# Posted 7:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

OUR AFGHAN CORRESPONDENT CHECKS IN: I ended my last travelogue with our group leaving the pesticide-happy town of Tashqurgan and driving to Mazar-e-Sharif. By the time we arrived and checked into the comfortable World Food Program guest house, I was too worn out to venture out and see the famous shrine (or mazar) from which the city takes its name -- the blue-tiled tomb of Hazrat Ali, with its thousands of white pigeons. We drove past it; it looked lovely from the road. If I ever get back there, I'll head over for a closer look.

The next morning, our Deputy Project Head made a spot decision to drive north to the border with Uzbekistan. If we do manage to get agricultural exports going, after all, most of them will leave through either Pakistan or Uzbekistan, so the Deputy Head wanted to see what the transport facilities were like at the border. He also wanted to see the Amu Darya, the border river that separates Afghanistan from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and decide if it was suitable for a big canal project to irrigate the arid plains of northern Afghanistan. My sense is that the government of Uzbekistan would take strong issue with the idea -- as would every environmental group active in the region, given that the shrinking of the Aral Sea (the inland sea fed by the Amu Darya) is one of the region's most infamous ecological catastrophes. But the DH was undeterred, so north we drove.

The plains soon turned into true desert, with camels and huge, road-swallowing sand dunes. We arrived in the gritty border town of Hairatan, driving through a gate adorned with portraits of Hamid Karzai and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic-Uzbek warlord. Here as in Mazar, I noticed a few women wearing headscarves instead of burqas. For all his many flaws, Dostum is less of a stickler for Islamist discipline than many of his fellow militia commanders. Women have rather more freedom under his rule than under his rivals in Herat or Paghman.

In Hairatan, we drove first to an oil depot. Afghanistan gets much of its oil from Uzbekistan, and tanker trucks fill up here for their long drive through the mountains to Kabul. The Amu Darya rolled past the depot, sluggish and swirling brown, with a couple of makeshift barges tethered to shore. A few hundred yards away, we could see the Friendship Bridge, built by the Soviets in 1982, who demonstrated their rather Orwellian concept of friendship by sending lots and lots of people across the bridge for an extended visit. There isn't a whole lot of traffic across the bridge these days, if what we observed was an average morning -- a few sluggish trucks, and a single, small train.

We were informed that there was a port facility nearby, and the Deputy Head's eyes lit up -- we could send goods out by water! I told him that the river flowed into Uzbekistan and that was pretty much it, but he was still excited to find an exception to Afghanistan's landlockedness. When we arrived at the gate to the port of Hairatan, we found several armed guards there, looking uneasily at our pack of Kalashnikov-toting Panjshiri escorts. Needless to say, in a region where the main conflict is between the Uzbek-led Junbesh and Tajik-led Jamiat, we didn't make any friends by bringing a bunch of well-armed Tajiks along with us. The guards let us in, but told our shooters to wait outside, and went to call the boss. "The man, Abdullah, who runs this port, he is a big commander under Dostum," our driver Ainodeen whispered to me. "Great," I
whispered back.

The port was underwhelming, containing no barges, a bunch of empty shipping containers, and an out-of-commission crane. While we stood there in the baking sun, Mr. Abdullah showed up -- a hefty, smiling gentleman with a denim jacket, a well-groomed mustache, and a sizable entourage. He told us how glad he was that we had come to see his port, and that he was sure we would be able to provide the resources to get it running at full capacity again. Our Deputy Head asked how far the river was navigable downstream of Hairatan. "As far as Termez," replied Abdullah (through Mohibi's translation). "That's about five kilometers away," I whispered to the DH. "And when you get your goods to Termez, what do you do with them?" the DH asked, slightly disappointed. Well, they would be loaded onto a train, and sent to Tashkent and Moscow and other such places. The Deputy Head pointed up at the Friendship Bridge, where a train had just begun to rumble across, and asked where that train was coming from. "Termez," replied Abdullah cheerfully, and repeated how very glad he was that
we were going to be investing in his port.

