Crossing Afghanistan, I saw how the war brought jobs – and corruption

MATTHIEU AIKINS
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, May. 23 2013, 7:35 AM EDT
Last updated Thursday, May. 23 2013, 9:02 AM EDT

My journey of a thousand miles began with a single bribe. I was riding in a Pakistani truck hauling a shipping container from the port city of Karachi to the Afghan capital of Kabul, along one of the two main routes used to supply U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. I was accompanied by the truck driver and his brother, and a friend who served as a translator. We were still on the outskirts of Karachi when we were first stopped by the police, two tubby traffic cops on white Suzuki motorcycles. After paying the equivalent of $4 to the cops, we set out again, but for the next six days, bribery, along with breakdown and the threat of militant attacks, would be a constant impediment to our journey, culminating in a barrage of police “tolls” on the final stretch through the Khyber Pass on our way into Afghanistan.

But I couldn’t blame the Pakistani cops for wanting to get into the vast feeding frenzy that has accompanied the tens of billions of supplies that have surged through the country since 2001. Pakistan is one of two ground routes used to supply landlocked Afghanistan, with the other, much longer and more expensive, winding its way through Central Asia. This route is so vital that when it was shut down for a seven-month period in 2011 and 2012 following a dispute between the United States and Pakistan, the U.S. military estimated that the closure cost $100-million a month.

After more than a decade, this improvised system has become not only the lifeblood of the Afghan war but a major force in its own right inside Pakistan – a vast industry that has grown to encompass everyone from the rural Pashtun families who send their sons to drive the trucks to the millionaire Punjabi businessmen who hire them, from crane operators and gangsters in Karachi to international contractors and Western lobbyists. It has linked the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands to the heart of the global economy, and its complex and volatile development offers a dramatic example of how a foreign military intervention alters the economic and social fabric in the region around it.

Since I started covering Afghanistan almost five years ago, I’ve always made it a point to try to get out of the blast walls and armored vehicles and into the countryside, taking advantage of the fact that with my half-Asian features and Persian language skills, I can often pass for a local. This was my most ambitious trip yet, though, one that, to my knowledge, no other foreign journalist has undertaken. Not only did it mean spending seemingly endless stretches jostling around in cramped, burning hot cabin, and braving Taliban attacks – we narrowly missed two bomb blasts on our trip – but it almost meant crossing Pakistan’s tribal areas, which are normally off-limits to foreigners. The result is Bird of Chaman, Flower of the Khyber, an e-book published by Foreign Policy and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which details my journey and the lives of the truckers who ply the NATO routes, most of them ethnic Pashtuns from the borderlands.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/in-pakistan-the-afghan-war-brings-jobs---and-criminality-on-an-epic-scale/article12089432/