This was the second mine of the morning, and the truckers were losing heart. They stood beside their rigs, silent, doing nothing. The convoy was about to fall apart.
Sayed Shir Jan Jalal, the local Northern Alliance commissar, saw this. He jumped into his Russian-made jeep and floored it around the stricken truck, driving over the mined edges of the road. People stared.
“I had to do something a little daring, or they would turn back,” he explained, then raced ahead, raising a smear of dust.
Slowly, hesitantly, the convoy stirred to life. Battered cars, loaded microbuses and trucks stacked high with cauliflower, onion and crates of fruit followed carefully in the commissar’s tracks. Dust rose from a road that had not seen through-traffic in five years. Drivers laughed. The convoy was moving again.
Two miles ahead, another obstacle. A landslide.
A truck that attempted to cross the loose scree tilted sideways, threatening to topple into the Ghorband canyon. Silence again. The big trucks were the test of a convoy’s success. Cars might pass but that meant nothing if heavy cargo could not travel the road. Trucks kept cities alive. The drivers walked ahead. They began to move the stones. Within an hour, they re-started their engines.
The canyon unfolded into a broad river valley. The river was a cold green, with aspens turning yellow on its banks. The scene looked like Colorado, but Alexander the Great marched on India along this road in 327 B.C. and American B-52s scratched the sky now, returning from bombing runs on Kandahar.
The convoy rolled on, excited, roaring, gathering speed. Life was good. The buses careened ahead, picking up their first passengers since 1996, when the road was cut by the Taliban. Families clapped each other on their backs–a gush of public emotion from mountain people. The trucks honked at stunned goat boys.
In this way, Afghanistan was knitting itself back together again. The road to Bamiyan was open.
Paul Salopek, the Tribune’s Africa correspondent, is on assignment in Afghanistan.
