Afghanistan's wild west

Everyone had told me not to go west by road, not alone, not as a foreigner. Even my travelling through cities alone was regarded, by most of the expats I spoke to, as somewhat insane. To cross the mountains of central Afghanistan by van and truck was a voyage that not even my Afghan friends in Kabul would consider. Yet as scared as I was, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see the remote interior firsthand.
There were two main routes overland from Kabul to Herat, a major city near the Iranian border. The fast way was the long loop south over paved highway through Kandahar and Helmand. It was also extremely dangerous for foreigners, with Taliban checkpoints a regular occurrence. Even ordinary Afghans were at risk: while I was in Kabul, 23 civilians were pulled off a bus outside of Kandahar City and executed by the Taliban, on suspicion of working for the government.
The slow way was a straight shot west through the rugged mountain ranges of central Afghanistan, a four-to-six-day journey over serpentine, broken dirt roads. Gruelling as it was, it passed through what had until recently been safer, if desolate, territory. But with the security situation in the country deteriorating almost across the board, the route was now considered unsafe and exposed to bandits and militants, particularly in the territories between Ghor and Herat provinces where a renegade warlord named Mullah Mustafa was rumoured to be stopping traffic.
On the way was Bamiyan, site of the infamous destruction of the giant Buddha statues by the Taliban. To get there from Kabul I took a crowded public minivan -- one of the indomitable, four-wheel-drive Toyota Town Aces that ply the mountains here -- back north toward Mazar, and then east into the high mountains. I had to detour this way in order to avoid violent Wardak Province -- south and west of Kabul, the Taliban were operating nearly to the capital's doorstep.
The town of Bamiyan, nestled in a fertile valley at 2,800 metres, is the capital both of Bamiyan Province and the Hazarajat, a region in central Afghanistan inhabited by the Hazara people, Shia Muslims who are descendants of Genghis Khan's army ("Hazara" means "one of the thousands"). Long at the bottom of Afghanistan's socioeconomic hierarchy, the Hazara suffered terribly under the Taliban and have little sympathy for the current insurgency, making the area one of the safest in Afghanistan.
Even with the Buddhas gone, the area around Bamiyan contains a wealth of early Buddhist shrines and caves, and with its gorgeous mountain scenery would make, in some alternate universe, for a first-class touristic destination. There is in fact a small four-star hotel there, frequented mainly by NGO staff, that offers wireless Internet and Japanese cuisine, not far from where Bamiyan's poorest citizens were living in caves.
I met up with Yama Ferozi and Yaghya Ghaznawi, two Afghans working for a Japanese-funded literacy program, and drove down the valley with them to the little villages the program served, small clusters of mud and brick houses with piles of dry sheep dung stacked in front of them as fuel for the coming killer winter.

Source:http://www.nationalpost.com/