A significant part of the mission is to help provide a secure environment for the construction of the Khost-Gardez Highway, the “K-G Road.”
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Mark BorowskiA loaded “jingle truck” waits on the Khost-Gardez Road for passing Kuchi nomads and their livestock. The Kuchis migrate to the interior of Afghanistan in the spring, and back to Pakistan for the winter. Above, a typical village along the Khost-Gardez Road in the mountains of Paktiya Province. Editor's Note: This column is part of a series by Lt. Col. Mark E. Borowski, a native of South Hadley, called “Afghanistan Journal: A Soldier’s Stories.” See below for more about the series.
By Lt. Col. MARK E. BOROWSKI
Being able to link to your heritage is always a great thing.
When one thinks about the U.S. Cavalry, the image that often comes to mind is one of the Old West: horse-mounted troopers patrolling the wild and lawless frontier, manning lonely outposts at the fringes of civilization, providing security for wagon trains and railroads pushing ever westward in the face of countless dangers.
In Afghanistan in 2011, the mounts may be different, but our troopers’ mission remains very much the same, and things don’t get much more wild and lawless than the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and the Khost-Gardez Pass, places that our unit currently calls home.
A significant part of our mission is to help provide a secure environment for the construction of the Khost-Gardez Highway, the “K-G Road.”
About the series
The Republican and MassLive.com are publishing columns written by Lt. Col. Mark E. Borowski, a native of South Hadley, as part of “Afghanistan Journal: A Soldier’s Stories” over the course of his year-long deployment to Afghanistan. A squadron commander with the Army 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, he deployed to Afghanistan in December.
A graduate of South Hadley High School, Borowski was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Army upon his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1990.
His career has seen duty with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Richardson, Alaska. He served in the Department of Military Instruction at West Point from 1998 to 2001, and as the executive officer to the commandant of cadets prior to attending the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 2003.
Borowski deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 for duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom II with the 3rd Infantry Division from Fort Benning, Ga., where he served as an operations officer. Upon his return, he was assigned to the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
The son of Edward and Marjorie Borowski, he is married to the former Martha Absher, of Garrison, N.Y., and they have two sons, Ryan and Matthew.
» Read all entries in the series
The K-G Road stretches a little over 60 miles, from Khost City to Gardez, the provincial capital of Paktiya. On its journey it passes west along the flat, high desert of the “Khost Bowl” before it turns northwest, snaking through some of the most rugged, mountainous, and dangerous terrain imaginable before coming to Sata Kandow (elevation 9,500 feet), where it reaches the high plateau that leads to Gardez.
For the last several years, the rehabilitation and paving of the K-G Road has been the undertaking of the Louis Berger Group, a large, international construction firm based out of New Jersey, with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The actual construction work is performed by local or regional sub-contractors.
The prospect of a good road through the mountains between Khost and Gardez is important for many reasons. It will give people living in the remote parts of the area – especially members of the Zadran tribe that have traditionally provided the base of the Haqqani militant network – greater access to basic services, economic activity, and employment opportunities; opportunities that hopefully will provide disincentives to support the insurgency.
Once finished, and when connected to the border crossing at Gulam Khan in Khost, the road will significantly shorten the overland route between the Pakistani port of Karachi and the Afghan capital, Kabul, thus becoming an important artery of commercial activity for all of Afghanistan. No less important, completion of the road offers an important sign of progress and hope for the future.
Like many other intended symbols of progress in Afghanistan, though, the K-G Road project has been fraught with difficulties and challenges. Cost overruns, delays, allegations of corruption, violence, and other setbacks have all contributed to great frustration in completing this enormous undertaking, which was supposed to have been finished quite some time ago. Picture the Big Dig in the middle of a war zone.
Most of those things are far beyond the control of the U.S. and Afghan soldiers patrolling the area, though, and we focus on our responsibility of ensuring that at least the security piece is as good as possible.