It seemed clear that short of wartime border closures or disruption of the rail line, the only reason for the port to exist was smuggling goods over short distances. It also seemed fairly clear that we wouldn't be able to accomplish much in this town (certainly including our Deputy Head's grand Amu Darya canal scheme) without putting some money into Commander Abdullah's boondoggle. So we gave him our business cards, said we'd get back to him on the port thing, and left.

It was a good ten-hour drive back to Kabul. We headed back through the Tashqurgan gorge and the rolling hills around Samangan, to the bridge at Pul-e-Khumre, where the road heads north to Kunduz and south to Kabul. Afghanistan's only functioning textile factory is there, so we stopped for a quick look around. Then we started the long ascent to the Salang Tunnel.

The Salang Pass, one of the few gaps in the Hindu Kush, has long been the main conduit between Kabul and northern Afghanistan. In the early 1960s, the USSR built a 3 km long tunnel a few hundred meters below the pass, to keep the road open year-round. The Salang Tunnel has since become a vital lifeline for southern Afghanistan, the shortest link to northern grain surpluses and Uzbek oil supplies. As such, it was a key strategic point in the fighting against the Soviets and the civil war that followed. There's a gutted Russian tank on the roadside every mile or so. Along most of the ascent, the road is lined with white-and-red rocks; as soon as the asphalt ends, the landmines begin. ("One heck of a rumble strip," as our California consultant observed). Massoud bombed the tunnel on his retreat from the Taliban, in a vain attempt to keep them out of the north. Reopening and shoring up the Salang Tunnel was one of the first priorities of the new Kabul government, but as you can imagine, the road quality is still not the greatest.

As we drove up toward the gleaming peaks, we had to stop a couple times to remove the dust filters from our straining vehicles and have them blown out by a roadside vendor with a compressed air canister. The air grew cold, and patches of snow began to appear at the roadside. At the top of a series of steep switchbacks, we drove into our first avalanche gallery -- a length of road roofed over so it won't be blocked by falling snow. These long galleries are dark to begin with, and the dust kicked up inside them swirls around without ever quite settling... except in the flooded ones, where the snowmelt pours in overhead like a carwash and fills the deep gouges in the road surface. Our drivers sped blindly through the dust clouds and subterranean rivers, dodging the sluggish, wheezing oil trucks and passenger-packed Toyota Corollas, sending up great plumes of muddy water as our vehicles plowed through flooded nine-inch potholes. It was like a particularly manic amusement park ride, with the amusement somewhat tempered by mortal fear.

Finally we reached the Salang Tunnel proper: a dark circle in the mountainside ringed by blue concrete and surrounded by tumbledown Soviet barracks and warehouses. The first hundred yards of the tunnel were the worst -- the road was heavily cratered, and our vehicles bucked and shuddered wildly, spraying snowmelt into the blackness. A wire ran overhead, connecting a sporadic array of dim light bulbs, but for the most part our headlights were the only illumination. I thought about how many trucks and cars I'd seen with their headlights out since arriving in Afghanistan, and squinted anxiously into the gloom ahead. We drove for long minutes through the darkness. At a couple points, construction crews had roped off half the road, and were gamely trying to resurface a few dozen yards. Periodically the shadow of an oil tanker would loom up ahead of us, and our drivers would flash a warning semaphore to any oncoming traffic while doing their best to speed around the truck.

Three kilometers later, we emerged at last into a long avalanche gallery winding along the side of the mountain. To the south, flashing zootropically between the pillars of the gallery, the peaks above Panjshir glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. The sky was dramatically overcast, and we could see the road winding steeply down the long valley below us. Definitely one of the most beautiful views of my trip.

As we descended, I noticed that most of mines had been cleared from this side of the pass; the cliffs were speckled with the white checkmarks and blue stripes that signify "all clear." The south side of Salang is more heavily settled than the north side, with clusters of stone houses clinging to the bluffs and spires high above the road. We drove under several of their "wells" -- buckets sent down from the clifftop villages on long wires to the river. The sun was setting as we reached the foot of the mountains and drove into the Shamali Plain. A couple hours after nightfall, we were back in Kabul -- in time for me to finish off the leftovers from Thursday pizza night at Le Monde Guesthouse. Home again, home again.

Next time: The valley of Panjshir (0) opinions -- Add your opinion