Into the heart of Afghanistan

As a hair-thin line on a map, Afghanistan's national Ring Road looks easy enough to conquer. But tell war-hardened Afghans that you're going to travel its entire 1,373-mile length unarmed, in the middle of winter and a raging insurgency, and they look at you like you're completely mad.

Officially, the $1.05 billion project is almost finished. However, as with many things in Afghanistan, there is a chasm between the rhetoric and reality.

Some of the best stretches of the road are among the Taliban's favourite killing grounds. Last autumn, Canadian troops led the biggest ground battle in Nato's 57-year history, in part to regain control of a stretch of highway west of Kandahar. However, guerrillas and highway robbers still prey on travellers.

About 40 per cent of the road isn't finished. Some sections are nothing more than muddy tracks through the country's lawless Wild West, where you can drive for hours without seeing another vehicle fishtailing and backsliding through the muck along with you.

The only way to understand the condition of the road and grasp what it says about Afghanistan is to drive it.

I knew some of the Ring Road all too well. I travelled it for weeks in the early Taliban era when years of war had already reduced it to patches of broken asphalt.

A trip that would take a few hours on a proper road was days of torture, with the speedometer straining to break 10mph as the vehicle crawled over shell craters and pond-sized potholes.

Decades-long tailspin

This time, I would be leaving from Kabul with interpreter, Wesal Zaman, and driver, Zyarat Gul. A quiet and calm man, Gul had gotten us home safely from other terrible places.

Before starting out, we visited three experts at the Economics Ministry to find out what we were in for.

Syed Arif Nazif, the ministry's director of design, told us that the building of the road began in the mid-1970s. The US helped, but most of the money came from the Soviet Union and Arab countries.

Farmers used the road to get their produce to market. Afghanistan became the world's largest exporter of dried grapes, apples, nuts and other fruits.

But Soviet troops poured down the Ring Road to invade Afghanistan in the dead of night on December 25, 1979, setting off a decades-long tailspin from which Afghans are still trying to recover.

The rebuilding of the road is supposed to help revive the economy and break down ethnic differences.

Although dried fruit exports are 20 per cent of what they were before the wars, reconstruction is showing benefits, Nazif said.

I had a more pressing question: "How long do you think it would take to drive the whole Ring Road?"

Nazif shifted in his seat. "Take the length of 1,373 miles, and divide by an average speed of 50 miles per hour," he said.

"That sounds like we could do it in maybe four days," I replied. Nazif smiled and nodded, but we both knew Afghanistan was a lot more complicated.

Before we started, we made one rule: If Gul, an ethnic Pashtun like most of the Taliban, felt anything he didn't like, he should turn around without pausing to ask us.

The Ring Road begins a steady climb out of Kabul on a 27-mile section rebuilt by the Taliban. The road is as smooth as any in the US. But the government can't afford to keep it ploughed, so it was covered with packed snow and ice.

We were less than six hours into the journey near Shahr-i-Safa when we saw the first signs of Taliban activity.

Four insurgents armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades had ridden two motorcycles to a hill overlooking the highway near Qalat. About 3pm, they opened fire on a civilian truck taking supplies to an Afghan military base.

Normally, insurgents carry out swift attacks and make a getaway into the desert. But this time, a pickup truck carrying Afghan national army troops pinned the guerrillas down from behind.

We reached the scene about half an hour after the battle ended. Jubilant Afghan troops were joking next to three Taliban corpses, like scavengers enjoying quality roadkill.

One of the dead men lay on his back with his knees bent, as if he might jump up at any moment. But the bullet hole in his neck left no doubt his war was over.

As night fell, we rushed off to Kandahar, which has been staggering under a wave of suicide bombings. The governor gave us beds in his guest house.

Early next morning, we headed west into Helmand province, the scene of fierce fighting this year between Nato forces and the Taliban. The 70 miles of road that Japan pledged $76 million to fix is the same bumpy, cracked surface that it has been for years. The area is too dangerous for road crews.

It is the hashish harvest season and marijuana plants as big as Christmas trees are stacked by the thousands against mud-brick homes, curing in the sun.

Villagers scrape the gooey resin, which is pressed into blocks and exported along the same routes that move the opium, a big source of the insurgents' income.

