Highway to Hell
The $300 million Kabul-Kandahar road was meant to be a symbol of the new Afghanistan. But a dangerous trip down it today reveals everything that has gone wrong in America’s longest war
It’s past 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and Zarifa Ghafari is running late for work.
Six days a week, she commutes from her home in Kabul to Maidan Shar, the embattled capital of Wardak province, where she serves as the youngest female mayor in the country. Her office is just 30 miles southwest of the Afghan capital. But getting there requires a drive down National Highway 1, a massive U.S.-built showpiece once hailed as “the most visible sign” of America’s commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan after decades of war. Seventeen years after its completion, the highway is a glaring symbol of America’s failures, scarred with bomb-blast craters that snarl traffic and under constant attack from a resurgent Taliban. “Every time I leave home I’m thinking this trip might be the last one,” says Ghafari. “This dangerous road could decide my fate.”
On the outskirts of Kabul, we detour around a bridge that recently collapsed. The asphalt starts to fall apart, and four lanefuls of traffic are soon jockeying for position on what’s left of the twolane highway. Ghafari’s bulletproof SUV lurches to an abrupt halt, boxed in by incoming trucks on one side and impatient southbound cars on the other: a bad situation. Her driver jumps out, AK-47 slung over his shoulder, to clear a path out of the jam, leaving the mayor unguarded.
“The Taliban like to hide and attack from the trees and homes along the road,” Ghafari says, scanning her surroundings through the bullet-riddled windows of her car. “Anything can happen here.”
Since becoming one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors, Ghafari has survived multiple assassination attempts, including one in March, when gunmen sprayed her Toyota compact with bullets in Kabul, missing her fiance’s head by inches. After months of ignored requests, an armored vehicle was provided by the cashstrapped government. “If the Taliban get the chance, definitely they will kill me,” she says. “I’m on their blacklist.”
Slight and poised, with a midnight-blue headscarf and oversize glasses, Ghafari is just 27 years old. She is a bold testament to how far Afghan women have come since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the extremist Taliban regime. As a child, she was forced to attend a secret school for girls just to get an education. In the postTaliban era she has thrived, earning a university degree in economics and launching a U.S.funded radio station in Wardak aimed at women. In 2018, President Ashraf Ghani chose her over 137 other candidates — all of them male — to be mayor of Maidan Shar, the seat of a strategically important province bordering Kabul where the Taliban enjoy support. “All I had was my talent and my education,” says Ghafari. “Nothing else.”
But her daily, high-stakes gamble to show up for work in a violent city so close to the Afghan capital is emblematic of a government in crisis. The Taliban now control or contest nearly half the country, including large sections of Highway 1, and are gaining ground, propelled by a February peace deal with the U.S. In exchange for a vague pledge to reduce hostilities and not harbor terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, the Trump administration committed to a full troop withdrawal by this summer. In the months since, the Taliban have ramped up their offensive. According to a U.S. government watchdog, attacks against Afghan forces and civilians surged by 50 percent in the third quarter of 2020.
In Wardak, Highway 1 — the government’s key lifeline for moving troops and trade — has been under concentrated assault. The hulks of Afghan army Humvees disfigured by roadside bombs litter the hillsides in Maidan Shar, which we finally reach more than an hour after setting off from Kabul. Construction of a new mosque and children’s “fun park” initiated by the mayor are both stalled. Passing a traffic roundabout with a giant billboard of Ghafari, we slip behind 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that entomb the government compound, and the mayor can breathe easy, for a moment.
Ghafari settles into her office and doesn’t even look up from the stack of paperwork she’s signing when the first Taliban rocket of the day thuds in the near distance. She must leave work by 3 p.m. each day to avoid traffic that could strand her on the highway after dark. Moments later there’s another explosion, closer to the compound. “There are Taliban checkpoints just a few miles from my office, but I’m safe here because of the security forces,” she says cheerfully. “They make every woman, every man around this country feel secure.”
For all her bravura, Ghafari is still a politician with an official posture to uphold. The sentiment is far different among civilians living in besieged villages along the highway, trapped between advancing militants and government forces they allege are firing indiscriminately on their homes in a desperate effort to hold the enemy back.
