SHAH JOI, Afghanistan, 7 September 2003 — Even on a good day, progress along the 300-mile highway between Kabul and Qandahar, Afghanistan’s two major cities, is painfully slow. In a few spots, massive machines inch along under the hot sun, laying a coat of asphalt that extends perhaps 100 yards by dusk. Ahead wait endless stretches of rutted, sandy track, passing through parched lands of grazing sheep and camels.
But on a bad day, it seems that forces more nefarious than equipment breakdowns, shipping delays or hot weather are determined to sabotage the US-funded project.
Just before midnight Aug. 31, a gang of armed men on motorbikes attacked a police checkpoint near a camp for Indian and Afghan highway workers in this remote district of Zabol province. Six of the sleeping guards were killed, several others were kidnapped and two vehicles were incinerated by rockets and gunfire.
“The people who did this do not want Afghanistan to be rebuilt,” said Mahmoud Sozan, 40, a shopkeeper in Shah Joi, a town about three-quarters of the way from Kabul to Qandahar. “This road has been destroyed by fighting since I was a boy. If it is paved again, we will be able to send our grapes and melons to the cities much faster. But these strangers who come in the night, they want to stop everything.”
None of the assailants was caught, but officials suspect they were part of a newly regrouped and well-organized force of fighters from the Taleban, the militia that ruled Afghanistan for six years and was overthrown in late 2001. Since July, more than 200 Afghans have been killed in bombings and other guerrilla assaults blamed on the Taleban.
Two weeks ago, in their boldest offensive to date, as many as 1,000 Taleban fighters occupied a mountainous region of Zabol called Dai Chupan between the highway and the Pakistani border. US military forces responded by launching Operation Mountain Viper, which combined sustained bombing with ground attacks by hundreds of Afghan and US forces.
On Wednesday, Afghan security officials in Zabol announced that they had driven most renegade fighters out of the province and that 125 bodies of dead enemy fighters had been found. But Taleban commanders — who felt bold enough to name their own provincial governor last week — reportedly said they had only made a tactical retreat.
In the wake of Sunday’s attack near the highway camp, project officials in Kabul said they have asked Afghan and US military authorities for extra protection in addition to the 800 Afghan troops that currently patrol the highway in trucks or stand guard at roadwork sites. But they insisted that the work would proceed and be completed, on schedule, by year’s end.
“We are committed to having a paved road by Dec. 31. There is a determination to carry on, but security does have to be beefed up,” said Michael Staples, a spokesman for the US-based Louis Berger Group, which is overseeing the $250 million reconstruction contract for the US Agency for International Development. Japan is funding the last 50 km — about 30 miles.
Staples said rebuilding the highway is an important “symbol of unification” for Afghanistan after 25 years of conflict, as well as a practical means of speeding goods, services and government authority to remote regions of this impoverished nation.
But the project, which President Hamid Karzai named one of his top priorities after taking office in December 2001, was plagued by repeated bureaucratic and financial delays. An official ribbon-cutting was held in October 2002, but work did not begin in earnest until May, with bids awarded to Turkish, Indian and Afghan American firms to build five sections of road.
The logistics were daunting enough; power shovels, drums of asphalt and virtually everything else had to be imported by air or road. While most grading has now been completed, paving is still in the early stages. The journey between Kabul and Qandahar, while swifter and less jolting than a year ago, is still marred by patches of deep sand, zigzagging detours and cratered sections of old asphalt destroyed by tanks, land mines and thousands of cargo trucks.
From the beginning, the job has also been fraught with danger. Much of the route had to be cleared of mines left from the civil war of the 1990s, a painstaking process in which teams test the earth square by square, using trowels, metal detectors and dogs.
The de-mining teams, working alone in remote areas of the ethnic Pashtun heartland that brought forth the Taleban, were also easy targets for saboteurs. One de-miner was killed in May, causing work to be temporarily suspended, while others have been beaten or had their vehicles burned by unknown attackers.
But the brutal assault, coming at a time of unprecedented Taleban resurgence, has sent new jitters up and down the highway, where gas stations and restaurants sporting colorful flags and neon lights have been built in anticipation of a long-distance traffic boom. Along the route, people expressed anger at the attack and fear that the project would be suspended.
Many said repairing the road was so important to the country’s future that they could not believe other Afghans — even the Taleban — would sabotage it. Instead, they blamed next-door Pakistan and its powerful intelligence agencies, accusing them of seeking to destabilize Afghanistan and paying saboteurs to slip across the border.
Tensions between Pakistani and Afghan authorities have been running high in recent months, with widespread reports of Taleban and guerrillas loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar being given safe haven inside Pakistan. Pakistani officials deny sheltering the renegades and blame the long, porous border and its lawless tribal areas for the problem.
Gen. Sayed Ahmad, an Afghan army official from Ghazni who is investigating the attack, said the circumstances were murky and that there were indications the checkpoint commander may have been cooperating with the Taleban. He said he was bringing 60 additional troops to guard the area.
“For two months I have been patrolling this highway, and this is the first fatal incident,” Ahmad said as he indicated the charred hulk of a van resting in front of the now-abandoned checkpoint and the spots where the guards’ bodies had lain. “My job is to make sure this road gets built. If I need more men, I will ask for them.”
For residents of Shah Joi, the central preoccupation is making sure nothing stops the highway from being built. After years of war and drought, they said, the local economy has fallen into such ruin that the town is full of single men who cannot afford to pay the customary bride price.
“This road will be a great blessing to us. We can get our patients to the hospital sooner and send our products to markets faster. Foreign agencies will come and everyone will be busy,” said Hayatullah, a tractor driver. “We like Karzai and we like the Americans, but only if they bring us security and the reconstruction goes on. This is the future of our country.”
