The Network - Jason Elliot [116]
The border post at Torkham is a chaotic place. There’s a scruffy collection of buildings and a pair of wide gates flanked by fence posts that are no longer vertical, beyond which an Afghan flag flutters in the wind. Hovering near the gates are about a dozen Pakistani policemen in khaki uniforms, picking at random on individuals from the flow of men and women approaching the crossing point.
As long as we are not recognised as foreigners, there is nothing to stop us from entering Afghanistan here, and I sense that H is enjoying the idea of reliving the Great Game for a day and slipping unnoticed into the country. So a hundred yards from the gates we get out of the car and our driver agrees to wait until he sees us cross before he leaves. I catch the attention of an Afghan boy pushing a dusty cart laden with sacks and boxes, to which I add our bags and pay him a small sum to meet us on the far side of the gates. Then we say goodbye to our driver and merge into the flow.
‘You look good in an Afghan hat,’ I say to H.
‘See you in Afghanistan,’ he says.
We walk past the police as nonchalantly as possible and meet gratefully on the other side of the gates. It’s an anticlimax. There doesn’t seem to be any passport control. We wander into the courtyard of what looks like a customs post, where an armed Talib is dozing under a tree with an AK-47 across his lap. We rouse an official and are invited to sit, and a few minutes later a boy brings us tea. Then from the building someone waves us inside to a run-down office with a dusty desk beneath a bare bulb and a ceiling fan that doesn’t work. He smiles and stamps our passports without much interest, then points us in the direction of some decrepit cars waiting to ferry passengers to Kabul. We’re officially in Afghanistan.
Nothing has escaped the years of war here. For almost the entire route, the surface of the road has long since disappeared. For lengthy stretches even the road itself has simply been torn away by flooding or collapsed. Even on the best sections we weave between craters and gullies gouged out by years of neglect. The telephone poles and pylons beside the road have been stripped of their wires. There is no building, wall or human structure that is intact. Everything seems on the verge of collapse or to have been reduced to its most elemental parts. All along the way we see the vestiges of conflict: destroyed and rusting armoured vehicles, stripped of every salvageable part, crouching silently beyond the shoulders of the road or in the surrounding fields.
‘That’s not a tank,’ says H, when I point out the first of them ‘It’s a BTR-70. Armoured personnel carrier. That one over there’s a BMP combat vehicle.’ He knows his Soviet armour from the days when the West feared the might of the Red Army, which fought its last engagement not in Europe but in the valleys and passes of Afghanistan.
The landscape is beautiful none the less. Perhaps it’s even more beautiful because the evidence of destruction is never far away and makes us think of the fragility of life. It’s also as if we’ve gone back in time. The surrounding villages, clinging to hillsides as if they’ve grown out of the ground itself, are made from timber and adobe and have a biblical look. White-bearded men in turbans and flowing gowns lead camels by the roadside or guide wooden ploughs behind oxen. We return briefly to the twentieth century as we enter Jalalabad, where the streets are paved again, and we stop to eat kebabs and freshly baked bread at a tiny stall. The owner jokes with us and asks if we are looking for Osama.
The capital bears all the