In the hallway outside Ghafari’s office, I’m summoned by a gray-bearded man. He leads me to a group of tribal elders from Durrani village waiting for an audience with the mayor. All of them blame government forces for reckless retaliations they say have killed loved ones in recent months.
“My wife’s body was torn to pieces,” says Mohammad Ajan, a gas seller. “I gathered all the small pieces of her flesh with my hands.”
“My son was shot in the head,” says Mohammad Anwar, one of his neighbors.
“I lost a nephew,” nods Farouq, the man who summoned me.
A soft-spoken shopkeeper named Abdul Baqi, his arm limp in a sling due to a gunshot wound, describes the latest incident. Two days earlier, his cousin’s four children were injured by an SPG-9 rocket allegedly fired by the Afghan army, “the only people who have these kind of heavy weapons,” Ajan interjects. With no decent trauma facilities in Wardak, the children were rushed to the Emergency Hospital in Kabul for surgery. Their mother, who was outside washing clothes, was killed instantly by the strike, Baqi says. “We buried her yesterday.”
Despite these tragedies, the men roundly affirmed their support for the central government even if they’d lost all faith in its ability to defend them. “How can they protect us?” says Anwar. “They can’t even protect themselves.”
Now iN its 20th year, the U.S. military’s war in Afghanistan has long faded from global headlines. But when historians appraise the cost of the longest war in American history and how it all unraveled, they will inevitably talk about roads: the roughly 10,000 miles’ worth of highways and byways that were built, repaved, and repaired over hostile terrain on the far side of the world at an astronomical cost to U.S. taxpayers, at a time when aging infrastructure was falling deeper into disrepair back home.
In 2001, Afghanistan had less than 50 miles of paved roads in the entire country. A 2,000-mile “Ring Road” connecting major cities that was started by the Soviets back in the 1950s had been pulverized by decades of war and neglect. The U.S. government and its NATO partners believed that a new and improved Ring Road system, or Highway 1, would lay the groundwork for a functioning state: easing commerce and troop movements to improve security across 34 provinces while putting war-weary people back to work.
More than a third of the population live within 30 miles of the Kabul-Kandahar stretch, making it the essential artery. In a state roughly split between a Tajik, Hazara, and Turkic north, and a Pashtun-dominated south that spawned the Taliban, the 300-mile highway would help bind the fractious Afghan nation together.
How far those hopes have plunged. In August, I spent several weeks traveling Highway 1 from Kabul to Maidan Shar and parts of the Sayadabad district, the largest in Wardak province and a staging ground for militant attacks around Kabul. Over the course of hundreds of miles — and in meetings with the Taliban, government forces, and civilians caught in the crossfire — a grim truth emerged: The backbone of the U.S.led nation-building campaign is hopelessly broken, a life-or-death gauntlet where people drive in fear, commerce is stymied, and state forces are targeted with impunity. What was intended to ease the lives of Afghans and cement the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan is, instead, a story of colossal waste and squandered opportunity.
Nearly 20 years ago, construction of the highway started with optimism and promise. In late 2002, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired the Louis Berger
Group (LBG), a New Jersey-based engineering company, to handle the project; with an endof-2003 deadline set by the White House, the expected cost was $300 million. But the highway’s path through hard, ambush-ready badlands pushed engineers and hundreds of road workers to the limit, and made them easy targets. In a three-month period in late 2003, a Turkish LBG subcontractor was kidnapped, another was shot, and two Indian road workers were abducted; two American road superintendents survived an attack near Kandahar in which one was shot in the head. A total of 40 people died during Highway 1 construction in 2003, according to Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator. “We paid for the highway not just in dollars and cents, but in blood,” he writes in a history of the project. “The casualty rates were unprecedented.”
The first layer of blacktop was nonetheless completed on schedule, slashing travel time between Kabul and Kandahar from at least 18 hours down to six. At a roadside ceremony in December, Afghan President Hamid Karzai cut a ribbon with gold-plated scissors. “Today is one of the best days of our lives,” he declared. “We are rebuilding Afghanistan, bringing back to us what we all desired — like every other people in the civilized world.”
