The Network - Jason Elliot [132]
We move on shortly after dawn. The road begins to rise and the mountains to tighten around us. There’s no ongoing fighting in the area but the next day several pickup trucks with heavily armed men pass us in the opposite direction. They look battle-weary and well travelled, and their clothes and turbans and weapons are thick with dust. I wonder where they’ve come from and where they’ll end up. It seems likely they’re moving back to Kabul from the recent fighting in and around Yakawlang, avoiding the northern route via the Shomali plain, where Massoud’s forces are harassing their fellow fighters.
We are less than a hundred miles from the capital but we seem already to have moved back centuries. As we near the Hajigak Pass there’s a construction team hewing a new section of road from the mountainside, and there’s a long wait as we allow trucks coming the other away to squeeze past. There is no machinery. Just 500 men with pickaxes and spades, working at a furious pace, carving out and levelling the black rock. Watching them work, I have the feeling once again that we’re going back in time.
You can’t get this feeling from a map. The speed at which the influence of Kabul drops away is like a stone falling into a well.
‘Look,’ I say to H, pointing to the men hacking at the rock. ‘Afghan infrastructure.’
‘I can see why the Soviets failed here,’ he says. ‘If you invade a country you have to control the infrastructure. There isn’t one.’
H is right. Afghans depend on so little for their survival that there isn’t much for an invading army to control. The mechanisms by which a modern government influences its people simply don’t exist. Power, and its pursuit, is a fragmented and intensely local affair, and central government has never meant much to Afghans. The capital has never had significant influence in the countryside, except to take taxes or conscripts. Rural Afghanistan is made up of communities that depend on a close-knit structure of local rights designed to protect fragile resources. And since Afghans live from their land, their lives are bound up with the practical realities of survival, not abstract political or social goals. Fifty miles from the capital might as well be a different country. Five, even.
We pause at the top of the Hajigak Pass to admire the spectacular view. The men pray beside the cars. The engines smell hot. The peaks to the east and west of us soar to 15,000 feet, and the road behind and beyond us swoops down to loop between the intersecting spurs of the valleys. Then, from just below our line of sight, a man wearing a giant brown turban appears as if from out of the ground, flanked by a pair of grinning friends. The fact that he’s lost his right leg to a mine and must have ascended the pass on his crutches gives the sight a surreal quality. He stares at us with a mute grin, which reveals a wide gap where a tooth has been knocked out, and I marvel at his physical hardiness before giving him a few afghanis for his troubles, wondering how far he’ll have to go before he reaches home.
A long and winding descent leads us towards the Bamiyan valley. The surrounding geology seems to pass through every colour of the spectrum as we creep down, deepening to a purplish shade of red as we near the valley floor and turn west towards the site of the famous Buddhas. I catch glimpses of stairways and walls and ruined galleries in the cliffs above us and am reminded that Bamiyan was once a Buddhist state that resisted its Muslim overlords until well after their arrival in the seventh century. Its natural setting has always enchanted visitors. I don’t know if it’s because of the time of day, but the light seems particularly magical, and now that we’ve been released from the grasp of the mountains the valley seems a place of delicacy and charm, where slender poplars line the riverbanks and