11 Chapter 11. The Khyber Pass

Until 1947, Afghanistan shared a border with British India—the so-called Durand Line, drawn by the British in 1893, which sliced through the homeland of the Pashtuns. At the time India was partitioned, Pakistan inherited this border, and thenceforth those heading to India went initially to Pakistan. Most immediately, travellers from Kabul journeyed east to Jalalabad, a major centre of Pashtun culture, and from there to the town of Torkham, at the Pakistan border, and then through the Khyber Pass and on to the city of Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.

For those travelling overland to India, perhaps no other place has proved as visually evocative as the fabled Khyber Pass—a rocky valley flanked by towering cliffs of stone that stretches for more than 50 kilometres. Traversing the pass in the late 1970s, David Pearson recalled the “old coal-fired trains chugging black smoke going up the rail line,” while Gregory describes the “steep winding roads with precipitous drops and hairpin bends” and “taxis coming the other way—1950s Chevrolets packed with passengers, some sitting on the roof.”¹ But of course I recorded my own experience:

We took a minibus to Jalalabad on October 31, then rode on the roof of another bus to Torkham just over the border, sitting in among the array (or disarray) of local Afghanis and one pink-blue sheep. Maude was wrapped to her eyeballs in her new scarf and Rainer was in his Saudi kaftan, but my skin was baked and windswept into leather; still, a beautiful trip. We laugh and smile the journey away while the bus sways and bodies swing from the rafters, windows, and doors of the lurching bus.

We crossed the border in good time: a harried clerk at his typewriter did his thankless job in exemplary fashion. The border point looked as if a carnival had hit town. It featured an assortment of chai shops, beggars, baksheesh boys, peddlers, pushers, a skeletal dog (or two), drivers, soldiers, and finally Western travellers (but few women). Maude, Rainer, and I packed into the front seat of a jeep truck beside the driver.

We entered the pass. Abandoned clay forts and circular parapets surrounded us, towns marshalled against towns. My eyes and ears were filled with Kipling’s world. Bridges, train trestles, suddenly raised skywards, spans of steel and wood. The answering “clap” of rifles being fired at a distance echoing through the valley.

The India-born Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a controversial chronicler of the British Raj, often celebrating British imperialism but also deriding upper-class pretensions and predicting the empire’s demise. Kipling described the Khyber Pass as “a sword cut through the mountains”—a long gorge connecting Afghanistan to India. Fearful of Russian expansionism, twice during the nineteenth century the British sought to seize control of Afghanistan and topple the ruling Barakzai dynasty, in an effort to create a buffer zone.² But they were repeatedly thwarted by powerful resistance from Pashtun armies, at whose hands the British suffered one of their most devastating, and humiliating, defeats as they attempted to retreat from Kabul at the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42). I still remember seeing large cement plaques commemorating the British regiments that had served in the Khyber Pass.

As we slowly made our way along the winding road, Kipling’s lines “The flying bullet down the Pass, / That whistles clear: ‘All flesh is grass’ ” lingered in my mind. But the place I was travelling through was not Kipling’s world, even though traces of it remained. Much had changed since the British left, yet a martial atmosphere still hovered over the pass—a reflection in part of ongoing border tensions between Afghanistan and its new neighbour, Pakistan, as well as pressure from Pashtun nationalists intent on uniting Pashtuns on both sides of the border.

Once we were across the border, it was only a few kilometres to the town of Landi Kotal, situated at the summit of the pass. There we made a short stop. Describing his own trip across the border, Gregory recalls that as the barrier lowered behind the bus, “local traders besieged us, banging on the windows and offering to sell hashish, opium, acid and guns, all of which were on open display.”³ This was, in fact, a worthy preview of Landi Kotal itself. Ernest, who travelled in the same year I did, offered a memorable account of the town’s main road:

We found a bustling marketplace, primarily of all sorts of weapons, including large-calibre machine guns, land mines, and nasty-looking missile launchers, all beautifully laid on blankets, brightly lit by well primed and pumped hissing gas lanterns. You had the feeling that on the outskirts of town you would also find tanks and fighter jets. There was also an assortment of drugs, and one of our group bought a sealed bottle of pharmaceutical cocaine from Germany.