By then, however, George W. Bush’s administration was preoccupied with the war in Iraq. Seasoned officers and essential resources were diverted at a pivotal moment in the conflict. “There was a huge sucking sound as all the military talent left Afghanistan,” says a senior U.S. officer who was redeployed to Iraq. With the Taliban out of the way, there was an “opportunity to move quickly in terms of getting the Afghan government up and running in the countryside,” says Richard Boucher, a former assistant secretary of state, who formulated U.S. policy for Afghanistan from 2006 to 2009. “We failed to do that in part because we focused on Iraq and in part because we had this idea that we could do all of it.”
In this security vacuum, the resurgent Taliban laid siege to the highway. Attacks on LBG road crews intensified — fueled in part, Afghan officials told me, by grievances over the company’s failure to hire local workers and consult tribal elders. In February 2004, militants shot down an LBG helicopter, killing the pilot and injuring three employees. Meanwhile, travelers were increasingly stopped at gunpoint and shaken down. State employees were often summarily executed on the roadside. The Taliban made a special effort to destroy fuel and supply trucks that serviced the main NATO military bases at Bagram and Kandahar. In one infamous 2008 attack in Ghazni province, a convoy of more than 40 trucks was blown up and left to burn. “The
highway was a vehicle graveyard,” says the senior U.S. officer, who returned to Afghanistan after serving in Iraq. “We tried to send logistics guys to move all the carcasses of the dead trucks off the road as fast as possible,” but with all the fighting, “they’d sit there for months on end.”
After President Obama’s election in 2008, the spiraling Afghan war swung back into view. A troop surge that would ultimately climb to a peak of more than 100,000 U.S. service members was accompanied by an infusion of billions in funding to boost Afghan security forces. A series of Afghan National Army bases were erected along Highway 1, and motorcycle police units were created to patrol it. Taking a page out of the Iraqi insurgents’ playbook, the Taliban’s use of roadside bombs jumped 100 percent from 2008 to 2009 to become the main killer of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
“They were destroying the roads, always attacking,” recalls Mohammad Halim Fidai, Wardak’s governor from 2008 to 2012. “What is the sin of the road — the road is for everyone!” When he took office, militants were setting up checkpoints on Highway 1 just 500 meters from his compound in Maidan Shar. As thousands more U.S. troops surged into the country, Fidai says, the government was able to extend its influence and enlist local men to guard and maintain roads and rebuild district centers.
Progress was fleeting. Under Obama, USAID cut funding for road construction. It also refused to fund Afghan government maintenance work, having soured on its ability to complete basic tasks. “The lack of continuity of these programs started losing the trust of the people,” says Fidai. “When you don’t support these people, they go back to the Taliban because they become jobless.” In 2012, there were more than 200 bomb attacks and 300-plus shooting incidents on Highway 1, about one for every mile of asphalt between Kabul and Kandahar. What was once hailed as the “road to Afghanistan’s future” had a new nickname: the “highway of death.”
Today the taliban threat is at the edge of Maidan Shar. Less than two miles south of the governor’s compound, police outpost “Black Rock” is the city’s first line of defense: an overlook of concrete walls and sandbags at the mouth of Highway 1. “If the Taliban capture this post, it means they have captured the whole province of Wardak,” says Capt. Sardarwali Stanikzai, Black Rock’s commanding officer. With just 20 men armed with nothing more than Kalashnikovs and a few box-fed PK machine guns, he says his team is being picked off by American-made sniper rifles and night-vision scopes the Taliban have captured. “It would be better if the Americans were still here,” he says. “We are just like blind men fighting. We can’t see them, but they can see us.”
Stanikzai took command of the outpost after his father, a veteran police commander, was assassinated in a Taliban ambush. He says he’s lost four men since he arrived in 2019. The last was three weeks earlier, when a sniper’s bullet struck
his deputy in the head; a pile of rocks marks the spot where he fell. The inner walls of the officers’ bunker are pocked with head-height bullet holes. “We try to steal a few hours of sleep in the daytime when we can, and we stay up all night on guard,” says the captain.
