an Afghan military leader and politician. Known as the "Lion of Panjshir", he was the foremost commander of Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias, and actively fought against the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies, from the time the regime rose to power in 1996, and until his assassination in 2001.

Massoud came from a Tajik Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with religious anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist. He participated in a failed uprising against Mohammed Daoud Khan's government. He later joined Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami party. During the Soviet–Afghan War, he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking the Panjshir Valley. In 1992, he signed the Peshawar Accord, a peace and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan. He was appointed the Minister of Defense as well as the government's main military commander. The accord was opposed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords, initiating the Second Afghan Civil War.

The Panjshir River flows through the Panjshir Valley in northeastern Afghanistan, 150 kilometres (93 mi) north of Kabul. Its main tributary is the Ghorband River which flows from the Parwan Province and joins the Panjshir River 10 km east of Charikar in Bagram District. The Panjshir River takes its source near the Anjuman Pass, flows southward through the Hindu Kush and joins the Kabul River at Surobi.

Florentia Sale crossed this river during her captivity under Wazir Akbar Khan in 1842 during the First Anglo-Afghan War. A dam was built on the Panjshir River near Surobi in the 1950s to supply water from the Panjshir River to the Kabul River. There is just one permanent bridge on the Panjshir River that provides access to the Bagram Airport. On 12 July 2018, a flood in Panjshir Valley killed ten people.

Khawak Pass (elevation 3,848 m (12,625 ft)) sits across the route heading to the northwest from near the head of the Panjshir Valley through the Hindu Kush range to northern Afghanistan via Andarab and Baghlan.

This is the route traditionally thought to have been followed by Alexander the Great in the spring of 329 BCE when he led his army from the Kabul Valley across the mountains to Bactria (later Tokharistan in the north). Vincent Smith states that Alexander took his troops across both the Khāwak and the Kaoshān or Kushan Pass. According to some scholars, there is no proof of this.