He might have been describing my own experience:

Small shops lined the road. We had chai amid a crowd of local merchants attempting to sell us hash, opium, morphine, or guns. Guns were everywhere: rifles, automatics, semi-automatics. One shopkeeper told me they could replicate any gun I wanted. They used original weapons—Kalashnikovs were popular—as models. At one shop, I was offered for sale a stainless-steel single-shot pen gun. The shopkeeper showed me how it unscrewed, revealing a chamber where a bullet—I think it was a .38-calibre—could be inserted, then fired with the pen clip. I was tempted to buy it, as it would have made for a fabulous conversation piece, but in the end decided not to.

I was told that there were no police in Landi Kotal, which I took to be true. The entire town exuded an aura of frontier lawlessness. It looked as if it had been lifted from a Hollywood backlot.

Beyond Landi Kotal, the entire Khyber Pass had a reputation for danger. Although Western travellers were often ignorant of the surrounding culture, the region had long been home to a number of Pashtun tribes, who naturally felt a sense of ownership. As traffic through the pass increased, Pashtun residents sometimes took to demanding payment for safe passage, as a source of badly needed income. Basil Jay describes travelling through the pass in 1973 when, roughly halfway across, a “small group of men with rifles and bandoliers” blocked the way. The group’s leader pointed his rifle, smiled, and with a mixture of hand signals and makeshift English demanded a tribute—US$10—which Jay was swift to bestow.⁴ David Pearson similarly remembered arriving at the Khyber Pass in 1978 only to be stopped by a man demanding his camera as the price of proceeding. Pearson kept his Land Rover running, and when the man came around toward the driver’s side, he gunned the engine and escaped.

Such tales notwithstanding, we exited the pass safely, as indeed did most travellers, our sense of relief dimming before the raw excitement of having just travelled through a place we believed to be dangerous.

Dusk began to settle over the valley as we continued on our way. The sky was darkening, the clouds pierced by golden rays of the setting sun as a purple haze gently descended over the mountains. We stopped for the evening prayer and then drove on, enchanted, through a deepening landscape, reality dissolving into history and myth. The world seemed inconceivably beautiful, too much for my heart to hold.

Not quite a decade after I left Afghanistan, a photograph appeared on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic. Titled simply “Afghan Girl,” it was taken in 1984 in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar. The image is unforgettable. At once wary and defiant, the girl stares straight at the camera, her green eyes wide open. Only in 2002 was her identity established: a Pashtun woman named Sharbat Gula. Her family had fled Afghanistan after their village was attacked by Soviet helicopters, travelling on foot across the mountains. As she later confirmed, she did not wish to be photographed—a violation of Pashtun cultural norms.

The Soviet–Afghan War was, of course, only the beginning. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, a violent civil war ensued, which culminated in 1996 with the victory of the ultraconservative Taliban, which upholds an extreme form of sharia law that, among many other things, places excessively severe restrictions on acceptable behaviour for women. The Taliban government was overturned not long after the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, setting in motion a disastrous war that dragged on for nearly two decades. Yet the Taliban once more emerged victorious, returning to power in August 2021.

Gula lived as a refugee in Pakistan until 2016, when she was arrested by Pakistani authorities, who accused her of possessing a forged identity card. She was deported to Afghanistan the following year, where she was given a state welcome and a large home—only to be evacuated to Italy four years later, shortly after the Taliban formed its new government.⁵ She has become a celebrity of sorts, although not by her own choosing, but otherwise her story is little different from that of more than six million other Afghan refugees. Never could I have imagined such a future in 1976, and I find it all but impossible to reconcile it with the warmth of my memories.

1. Richard Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Kashmir and India” section.

2. Omar Waraich, “History Shows the Khyber Pass Is the Key to Afghanistan,” The Independent, October 5, 2010, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/omar-waraich-history-shows-the-khyber-pass-is-the-key-to-afghanistan-2097659.html. Afghanistan had been ruled by Pashtun dynasties since the mid-eighteenth century. The country was, at the time, caught up in the so-called Great Game between two empires, the Russian and the British, both contending for hegemony in Central Asia, and was hence of strategic importance to Britain’s defence of India.

3. Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Kashmir and India” section.

4. Jay, 65 Days to Delhi, 558.

5. Jenny Gross, “’Afghan Girl’ from 1985 National Geographic Cover Takes Refuge in Italy,” New York Times, November 26, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/world/europe/afghan-girl-national-geographic.html (with subscription).