Hemmed in by mountains to the north and desert to the south, in a region infested with Taliban fighters, Highway 1 has once again become a scar on the face of Afghanistan. It is the main route east and west through this region — as it has been for a thousand years — and according to Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, chief of the land staff for the Canadian Forces, more than half of Canada’s seventy-odd combat deaths have occurred within twenty kilometres of this stretch of road near Maiwand, west of Kandahar. The throughway was a channel of death for the ancient Greeks and Persians, for the British and Soviets, and now for the Canadians. Along with the route from Baghdad to its airport, Highway 1 is one of the most murderous stretches of road in the world.
Forming the southern half of the ring road that circles the impenetrable central mountains of Hazarajat, Highway 1 traces an arc from Kabul in the east down to Kandahar in the south and up to Herat in the west. Sixty-six percent of all Afghans live within fifty kilometres of the ring road, 63 percent of the country’s cultivated land lies within the same area, and it’s along Highway 1 that the war in the south is largely being fought.
A good measurement for the success of the nato-led International Security Assistance Force (isaf) in Afghanistan is the degree to which it is able to secure the entire ring road. But, says Steve Appleton, the former program manager of road construction for the United Nations Office for Project Services, progress has been slow, and the results are unsettling. Perhaps this is why the ring road is rarely discussed during Canada’s rather abstract national debate on our involvement in Afghanistan. Stein suggests that public and political discourse focuses on matters such as destroying poppy fields and building the Kajaki hydroelectric dam because these objectives are more circumscribed and more easily defined. Nonetheless, Highway 1 remains the artery by which these and other missions must be supplied, and there are simply not enough troops to secure it for any significant period of time.
From war, neglect, and sabotage, much of the ring road is in ruins. As the Western allies try to rebuild it, the Taliban consistently try to stop them. They have murdered Turkish road engineers and contractors, and killed, kidnapped, and decapitated Indian engineers working on the Herat stretch and the new Delaram tributary road in the west. Appleton (now retired) says that not even Highway 1 is complete — as some in nato’s isaf would have us believe — to say nothing of the entire ring road. This spring, insurgents blew out the road east of Kandahar, and fear of attacks brought construction to a halt around Lashkar Gah. Iran, which was to complete the ring road stretch north of Herat through Badghis province, seems to have reneged. Alarmingly, says Appleton, there are rumours that some Afghan construction companies are now Taliban controlled. The ring road is a lifeline, and to the Taliban destroying it is almost as good as seizing control of it.
On maps of ancient trade routes, one finds the intersecting paths of today’s ring road around the central mountains. Alexander the Great took the region by following part of the route from Herat to Kandahar and almost the exact course that Highway 1 now takes to Kabul. In the eighteenth century, Pashtun conquerors, the founders of modern Afghanistan, marched the old India-Persia trade route from Kandahar to take Herat from the Persians. In July 1880, a British force moving along the route near Maiwand met with disaster at the hands of Afghan rebels, right near where the Canadians died this past Easter.
Years before Moscow invaded in 1979, the Russians made the ring of dirt roads into a crude cement highway. Anton Minkov, from the Centre for Operational Research and Analysis at Canada’s National Defence headquarters, says that during the 1950s and ’60s, as the Soviet Union and the United States were vying for control over Afghanistan, each built sections of
Highway 1: the Soviets doing the Herat-Kandahar stretch, the Americans Kandahar to Kabul. In the north, the Soviets paved connections across their own border to tie Afghanistan to the ussr and for invasion purposes; from the first, the road was designed for heavy military transport.
The Soviet strategy was to take the main cities and secure the ring road that bound them. But their army ran into the same problems the isaf is facing today. According to Minkov, every single Soviet convoy that ran along Highway 1 was attacked, and 25 percent of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan were tied up in the ring road’s defence. In the end, 11,000 military trucks were destroyed, and the Soviets never realized their goal of taking Panjwaii, the western gateway to Kandahar.
The area around Panjwaii is the ancestral home of the Taliban, and the village of Sangsar, a short distance to the north in Uruzgan, is said to be the birthplace of the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar. Omar founded the Taliban partly to eliminate extortionate toll stations set up by local warlords along Highway 1 after the Soviet withdrawal. In the civil war that followed, the Taliban took Kandahar and made it their capital. During the fighting, the entire ring road was destroyed. After the Taliban took power, they left it in ruins because, they reasoned, restoring it would open the door to cosmopolitan influences.
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