On Afghan road, scenes of beauty and death

Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge.

The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.

The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes.

Indeed, driving on the Kabul Gorge seems a uniquely Afghan experience, a complicated dance of beauty and death.

“I sit right here and watch people crash all day long,” said Mohammed Nabi, who fries fresh fish in an open-air stall along the road. “The course of history has proved that the Afghan people are bullies. This is why we cannot drive safely.”

One day last week, 13 accidents unfolded on the road in a mere two hours, all of them catastrophic, nearly all of them fatal. The daylong drizzle made the day slightly more calamitous than most. At one scene, a bloodied family grieved for their kin trapped in a flattened car. At another, a minibus lay crushed beneath the hulk of a jackknifed truck. At still another, the bottom of a ravine was filled with a car’s twisted remains.

And yet even as those accidents spread themselves across the roadway, the cars sailed heedlessly past. Taxis and buses weaved and passed one another at bone-chilling speeds, with only millimetres separating them from bloody catastrophe.

Everyday affair

“The fighting with the Taliban lasts only for a day or two, but the crashes are every day,” said Juma Gul, who owns a fabric shop in Sarobi that looks directly out onto the highway. “It’s a kind of theatre. Sometimes, a car will fly by in the air.”

The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique mix of geography, the road itself, and the drivers’ disregard for the laws of physics.

The two-lane highway is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On the inside lane, less than a yard outside your window, stands a wall of treeless rock that climbs upward in a nearly perpendicular line. A foot-high ledge guards the outside lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far as 1,000 feet down.

For the drivers, of course, that means there is virtually no margin for error: they go into the wall, or over the edge, or into each other.

The only note of caution is provided by children, who live in the impoverished villages nearby. Often as young as 4 or 5, they stand bedraggled at the bends, using flattened green Sprite bottles as flags, waving the drivers through when the way is clear.

Under the circumstances, you might imagine that drivers in the Kabul Gorge would proceed slowly, crawling and craning their necks to guard against oncoming traffic whipping round the next curve. In fact, for most of history, they did.

Over the centuries, countless invading forces passed through or near the gorge on their way to the Khyber Pass. Among them were a group of 17,000 British troops and civilians, who were massacred as they beat a retreat from Kabul at the end of the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1842. Dr William Brydon, who rode into Jalalabad on a horse, was the only European to survive.

The Kabul-to-Jalalabad road was paved for the first time by the West German government in 1960. In the 1980s, it was almost entirely obliterated during the insurrection against the Soviet invasion. In the decade that followed, when the Taliban and other armed groups fought to control the country, the road was a blasted moonscape. The craters were so large that taxis would disappear for minutes at a time, only to reappear as they struggled to climb out.

It was a tough road, and it had its own dangers — stretches of roadway often collapsed or washed away — but speed was not among them. That changed in 2006, when a European Union-backed project finally smoothed the road all the way through. Now Afghans could finally drive as fast as they wanted.

Tricky drivers

And they do! The cars zoom at astonishing speeds, far faster than would ever be allowed on a similar road in the West, if there was one. Like Formula One drivers, the Afghans dart out along the sharpest of turns, slamming their cars back into their lanes at the first flash of oncoming disaster. Most of the time they make it.

The danger is heightened by other things. On paper, the government of Afghanistan requires that drivers pass a test to get a license, but few people seem to have one.
Then there are the cars themselves, battered Toyota taxis and even Ladas from bygone Soviet days. A typical Afghan car has bald tires and squeaky brakes — not exactly ideal for zigging and zagging through the mountains.

But perhaps the gravest threat, apart from speed of the cars, is the slowness of the trucks. The massive tractor-trailers that move cargo in and out of Pakistan are often overloaded by thousands of pounds. They cannot move fast; if they are climbing one of the gorge’s thousand-foot hills, they cannot move at all. They get stuck. They fall back. They fall over.

So the cars and their drivers stack up behind them, angry and impatient, and rush and maneuver and pass them at the first chance. And so the cars crash, one after the other.

Each day, the broken and bloody arrive at the Sarobi Hospital, a small clinic in the town at the head of the gorge.

“Most of our patients were injured in accidents,” said Ros Mohammed Jabbar Khel, the chief surgeon.

Dr Jabbar Khel has a plan to buy a fleet of ambulances and stage them at various points along the gorge. That way, he figures, he could save a lot of lives. He said he was waiting for the money to come from the government in Kabul.

Dr Jabbar Khel himself drives the gorge several times a week. And each time, he said, he is filled with fear — not for his own abilities, but for those of the others. “I have a license!” the doctor said. “I took lessons!”