Afghanistan. A land high in the mountains of grand valleys and great beauty, marred by war, poverty, bigotry, anger and exploitation. But did you know it has trains?
Afghanistan is situated at the collision of the Hindu Kush, the Karakorum and Pamir ranges, but is mostly dry as it is so far away from the ocean. Dry plains exist along the southwestern borders of the country. Consequently, getting around the country was difficult. Each time the region was united under a dynasty, they could not assimilate the people there, creating a complicated ethnic mix that was difficult to manage even then. However, when the Durrani Dynasty collapsed in 1810, both the Russian Empire from the north and the British Empire from the south encroached. Much of Afghanistan’s history, borders and railways stem from imperialism. Russia wanted a warm water port ideally on the Indian Ocean, while Britain wanted to prevent Russian expansionism. Possessing Afghanistan would give Russia a launchpad to attack India, and Britain a launchpad to attack Central Asia. The Great Game resulted, a battle of spies, influence and intrigue to persuade the Emirate of Kabul to join one sphere or another. Britain tried to invade Afghanistan twice, and both times it failed. To help in this endeavour, it built Afghanistan’s first railway, the Khyber Pass line. Twisting up through the valleys from the frontier town of Peshawar, it reached the Afghan border at Landi Khotal in 1925. Unfortunately, by 1907, the railway was already pointless. Russia and Britain had signed an alliance to contain Germany, while the Emir refused to let Britain continue the railway to Kabul, fearful of the expansion of British influence. However this railway would have been very difficult to build anyway, the 36 miles of railway already built had taken 7 years. Getting around Afghanistan is difficult.
So, even by the 1950s, the fastest way to get anything larger than a suitcase to Kabul from the outside world was to take a train from Russia to the town of Termes on the Amu Darya river. From there, a barge would sail upriver to Hairatan, and from there a truck would take the goods to the mountains. Upon reaching the village of Khenjan, the goods needed to be disassembled and loaded onto goats to traverse the high, dangerous and snowy Salang Pass. Once over the other side, the goods would be loaded back onto trucks and then driven to the capital. Almost everything was shipped this way, since Afghanistan claimed Pakistan’s territory, and was therefore much closer to India. The trucks, the petrol for the trucks, farming equipment, and any exports of Afghan products.
Despite this difficulty, King Amanullah imported three steam engines for a five-mile tramway from Germany in 1927 around Kabul. Religious fundamentalists railed against this modernising influence and it was removed in the 1940s. In addition, during the post-war monarchy, six additional German locomotives were sent to Kabul, three for the construction of a hydroelectric dam, and the rest for an unknown customer.
From the 1920s, the Soviet Union developed a considerable commercial influence in Afghanistan, and to make trade easier, they invested in development in the country. The goats in the Salang Pass were replaced by a new tunnel. A railway was built from Turkmenistan to the Afghan border at Towrgondi. New neighbourhoods and a trolleybus line were built in Kabul in the Soviet style, and they quickly became unusually fashionable to live in and ride on. The next step came from events across the world.
By the 1970s, USSR foreign policy generally tried to preserve what they had and support organic socialist movements around the globe rather than a faintly ridiculous commitment to World Revolution. However, with the defeat of South Vietnam in the Vietnam War in 1975 and the subsequent invasions of Laos and Cambodia, the ossified and ancient Politburo began to truly believe that the heralded World Revolution was underway, that country by country would embrace Marxist-Leninism and loyally follow Moscow into winning the Cold War. The USSR began to embrace a much bolder foreign policy, and resumed desiring a warm water port, ideally on the Indian Ocean. The way there would have to be through Afghanistan, but despite Russian influence, there was no Communist movement the Russians could hijack. So, the KGB simply persuaded the leading Communist politician, Nur Mohammed Taraki to go along with the coup they organised in 1979, along with the real power behind him, Hafizullah Amin. After the Saur “Revolution”, Amin encouraged a cult of personality to grow up around Taraki, but Taraki began to actually believe that he was “The Star of the East”, so Amin had him killed on KGB advice. To deal with the chaos surrounding the coups, and faced with a leader Moscow could trust, the USSR invaded Afghanistan brotherly intervened to support a friendly government. It is thought that once the Russians had secured Afghanistan, then they would do the same thing in Pakistan to secure the port of Karachi. It was the beginning of 46 years of almost continuous conflict.
