Dispatch 3.2: The Road That Runs Backwards In Time
Dispatch 3.2: The Road that Runs Backwards in Time
Kandahar Air Field (KAF) sits on the flat desert plain outside of the ancient city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. It’s a modern, first-world military base, holding its own in a third-world country. Grey-skinned, sand streaked transports glide down taxiways, while jet fighters scream overhead, deafening afterburners ripping the air open. On the horizon, attack helicopters dart in and out of the hills, looking for insurgents.
The base itself has grown organically over the past decade, a confusing mishmash of streets, roads, gravel parking lots, and drainage ditches. Its layout is far more reminiscent of a medieval European city than a 19th century Midwestern American one. Lumbering armored vehicles, all guns, steel and electronics, share the road with tractors, pickup trucks, busses, and the ubiquitous “gators”.
Soldiers walk down the main boulevard, past tent cities, shipping-container apartment blocks, gymnasium-sized mess halls with enticing odors, and headquarters buildings covered with their crowns of antennae. There are engines and dust, generators the size of recreational vehicles belching their steady growl by the basketball courts, fiber optic cables strung like telephone lines.
Outside the gate to KAF I drive the four-lane road that connects the airport with the city of Kandahar. The road is lined with Afghan urban sprawl: car dealerships, bus stations, container yards, light industry, construction equipment, and government buildings. Turbaned men haggle in the gravel while yellow-striped taxis laden with passengers inside and on the roof zip in and out of military convoys.
It’s a gold-rush town, where anyone with some commercial instinct and connections can get access to a piece of real-estate and open up their business. It’s where the country people have come to the big city to make something of themselves: the scam artists, the crime boss, the immigrant. It’s 1920s America, but everyone has a cell phone.
Further on, Kandahar City itself is a tight mass of humanity, pressing up to the very edge of the roads where the convoys lumber by. Fruit sellers and bottled water vendors, trucks listing with produce, carpets, gas cans, ice-cream carts, young boys throwing rocks at passing military vehicles, businessmen on motorcycles, tractors pulling timber, hay or old tires – zig-zag by the traffic police at every corner. Women fill buckets with water from the public pump on the street corner and castigate children who stray too close to the traffic. It’s 19th century London with a heavy layer of diesel exhaust.
And then north of Kandahar, on what we Americans refer to as the “ring road” or “Highway 1” and what the Afghans call the “Kandahar-Herat Highway,” the farms start. Crowding the Arghandab River and its man-built network of irrigation canals, sharecroppers till small plots by hand. Grapes, pomegranites, wheat, and poppy grow here, much as they did a thousand years ago. Young boys shepherd herds of optimistic sheep and goats across the desert. Motorcycles are everywhere, traveling well-known tracks between villages. Horses, mules, and cows are the exception – they are clear signs of wealth. Plows are pulled by people through the grainy desert soil.
Small adobe compounds trade arable land for living space. Families are big, often 5-6 adults and over a dozen children living in tight quarters, unwilling to sacrifice the economically valuable farmland for a bigger home.
This is Zharay District and the Afghan government is fairly active. Representatives from the Department of Agriculture, Industry, and Livestock hold seminars on animal husbandry. Seed is distributed by the government during planting season. The Education Director inspects schools in the villages. Feuds and arguments are settled by the district governor and the chief of police. Charitable organizations from around the world support humanitarian projects. It’s a pre-industrial economy with a functioning bureaucracy.
I continue west on the Ring Road to Maiwand District and the largest village, Hutal. There’s a 19th century British fort in the center, complete with round towers and crenellated walls. There’s a poured concrete district center adjacent to the fort and a street market with straw covered stalls on the main road. Every Monday farmers herd their livestock to the weekly market held in the dry riverbed in the center of town.
It’s all traditional dress here. Women in burkhas, men in long flowing robes with colored scarves wrapped around their heads, the end held in their teeth when the wind blows to cover their face and protect themselves from the dust. The market sells food, firewood, fruits, and freshly-butchered animal carcasses displayed over the owner’s head on wooden poles.
In Maiwand, it’s the tribal elders who hold sway. Government representatives are so entwined with the traditional tribal structures that it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Noorzais, Alikozais, Ishakzais, and Popalzais – they meet at the district center weekly to resolve disputes and chart the future for the district. I imagine it looked much the same when Alexander and his Macedonian host marched through here. Rudyard Kipling and Genghis Khan would recognize the scene immediately.
For me, that’s as far west and as far back in time as I go. The road continues of course. Over the horizon is the Helmand River Valley, the largest poppy producing area in the world and beyond that Herat – a city more Persian than Pashtun.
I’m a visitor here, out of place with my digital radios and synthetic nylon military equipment. When I look at the livestock market, I see a crowd of people and animals, shifting back and forth in the air-baked heat. I don’t see the complex family, clan, and tribal relationships that have been here for thousands of years. Like the firewood vendor seeking shade under his straw canopy, I’m a product of my environment. So I climb into my armored vehicle, check my digital map, talk on the satellite radio and drive back towards the present.
Eric Smith is a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Army, currently stationed in Afghanistan. A lifelong resident of Lakewood, he graduated from Lakewood High School in 1990. He really wants to go to an Indians game with his family when he gets home.
Eric Smith
I grew up in Lakewood and graduated from LHS in 1990. After graduating from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, I joined the Army and I've been traveling the world ever since. I've contributed articles to the Observer in the past based on my experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.