Driving in Afghanistan

On Afghan Road, Scenes of Beauty and Death

I sit right here and watch people crash all day long, said Mohammed Nabi, who fries fresh fish in an open-air stall along the road. The course of history has proved that the Afghan people are bullies. This is why we cannot drive safely.
One day last week, 13 accidents unfolded on the road in a mere two hours, all of them catastrophic, nearly all of them fatal. The daylong drizzle made the day slightly more calamitous than most. At one scene, a bloodied family grieved for their kin trapped in a flattened car. At another, a minibus lay crushed beneath the hulk of a jackknifed truck. At still another, the bottom of a ravine was filled with a cars twisted remains.
And yet even as those accidents spread themselves across the roadway, the cars sailed heedlessly past. Taxis and buses weaved and passed one another at bone-chilling speeds, with only millimeters separating them from bloody catastrophe.
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But perhaps the gravest threat, apart from speed of the cars, is the slowness of the trucks. The massive tractor-trailers that move cargo in and out of Pakistan are often overloaded by thousands of pounds. They cannot move fast; if they are climbing one of the gorges thousand-foot hills, they cannot move at all. They get stuck. They fall back. They fall over.
So the cars and their drivers stack up behind them, angry and impatient, and rush and maneuver and pass them at the first chance.
And so the cars crash, one after the other.
Each day, the broken and bloody arrive at the Sarobi Hospital, a small clinic in the town at the head of the gorge.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/world/asia/08road.html

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