From the Eisenhower Highway--in Afghanistan, that is!

True to the adage that we learn something new everyday, now I know that there is an Eisenhower Highway in Afghanistan. 

Here in the US, we are all too familiar with how Eisenhower participated in the army’s exercise to study the logistical issues in moving military vehicles and equipment from coast to coast, which was a huge factor in President Eisenhower leading the charge on building the interstate highway system that we now take for granted. 

But, I certainly had no idea that there was an Eisenhower Highway all the way in another part of the world!

The road, known as Highway One, runs in a massive arc from the capital Kabul in the eastern part of the country southwest to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second major city, and then northwest to Herat, an economic center near Afghanistan's borders with Turkmenistan and Iran.
By a strange coincidence President Dwight Eisenhower, who is remembered as the father of the U.S. interstate highway system, has a similar legacy among Afghans: The Kabul-Kandahar-Herat road has been known locally as the Eisenhower Highway because it was built with U.S. assistance in the 1950s and 60s.

Jonathan Steele's description of it is sadly poetic:

Built in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed peacefully for Afghan friendship, this US-funded 300-mile ribbon of tarmac was plied for two decades by lorries and garishly painted buses with no concern for security. Among the passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion.

As one can imagine, this highway is in a state of disrepair after years of war.

More than a quarter of the 745-mile highway is dirt and gravel. Depending on weather conditions and the mood of local bandits, the trip from one end to the other can take from 28 hours to a week.

In other words, yet another evidence that the Afghanistan of today is in a worse shape than the country that it was forty years ago. Perhaps we have invented the time machine after all--bomb a country enough, and time reverses!