My journalism work and travel have taken me on some dangerous drives – through impenetrable fog in the mountains near the Oman-Yemen border; half a tyre over a cliff edge at night in Bosnia; and through open fields in full view of snipers just metres from ISIS-held territory.
None of them compare to the Mahipar Road, which thousands of Afghans travel each day to get between Kabul and Jalalabad. For more than 60km, the narrow motorway clings to the side of jagged, stony mountains, full of sharp turns and steep descents, roughly following the course of the Kabul River, which flows hundreds of metres below.
For large stretches, its two lanes are unmarked, and sometimes they are made narrower – if that were even possible – by the occasional rockslide.
The name Mahipar is Persian for “flying fish”. My colleague, who was doing the driving, said a common speculation was that the river was once home to flying fish – unlikely, given they live in oceans.
A darker theory, he told me, is that flying fish are what you think of when you see vehicles speed off the side of the road and plunge into the valley. The children who live in nearby villages see it happen all the time – they double as traffic wardens, perched over switchbacks warning drivers of oncoming lorries hidden around the bend.
Road safety is a virtually non-existent concept in most of Afghanistan. I’ve seen mobile phones playing YouTube videos taped to steering wheels, eight or nine people occupying sedans and cars travelling in three different directions on a roundabout. If you’re wondering how that last one works, they drive straight through the central island, right past the exasperated traffic officer.
The result of this chaos is a perennial cycle of carnage that is only getting worse. Nearly a decade ago, the World Health Organisation estimated that an Afghan died in a road accident every two hours. Last year, the Asian Transport Observatory, a road safety monitor, put it at one every hour.
The annual cost of car crash casualties is thought to be around $1 billion – nearly 6 per cent of the country’s GDP. Even during the war, in many years road accidents killed more people than bullets, bombs and air strikes. Around 80 per cent of the fatalities are men – a crippling tragedy in a country with the world’s highest proportion of widows.
In the past two years, the main motorways throughout the country have been clogged further by the influx of around two million deportees (adding an extra 5 per cent to the Afghan population) from Pakistan and Iran.
Most deportees – having not lived in Afghanistan for many years or ever – have no vehicles, homes or other assets in the country. When they arrive, usually in waves of thousands at a time, the solution has been for military vehicles and buses to pack in as many as possible and shuttle them from border areas to a big city. Roads become jammed. Bus drivers are overworked and many of them are underqualified.
So, it was only a matter of time before there would be a horrific accident involving a bus of deportees, such as the crash in Herat on Tuesday. The accident, between the bus, a lorry and a motorbike, killed 79 people – including 19 children.
The main problem is a near-total absence of regulatory and enforcement capacity for existing road safety laws. A significant proportion of drivers got their licences under the country’s now-fallen republic government, when a bribe of around $100 was enough to get one.
When a traffic cop asked to see your licence, it was common knowledge that you could hand them money instead. A 2014 investigation by Pajhwok, an Afghan news agency, found that about 60 per cent of Afghan drivers had never passed a driving test.
The country’s new Taliban rulers are much less corrupt when it comes to bribery and penalties. At most checkpoints, trying to hand cash to an officer will land you in jail. But the licensing system has become only marginally more rigorous. Some towns lack the staff or vehicles needed for practical tests, so a very short theory test is enough.
A much bigger issue, however, is that the new authorities, and the underpaid, overworked bureaucracy they manage, are simply overwhelmed. Getting any documentation – from marriage certificates to IDs to driving licences – can take weeks; many Afghans would rather risk driving without papers. And municipalities, starved of funding in a country cut off from most of the global economy because of sanctions, face severe shortages of traffic wardens.
What meagre police budgets exist are instead devoted to keeping crime at bay or, to a lesser extent, enforcing the country’s austere religious and social codes. And it appears true – anecdotally, at least, for want of comprehensive data – that petty crime has fallen dramatically, as have kidnappings and gang-related murders. Walking on the street at night is now much safer. But driving on it remains another story.