I follow him out to a lookout point with a panoramic view, at once pastoral and menacing. To our rear, a military-intelligence building sits pancaked from a 2019 car bombing that left more than 40 officers dead. Out front, a verdant river valley of orchards ringed by poplar trees sprawls out to the mountains. “The Taliban control all of this,” says Stanikzai, sweeping his arm. “They shoot at us from down there,” he adds, pointing to a pair of men out strolling a field, farmers most likely. I ask if he’s afraid of being overrun. “Of course!” he says. “We worry about that day and night.”
Indeed, soon after we head back to Kabul, some of his men are ambushed returning from the city center on the short, exposed section of highway between the outpost and the governor’s compound. The attack started when a roadside bomb detonated in a canal we had driven over twice that day. No one was killed, but the gun battle raged for most of an hour.
With the Taliban expanding their grip in the backcountry, the need to protect road crews under steady attack around the Ring Road drove U.S. military and CIA officers to spend more and more funds on unsavory partnerships in recent years. Warlords, government officials, religious figures, and other shady power brokers — everyone got paid in a flailing effort to bring stability. “We had partnerships with all the wrong players,” a senior U.S. diplomat told government interviewers, according to “the Afghanistan Papers,” a more than 2,000page trove of documents published in The Washington Post that showed the mismanagement and futility of the war effort. “It’s a case of security trumping everything else,” said Douglas Lute, an Army lieutenant general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013, telling interviewers that the U.S. dumped huge amounts of money into building dams and highways just “to show we could spend it.”
A forensic accountant who served on a military task force in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012 and helped assess some 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth $106 billion concluded that about 40 percent of the money ended up in the hands of Taliban insurgents, criminal groups, or crooked Afghan officials. U.S. officials were “so desperate to have the alcoholics to the table,” an unnamed State Department official said, that “we kept pouring drinks, not knowing [or] considering we were killing them.”
The Afghan sinkhole reached a staggering low with the Gardez-Khost highway, a 60-mile stretch linking the Ring Road to the eastern borderlands. The contract was turned over to LBG, and construction started in 2003. In November 2010, the federal government slapped LBG with the highest ever fine in a wartime contracting case: $18.7 million in criminal penalties and $50.6 million in civil penalties for overbilling. The company’s former CEO had pleaded guilty in 2014 to defrauding U.S. taxpayers of tens of millions. But the project dragged on, unchecked. By the time the road opened, in 2015, costs had ballooned to nearly $5 million a mile, and it became a never-ending boondoggle. A whistleblower later revealed that LBG had, through dubious methods, paid insurgents not to attack the project. More than 200 gold-star families have since filed a lawsuit against LBG and other defense contractors, alleging these kinds of protection payments “aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an al-Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.” (The case is still in court.)
In 2016, the special inspector general for Afghanistan (SIGAR), the government watchdog agency that provides quarterly audits to Congress, published a report on the dismal state of Afghanistan’s roads. Some 95 percent of the Highway 1 sections it inspected were either damaged or destroyed; the Kabul-Kandahar section was “beyond repair” and needed “to be rebuilt,” the report noted, warning that “if the road becomes impassable, the central government will collapse.”
It’s hard to fathom a lower return on investment. According to an October 2020 audit report, the U.S. has spent nearly $134 billion overall on Afghan reconstruction since 2001 — far more than it did rebuilding 16 European countries after World War II. Of the $63 billion reviewed by SIGAR, about 30 percent, or some $19 billion, was “lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.”
In hindsight, some former U.S. officials say that instead of flooding the country with reconstruction aid and contractors, a greater effort should have been made to build up the capacity of Afghan institutions and secure more buy-in from the public. “Afghanistan never had a government that was capable of serving the people,” says Boucher. “It didn’t matter how much we spent: Unless we built the capabilities of the Afghan government to deliver benefits to the people, we weren’t gonna get stability out of it. We were spending money through a broken vessel.”
Beyond the blast walls of Stanikzai’s outpost, Highway 1 carves its way through the hardscrabble farming villages, plains, and mountains of what is now undisputed Taliban country. Two hundred meters down the road, the first bomb crater blisters the pavement; we count 19 in a single 30-mile stretch. In some places we are forced to slalom between yawning pits that
could swallow our car. At least there’s no traffic to contend with.
