Following the US-led defeat of the Taliban in 2001–2002, aborted highway construction projects of a half-century ago were resurrected. The rebuilding of Highway 1 began in 2002 with primary funding from the US Agency for International Development ($80 million) and Japan and Saudi Arabia ($50 million each). The total estimated cost was $250 million, and there was clear determination to complete the job, because without this road there would be no Afghanistan.

Landlocked Afghanistan has no coast or defining waterway. It has always been a transit route for surrounding powers — and often a power vacuum at the centre of them — and the country’s tendency is centrifugal, with ethnic, linguistic, racial, and tribal loyalties often splintering. This, combined with its famously difficult terrain and remote settlements, has made centralized control and planning all but impossible. Still, it is a place badly in need of common bonds, and the ring road could bring myriad agricultural enclaves into a national economy by transporting produce to markets (the Kandahar-Kabul stretch is the most crop-intensive area in the country),and providing mobility for workers, which would drive up employment. Before the war with the Soviet Union, when the road was unbroken, Afghanistan’s major export of dried fruit was five times what it is now. Above all, the ring road is needed to extend Kabul’s rule over the country, uniting the alienated, disenfranchised Pashtuns in the south (where the Taliban finds its recruits) with the more peaceful north. It could bring back the people of remote regions who trade independently with Iran and Pakistan, and tie Afghanistan to the economies of India, Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia. (At the end of the nineteenth century, this is what Afghanistan’s Amir ‘Abdor Rahman Khan attempted by turning the trade routes into a circular thoroughfare. Paradoxically, for the same reason the Taliban refused to restore the ring road, ‘Abdor Rahman refused to build a single railroad: it would provide a means for outside powers to secure interests inside Afghanistan.)

In the north, the ring road remains broken and is actually nonexistent in some areas; in the south, the Taliban attack Highway 1 relentlessly. While nominally controlled by the isaf, the north-south river valleys that cross Highway 1 are in the vise grip of the Taliban, and the war against the insurgents will not be won unless the area’s supply depots are eradicated. The line with which the Taliban supplies the Panjwaii area begins in Nushki, Pakistan, far to the south. It runs across the border, northwest along truck tracks across the Rigestan Desert to the lower Helmand River, then by river to their supply base at Garmsir, and up the Arghandab tributary to Highway 1 and Panjwaii, just west of Kandahar. Cutting that supply line would help secure the highway and protect Kandahar, but to date no such effort has succeeded.

Canadian Lt.-Col. Omer Lavoie, who commanded operations in Kandahar in 2006, says that any invader who has wanted to take the city (from Alexander the Great on) had to take Panjwaii first. This the Taliban did. But as the district has some of the most recalcitrant and xenophobic tribes in Afghanistan, no outsider has ever conquered it. In the spring of 2006, after the Taliban dug in at the tightly packed villages and vineyards in Zhari district (above Panjwaii and on Highway 1), the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry repeatedly endured casualties on the five-kilometre stretch known as Ambush Alley. In September, Lavoie was given the job of clearing out the Taliban from Panjwaii and Zahri.

The insurgency’s plan, meanwhile, was to cut the highway at Panjwaii-Zhari and launch assaults to take Kandahar. Commanding the isaf’s Canadian-led Operation Medusa, Lavoie achieved early success, killing hundreds of Taliban fighters in ferocious engagements, and rooting them out of Panjwaii and Zhari. To help secure the district once and for all, Lavoie built a wide road into the heart of Panjwaii. The “Route Summit” connected Highway 1 to the Arghandab River, and significantly cut the response time for military operations while linking Panjwaii’s farm economy to Kandahar.

In general, the isaf uses an “ink spot” strategy to gain control of Highway 1. Scattered urban centres, or Afghan Development Zones (adz), are taken in combat and provided with security and development assistance that, in theory, will spread outward until the adzs link up, protecting Highway 1. Lavoie says securing the highway first could be successful, but he points out that the Soviets’ mistake was to restrict their operations to the highway at the expense of surrounding districts.

The operations led by Lavoie and his successor made the Qalat-Kandahar-Panjwaii stretch of highway safer, but the Panjwaii area itself has started to regain its reputation for viciousness. Before fleeing last fall, many of the Taliban buried their weapons and returned as farmers to booby-trap the highway and carry out ambushes and suicide bombings. Thus, last December’s Baaz Tsuka (a.k.a. Operation Falcon’s Summit), in which the Canadians pushed the Taliban out for a second time, became necessary.

Though Canada had the firepower to defeat the Taliban, it didn’t have the troop numbers to hem them in and prevent them from escaping. Over desert and mountain routes — and with astonishing speed — many moved far to the west to support a mushrooming insurgency in Farah province. Lavoie admits that Taliban fighters probably stow their weapons and resume their normal identities as farmers who fill the backs of pickup trucks on Highway 1, and Leslie says the Taliban most likely use the road to traffic opium, using the false bottoms of their trucks.

Early in the new year, Highway 1 was under renewed Taliban attacks in the west, all the way up to Herat. The stretches near Herat and Kabul (outside the Canadian and British zones) remain the most dangerous: in July, it was on the route through Ghazi, south of Kabul, that the Taliban kidnapped a busload of Korean missionaries. In these areas, crime and corruption are rampant, and Afghan auxiliary police are known to use checkpoints to extort money and/or goods.

By late summer, gains made in Panjwaii had been all but lost. The Canadians had moved west and south, only to see the Afghan police outposts they had left behind overrun by Taliban fighters. This September, Canada launched operations Strong Lion and Keeping Goodwill in a bid to get Panjwaii back.