For nearly 20 years, the road from Kabul to Kandahar has been a troubling example of what was going wrong in Afghanistan
CARS SWERVE from one side of the road to the other as they jockey to avoid the deep ruts in the decaying asphalt. The traffic passes the ghosts of American posts as it slaloms around the craters and shattered culverts left by roadside bombs.
The biggest dangers have subsided now that the very fighters who once attacked the road are standing guard along it. A month after the Taliban took power, the journey from Kabul to Kandahar gives an illustration both of how the country changed overnight and of the failures that helped precipitate the change.
The Taliban’s checkpoints are still there, but now they are formal, waving traffic through. By contrast the American-built security posts which lined the road in an unsuccessful effort to protect the route are already decaying. Some fly the white banner of the Taliban. Others are deserted. In the oldest, scrap merchants have removed the wire holding up the giant sandbags that ring the outposts. All that remains are sinking cubes of earth being reclaimed by the desert.
For the residents of rural Wardak, Ghazni and Zabul provinces, the foreigners’ efforts were of questionable value, says a journalist in the city of Qalat, in Zabul. “The whole focus was on the centres and I could not see any development in rural areas,” he says. “That’s why people started rising against the government.” The war over the road also brought night raids, air strikes and disappearances to the districts. Both sides were ruthless.
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