Photographer Andrew Quilty, filmmaker Mark Oltmanns, and I are squeezed in the back of a beat up Corolla, wearing traditional dress; our translator, Ahmad, sits in front. All of us are on the lookout for Taliban checkpoints that are known to appear out of nowhere and wary of the unexploded bombs that seed the highway. We’re driving to the Afghan army command about 25 miles south of Maidan Shar. The army outposts that crop up every few miles are a jumble of razor wire and Hesco barriers. Some are abandoned. The odd Afghan flag signals where troops are still hunkered down, though no one is visible.
An hour later we pull into a large base that’s built like a maze, spiraling inward to the headquarters, where the commander of the Afghan Army’s 5th Brigade in Wardak, Col. Hamidullah Kohdamani, is surprised — and a little troubled — to see us. Calling on traditional Afghan hospitality, we’ve given him no choice but to host us for the night.
“Since earlier this year, the enemy has stepped up their attacks,” the colonel explains, “so they can say, ‘We are powerful, we can make this situation worse for you.’ ” Drawing a line in the dirt with his boot, he shows me where his troops are massed along the highway, near a notorious insurgent stronghold that U.S. and Afghan forces had both long forsaken to the Taliban. From this base, he says, militants are launching bolder, more frequent attacks on the highway and Kabul. The colonel insists he has a plan to retake the valley when the weather cools down. “The Taliban are afraid of us — they are fighting like thieves,” he adds, with a nervous smile that betrays a lack of conviction.
A radio crackles. There are reports of enemy movement in a wooded area to the south, where the Taliban build roadside bombs, or IEDs, and the colonel gives the order for an artillery strike. I tell him about the villagers I’ve met who allege their relatives were killed by errant shells. How can he be sure no civilians are in harm’s way?
“No, no — it’s not a civilian area!” he says, assuring me intelligence is coming from assets on the ground. “We are constantly firing in that area, and, as I have witnessed, no civilians have ever been harmed; we are making maximum effort not to harm civilians.” Suddenly, though, Kohdamani seems unsure. Without explanation, he instructs his gunner to shift the barrel 90 degrees to a bald ridge on the far side of the highway. No threat is imminent; we’re only told the base takes occasional rocket fire from that direction. The shell smashes into the mountain — a completely arbitrary show of force that, hopefully, has done nothing more than break the midday quiet.
Afghanistan remains one of the deadliest places in the world to be a civilian. To date, more than 43,000 people have died in the conflict. According to the U.N., the number of killed and wounded exceeded 10,000 each year from 2014 to 2019, with some 6,000 casualties in the first nine months of 2020. The Taliban were responsible for about half the deaths, while government troops caused almost a quarter — mostly in ground-fighting attacks like the one that very nearly played out in front of us. (Most of the remainder occurred in crossfire or were caused by ISIS or undetermined elements. U.S.-led forces were responsible for two percent.)
The colonel disappears for the night, and a promised patrol along the highway never materializes. A lanky sergeant named Waheed Jan informs us that the district center 35 miles away is under attack and two soldiers are critically injured from a mine blast. That evening, I listen in as a radio operator tries in vain to summon a medevac from Kabul; 10 hours after they were hit, one of the men dies from excessive blood loss, and the other is still waiting for a chopper. Meanwhile, a vehicle convoy dispatched to provide support is stuck on the highway battling a Taliban ambush. “The truth is we’re taking a lot of casualties here, and our [command] does not share it with the media,” says Jan. He later confides that he, too, was recovering from an IED blast on the highway.
Under the circumstances, the sergeant says it could take several days to arrange an Afghan army convoy back to Kabul. Given the high likelihood of being blown up in their company, we take our chances in the morning and drive back on our own, falling silent over gravel patches and irrigation canals where bombs are easily placed. The only trouble we encounter is from the Afghan army command, which detains us for questioning at their base in Maidan Shar.
“You did not receive permission — you broke the rules,” barks a gruff military intelligence officer who drove down from Kabul to check us out. Eventually we are allowed to leave, with a stern warning from the security forces not to defy the rules again. We had clearly glimpsed the underbelly of a losing war that the Afghan government didn’t want us to see. [