Next Stop Jalalabad: Traveling One of the World’s Most Dangerous Roads
Security threats on the Kabul-Jalalabad highway have drastically increased over the last few weeks.
On the last stretch of our early morning drive on Highway 1 from Kabul to Jalalabad we come across a peculiar site: A haulage truck, more than crammed and bulging with heavy cargo, was stuck in a tunnel. The truck had barely entered the shaft until the carriage’s top, grazing the tunnel’s ceiling, had put a sudden stop to its advance.
At the scene an Afghan traffic policeman is arguing with the driver, gesticulating wildly. Fortunately for us the incident occurred past the infamous 64-kilometer long Kabul River Gorge, and we avoid the tunnel, taking a road less traveled.
On top of the rock into which the tunnel had been carved in 1962 by the West German government, a lonely member of the Afghan National Police armed with an AK-47 peeks out from behind a guard post protected by sandbags and barbed wire observing the traffic – a token of the more lethal responsibilities of law enforcement in the fractious hinterlands of Afghanistan.
Security has deteriorated markedly in the last few weeks along the 160-kilometer long highway from Kabul to Jalalabad, which CNN once dubbed the world’s most dangerous road with a “death rating” of 9.5 out of 10. Afghans refer to sections of the highway and the surrounding area as “The Valley of Death.”
Why so dangerous?
Risks abound here: Taliban insurgents taking potshots at cars, roadside bombs (especially the first 26 kilometers of Highway 1 have seen repeated IED and suicide attacks), kidnappings, and perhaps the most constant and random danger – reckless Afghan drivers, who believe that the laws of physics neither apply to them nor to their cars hurtling over the narrow road that zigzags across rugged terrain through the Afghan provinces of Kabul, Laghman and Nangarhar.