The US did not want to see an expansion to Moscow’s influence, but they felt uncomfortable dealing with the religious fundamentalist opposition directly, so they gave weapons to Pakistan to support the Afghan Mujahedeen, in an act that in no way backfired on them.
The Russians supported their faction through infrastructure investments. The Soviet-Afghan Friendship Bridge (now the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge) was built across the Amu Darya river at Hairatan, and a railway was laid across there to a supply depot and to a shed outside Mazar-i-Sharif. Since the Russian military relied so much on railway logistics, the mid-1980s, the USSR had a fanciful plan to connect Kabul to the Russian railway network, which would have been extremely difficult to even survey due to all the shooting.
By 1989, fighting an unwinnable insurgency, with costs and extremism rising and casualties mounting, the USSR under Gorbachev decided to leave Afghanistan and abandon the communist government to it’s fate. The USSR heroically retreated back across the Friendship Bridge and spectacularly imploded less than two years later.
The civil war continued against the communists until 1992, with Pakistan funding the most loyal Islamist forces which turned out to be the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Violence spilled over into Pakistan, which prompted them to negotiate a peace settlement. The Islamic militants immediately took up arms against the Pakistani- and American-supported new government using their Pakistani-and American-supplied weapons. They succeeded in 1996, but the situation simply reversed so that now they were fighting an unwinnable anti-Taliban insurgency. Terrorism began to run rampant as the situation became ever more complex and violent. al-Qaeda decided to strike back at the United States, which culminated in the 9/11 attacks. A month later, the USA invaded Afghanistan and defeated the Taliban government easily, but the victory slipped through their fingers in the inevitable unwinnable insurgency. The militias even began fighting each other as people divided on ethnic lines, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras declaring allegiance to different extremist groups. The US tried to develop the country, but failed to understand the situation, and tried to impose something close to the sort of neoliberal democracy seen in the United States. The resulting cockup was so astounding in scale that it is difficult to even comprehend. One trillion dollars, twenty years and two million people dead were spent on replacing the Taliban… with a more radical and violent version of the Taliban.
During the occupation of Afghanistan, the United States tried to stabilise the country through development. Much of this money was lost to NGO and local corruption, militias, simple theft. Countries around Afghanistan tried to grab a slice of the immense amounts of money flowing in, mostly through railways. Pakistan and Afghanistan planned a railway to Khandahar from Quetta, which absorbed some money and was never built. Turkmenistan, dictatorship led by an insane family dynasty (future post, but look up Sapurat Niazov in the meantime) announced a plan to extend a railway to Herat, which reached Andkhoy before giving up in 2021. Tajikistan announced a plan to build a railway to Sher Khan, but not into Afghanistan itself. Most ambitious of all, China announced a plan to expand it’s influence build a railway from Mazar-i-Sharif to the Khyber Pass, but this was always unrealistic.
In 2020, Donald Trump realised he was most likely to lose the elections that year. In order to impose maximum agony on the Democratic president who would inherit the Afghan situation, he negotiated a peace settlement with the Taliban which set a date for withdrawal in 2021. Then he fired all the people responsible for withdrawing from Afghanistan so that when Joe Biden decided to leave, many thousands of people who had supported the NATO effort were left vulnerable to Taliban reprisals.
Since the Taliban takeover, the only people who have anything near a warm relationship with the country are Iran (due to Fundamentalist Islamist beliefs) and India (due to opposition of Pakistan). Iran is building a railway from Khat to Herat, but has only reached the town of Ghourian. And that is every railway in Afghanistan, past and present, proposed or built.
Thanks for reading the sad history of Afghanistan, the graveyard. I hope that one day, they, and the world, can see past violence.
S.
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