In Afghanistan’s lawless northwest, the ring road has always been a dilapidated dirt track which signifies a four day ride from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif. And Afghan government control – a relative in the best of times – has traditionally never extended further west than Mazar-i-Sharif. But since the fall of the Taliban, the northern provinces of Jawzjan, Faryab and Badghis – now a series of petty warlord fiefdoms where a man with forty Kalashnikov-toting herders can declare himself a general – have come closer to Kabul, much to the delight of civilians (especially small traders and businesspersons who pay numerous protection fees and other ‘taxes’) and the chagrin of peripheral elites such as the ethnic Uzbek warlord General Dostum, his rival Abdul Malik, and numerous other petty players. These men have carved out statelets – the largest is Dostum’s, whose control spans across much of the north; and the smallest being villages run by various Dostum and Azadi supporters such as Abdurrahman Shamal, a 28-year-old Jumbesh-e-Milli member whose 200-man militia until recently ran Kateh Qala and 40 other villages, supported by extended kinship networks. Government authority in Maymana and a few other areas is cosmetic at best- and outside of those areas, it is non-existent.

Enter the ring road, which once ended on the western outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, but has, since 2002, steadily extended Westward through Dostum’s traditional fiefdom of Jawzjan (although many of the government elements who followed the road remain loyal not to Kabul, but to him), and then to Andkhoy, in Northern Faryab – a desperately dry, dilapidated place which might one day be sustained by cross-border traffic between Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, if only the border controls would loosen.

Transportation infrastructure in Afghanistan primarily necessitates the flow of coercive elements; secondarily, it facilitates trade. Economic incentives always accompany such road-building – the inauguration of the Salang Pass in the 1960s, besides making the once-deadly Hindu Kush crossing decidedly less so, led to price equalization between Afghanistan’s north and south for the first time ever. That same road-building, however, was primarily a political move; the Salang pass was built by the Soviets in the 1960s, and their 1979 invasion would have been impossible without it.

The same considerations are dictating the final completion of the Afghan ring road. And although the road is being explained in terms of price equalization between Balkh and Faryab (the convoy costs incurred during the current desert crossing can raise the prices of staple goods by 50 percent, and firewood, for example, is prohibitively priced), Afghanistan’s northern ‘commanders’ are beginning to understand that the road, far from simply allowing for their enrichment through the imposition on anticipated future trade of illegal local levies and taxes, could ultimately lead to their own disenfranchisement, in favor of government elements- or more likely, government- co-opted elements. Some of these outlaws will become in-laws. Others will remain on the outside, and will fall back to undertake subsistence-level predatory activities in areas more threadbare, with offerings more meagre and desperate than the decent pickings such men can choose from today in the region’s well-traversed dirt tracks.

The Mazar-Andkhoy stretch of the ring road, recently completed, is now one of the finest roads in Afghanistan; Andkhoy is connected to something for the first time since the emirates existed. Now the road is being extended south; soon Maymana, Almar and Qaisar will be connected to the state. Already the Andkhoy improvements have eliminated the old tracks which used to utilize the Dasht-e-Leili desert- a classical lawless land filled with herders and bandits who preyed on traveller’s convoys for as long as people have moved through that desert. The road has left the Dasht-e-Leili to the camels, Karakul sheep, and black-tented Kuchi nomads.

The road’s construction is accompanied by indirect violence throughout Faryab. In Chaqmaq and Kata Qala, small armies are engaging one another as the construction picks up speed. And surveyors are everywhere – on the dusty stretches of Dawlat Abad and Maymana are men with theodolites, dust goggles, tripods and orange vests. They may be targets soon.

This road will aid the centralization of power in Kabul; it will make it possible to rush troops into problem areas, even if local airports are seized by elements hostile to Kabul. Afghan police and troops are already moving in advance of the bulldozers and steamrollers, as are NATO forces; first in 2003, when fighting between Jamiat and Jumbesh killed a dozen in Maymana town; then in 2006, during the Muhammad cartoon fiasco, when Jumbesh supporters attacked the local NATO provincial reconstruction team base; and most recently, when Commander Shamal caught the attention of Kabul, which sent in reinforcements to unsuccessfully arrest him.

This road is an understated affair- but what it really signifies is the extension of control to a corner of the Afghan ‘state’ which has never been under such control before.

Once this newly-built transportation infrastructure links Faryab with the state, Badghis – another drought-stricken, lawless province where four MSF workers were brutally murdered in 2003 – will be next. The road’s end in Herat will make it harder for Ismael Khan or another of his ilk to turn that region into a statelet again- a richer one than Faryab, financed by import taxes from the lucrative Herat-Mashad road.

On the other side of the country’s north, the same road-building process will soon link Badakhshan province (a significant producer of opium, as well as the origin of much of Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli- a trade dominated by old Jamiat warlords) to Takhar, Kunduz, and then Kabul. More violence should be anticipated across Afghanistan’s peripheral northern areas, both west and east, as petty gunmen and ad-hoc ‘generals’ seek to extend holds, disenfranchise rivals, and consolidate gains before the blacktop arrives – and with it, the troops.