We spend a good amount of our time patrolling the road, over-watching construction, trying to keep the area clear of roadside bombs, and trying to make the Afghan soldiers and police stationed along the highway as good and as confident as possible. We also spend a lot of time talking with the people, making sure they understand the importance of the road and the interest that everyone has in seeing it finished. We hope that will generate motivation among the people to report insurgent or criminal activity, and otherwise do their part to help ensure the area is secure.
Still, dangers remain. Since we have been here, about a half dozen Afghan soldiers have been killed along the road, and several more wounded. Our soldiers encounter quite a few roadside bombs (though most of them are found or reported before they detonate), and insurgent attacks on U.S. and Afghan soldiers, while not a daily occurrence, still happen more frequently than we would like. Fortunately, these threats seem to be having little effect on the roadwork this summer, a testament to the bravery of the local construction workers and security guards.
Observing the construction work in this terrain, one cannot help but think this would be an incredible undertaking in the United States, under perfect conditions. And I have no doubt that watching the heavy equipment operators perched precariously on huge piles of rocks high above the road would make an OSHA official blanch!
Traveling along the road, as I often do, makes for a fascinating trip. I never know what I am going to see.
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Mark BorowskiA view of the Khost-Gadez Pass.
The mountain scenery is absolutely stunning, and it reminds me in many ways of traveling the Alaska Highway from Alaska through Canada. For long stretches, the road winds around the bottom of peaks averaging around 8,000 to 9,000 feet in elevation. In some places, the drop from the winding, narrow road to the riverbed below is almost 1,000 feet, and there are no guardrails. Driving through the occasional bustling bazaar adds to the Wild West, frontier feeling, while many of the villages and farms look exactly like they would have looked hundreds of years ago, with absolutely nothing to indicate which century one is in.
This area was the scene of great battles between the Soviets and the Afghan mujahedeen fighters. It is where Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the infamous Haqqani militant network, earned his fame as a great guerrilla commander, back in the days when the U.S. considered him a “freedom fighter,” and before his network became one of the most lethal threats to American soldiers in Afghanistan. While walking the high ridges along the road, it is not unusual to come across fighting positions left over from those days.
In the spring and fall, one often has to stop for the camels and herds of livestock clogging the roads as Kuchi nomads, the same ones brilliantly depicted in James Michener’s novel “Caravans,” make their semi-annual migration back and forth from Pakistan to the interior or northern reaches of Afghanistan.
The most ubiquitous feature of the road, though, is the “jingle truck.” These hulking, elaborately-decorated cargo trucks are common throughout south Asia, and earn the nickname “jingle trucks” from the decorative chains that dangle along their edges and “jingle” as the trucks trundle along roads on which most Americans would never venture in a 4-wheel-drive SUV.
Aside from their stunning décor, the most amazing thing about these trucks is their ability to seemingly defy the laws of physics with some of the places they go and the loads they carry; loads that often rise to almost twice the height of the truck itself. It is not unusual to see a jingle truck plodding along filled with livestock, furniture, bags of wheat and fertilizer, old tires, and with an entire extended family riding along on top of it all.
The “Ice Road Truckers” have nothing on the drivers who navigate these behemoths through the K-G Pass, battling monstrous potholes, flooding, mechanical breakdowns, and the risk of roadside bombs, ambushes, illegal checkpoints, extortion, and kidnapping, none of which you would ever think existed, based on the amount of traffic on the road. It’s just all in a day’s work for these guys. It’s no wonder that most of the trucks have emblazoned across the top of their windshields “masha’allah,” a common expression in the Muslim world, which translates to “whatever God wills.”
Like everything else in Afghanistan, the K-G Road is nothing if not an adventure. For us, securing the road and seeing progress is something visible to point to in a place where progress, where it exists, is often intangible and hard to measure. The road also seems to be one of those rarities that most people agree is something to be hopeful about.
We hope we get to see it finished.
The Peter Pan Cafe in Easthampton is seen at 46 Pleasant St.