Hundreds of gunmen prowl the Ring Road in Helmand who take orders from local warlords and drug barons.

As one longtime resident of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, told us: "They are loyal to the government until 4 o'clock in the afternoon and then until the next morning they're enemies."

As we neared the Lashkar Gah turn-off, in an area where we were told that kidnappers had abducted two German journalists, our driver broke our one rule.

Gul slowed for a speed bump and when a militiaman jumped up with an AK-47, he stopped. Gul opened the driver's window, weighing the comparative risks of getting shot and kidnapped.

The gunman stuck his head in, saw me in the back seat and smiled like a dog sniffing fresh meat.

"Get us out of here!" I shouted at Gul, and he hesitated.

"Get moving!" Gul hit the gas. The barrel of the gunman's rifle clunked off the rear side of the car. Not daring to look back, I tensed for the shot that didn't come.

Heading north towards Herat, we drove past mountains weathered so smooth they seemed moulded from clay. We reached Herat that night, putting us more than halfway along the Ring Road.

Swift progress made us overconfident. We talked about being back in Kabul in a day or so. We marvelled at the traffic lights operating in Herat, the only major city to escape the destruction.

The pleasure was short-lived. The next morning, 35 miles northeast of Herat, the highway abruptly ended. We didn't see asphalt again for three days.

Woes of Badghis

Iran was supposed to complete 70 miles of paved road from Herat into Badghis province, but its contractors suddenly stopped work, said Governor Mohammad Naseem Tokhi.

Some say the money ran out; others cite unspecified problems between Iran and the rest of the international community, Tokhi said.

Entering Badghis was like driving back into biblical times. Ours was the only internal-combustion engine running for miles. Most people were walking or riding donkeys. The grey smoke of cooking fires seeped through the black fabric of nomads' low-slung tents.

The province's people, mostly Pashtuns, have long felt cut off from the rest of the country.

Now, they are largely missing out on billions of dollars in international aid, and that makes Badghis an ideal recruiting ground for insurgents. Grinding poverty and poor health have left even moderates angry with Karzai's government and its foreign backers.

Prolonged drought, followed by devastating floods, last November left three-quarters of the province's people without enough food, Tokhi said. The roads are so bad that relief agencies are having a tough time reaching people.

The 200,000 residents of the surrounding area have no electricity, and their water is so bad that diarrhoea is a main killer.

Assault rifles

Smouldering rage exploded this autumn when gunmen stormed the district commissioner's new headquarters, a three-storey yellow brick building built by USAid.

They blasted a rocket-propelled grenade through the guardhouse and fired assault rifles at offices and police cars. The district commissioner fled for his life.

Three foreign workers at a US-based agency escaped by hiding in their garden as rampaging mobs looted the buildings.

Ghulam Seddiqi, the mayor, said the attackers wanted to stop the aid agency's education programmes, a Taliban priority.

We rode into the countryside, when a man in a Taliban-style black turban lurking near a disabled tank levelled his Kalashnikov rifle and took a potshot at us. We heard the loud hiss-snap of a bullet passing close by, but he didn't fire again. It must have been a good riddance round.

When we pulled in for a rest in Maimana, a pool of green fluid spilled out of a hole in the radiator, which a mechanic pounded shut the next morning.

We returned to paved highway at Andkhoi, near the border with Turkmenistan, where for centuries weavers have produced some of Afghanistan's best carpets.

Mazar-e-Sharif

We pressed on south to Mazar-e-Sharif, chattering about how good it would feel to have hot water and lights.

After a night of comfort in Mazar, it was an easy drive to the Salang Tunnel, a 1.7-mile passage on the route south to Kabul.

We made it through the Salang Pass without problems. The sky was ice blue, the road mostly clear. It seemed too easy for the end to such a hard journey.

In a few hours, we were overlooking Kabul, shrouded in brown smog. The capital hadn't had a suicide bombing for days. The only thing left to worry about was traffic.

Perilous journey

The trip down the Ring Road took my interpreter, driver and me seven days, inching along slippery edges of steep cliffs, wandering in the wilderness without road signs, suffering two flat tyres, a ruptured radiator and a spinout on mountain ice.

On the way, we managed to avoid a Taliban ambush, a potential kidnapper or highway robber, a suicide bomber and a gunman who fired close enough to take off one of our heads.