The problem of the Border

I figured you might want to know some of the progress we've made here, what it is, why it works, why we do it, what we hope to accomplish from it, so that what we do here wouldn't be a strange mystery.

So, let me talk for a bit about the border.

Afghanistan has the stupidest border in the world.

See, the British conquered India and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1800s, and they

had this idea

"Lets make the border as stupid as possible, so that no one can forge a united country and rebel against us."

True story.

So they drew this crazy border that squiggles all over the place, and they drew it that way to deliberately split up any group with any form of solidarity, drawing that border right through the middle of clans, tribes, and history.

Now you know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

This is an AMAZINGLY non-straight line. If Afghanistan had its borders put in place by any other method, they would be about half as long. All those little squiggles mean a LOT of border.

And since tribes and families were split by the border, people cross it all the damned time to visit family, to trade, for whatever reason.

So, there's LOTS of border, and people cross it all the damned time.

So, there's LOTS of smuggling.

Drugs gets smuggled out, and in.

Guns and bombs get smuggled in.

And propaganda gets smuggled in, trainers get smuggled in, foreign spies get smuggled in.

And it's really hard to stop, because there is SO MUCH border.

So this is what we've been doing.

First, we built a road. Route 1. It's the "Ring Road" that runs in a big circle through Afghanistan. It allows our forces

freedom of movement and resupply, it stimulates trade, it helps the country a LOT.

Then we started building other roads.

See, before we came here, there were almost no paved roads. Little internal trade, no external trade. Farmers can't get their goods to market, people cannot get to doctors or to schools. Most roads were single lane dirt roads, sometimes they were dry riverbeds.

So each paved road changes, fundamentally, the nature of the country, both it's physical terrain and it's human and economic terrain.

Some of these new roads we have built lead to the border, and on the border we built checkpoints.

So, if you want to visit family, or import scarves, or export oranges and grapes, you use the paved roads we built,.

And you pass through the checkpoints we built, which are manned by the Afghan National Army, and the Afghan Border Patrol.

And if you smuggle, and pass through these checkpoints, we might catch you.

And if you smuggle, and you bypass the checkpoints, we KNOW you are a bad guy, because who the FUCK wants to trek over the mountains with donkeys when they can just drive there on a paved road?

So, we opened the borders by building roads. And opening the borders has allowed us to finally start closing the borders to smugglers.