A1 Highway (Afghanistan)

A1 is a Highway in Afghanistan, between the cities of Jalalabad and Kabul, and the most important trading route between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Located at the junction of the Kabul River and Kunar River near the Laghman valley, Jalalabad is the capital of Nangarhar province. It is linked by approximately 95 miles (153 km) of highway with Kabul to the west.

The highway between Jalalabad and the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, has been re-surfaced in recent years, reducing the transit time between these two important cities. Because of the many traffic accidents, the highway between the city of Jalalabad and Kabul is considered to be one of the most dangerous in the world.
The 40-mile stretch of this highway, through the Kabul Gorge, are a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.

The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique mix of geography, the road itself, and the drivers’ disregard for the laws of physics.
The two-lane highway is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On the inside lane, less than a yard outside your window, stands a wall of treeless rock that climbs upward in a nearly perpendicular line. A foot-high ledge guards the outside lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far as 1,000 feet down.
For the drivers, of course, that means there is virtually no margin for error: they go into the wall, or over the edge, or into each other.

The only note of caution is provided by children, who live in the impoverished villages nearby. Often as young as 4 or 5, they stand bedraggled at the bends, using flattened green Sprite bottles as flags, waving the drivers through when the way is clear.
The Kabul-to-Jalalabad road was paved for the first time by the West German government in 1960. In the 1980s, it was almost entirely obliterated during the insurrection against the Soviet invasion. In the decade that followed, when the Taliban and other armed groups fought to control the country, the road was a blasted moonscape. The craters were so large that taxis would disappear for minutes at a time, only to reappear as they struggled to climb out.
It was a tough road, and it had its own dangers — stretches of roadway often collapsed or washed away — but speed was not among them. That changed in 2006, when a European Union-backed project finally smoothed the road all the way through. Now Afghans could finally drive as fast as they wanted.

And they do! The cars zoom at astonishing speeds, far faster than would ever be allowed on a similar road in the West, if there was one. Like Formula One drivers, the Afghans dart out along the sharpest of turns, slamming their cars back into their lanes at the first flash of oncoming disaster. Most of the time they make it.
The danger is heightened by other things. On paper, the government of Afghanistan requires that drivers pass a test to get a license, but few people here seem to have one.
Then there are the cars themselves, battered Toyota taxis and even Ladas from bygone Soviet days. A typical Afghan car has bald tires and squeaky brakes—not exactly ideal for zigging and zagging through the mountains.

But perhaps the gravest threat, apart from speed of the cars, is the slowness of the trucks. The massive tractor-trailers that move cargo in and out of Pakistan are often overloaded by thousands of pounds. They cannot move fast; if they are climbing one of the gorge’s thousand-foot hills, they cannot move at all. They get stuck. They fall back. They fall over.
So the cars and their drivers stack up behind them, angry and impatient, and rush and maneuver and pass them at the first chance. And so the cars crash, one after the other.