We’re discussing two different things. I’m with you that roads are a critical piece of economic development, and vastly improved infrastructure will be one of the main keys to stabilizing the country. However, the causal relationship between roads and security seems reversed in most media reporting: security must come first, and roads second. That is not the way the relationship has been reported.

But as an Afghan acquaintance in Peshawar (originally from Paktika) pointed out, the PRTs stress the road improvements with the local people as for their benefit but generally the local people see the road improvements being done for the military to move their vehicles more rapidly. And as the Kajaki road project implies, the promise of a new improved hard surface road putting many people to work in the process does little for security through hostile regions. This is one example where the line between military operations and development activities gets blurred. The road becomes a negative symbol rather than a hoped for improvement.

As my statistics professor pointed out years ago, there may not be a causal relationship between events although there may be a measurable co relationship. For example, there is a frequent co relationship between fire damage to a building and the number of firetrucks at the scene…but not causal.

And then there was the case of a short (5-10 miles) cobblestone road being built in Helmand from Lashkar Gah out to Kala Bist, previously a tourist site with little agriculture importance. A team of cobblestone road builders were brought in from Bolivia to do the work and to train Afghans in the process. The project clearly moved a lot of funds but would have minimum impact on this traditional cash crop region…presently into poppy. For example, the primary farm road through Nawa, a major irrigated agricultural district nearby was left unimproved.
This region gets some 4 inches of rain a year which reduces the need for hard surfaced farm roads but reasonable drainage and periodic grading would help. And cobblestone road builders could be found in neighboring Pakistan.

The farmers of central Helmand, the largest irrigation system in the country, have been stressing three things to help them get out of opium poppy cultivation (which they consider evil) since at least 1997: improve the irrigation system that had seen no real maintenance in roughly 20 years, improve the farm to market roads through the region to minimize damage to produce like melons, and help with the markets/prices of their traditional cash crops like cotton, vegetables, melons, peanuts etc. But the promises of a major reconstruction program have been slow in coming, frequently mis-timed, mismanaged and focused on many activities that did not bring direct benefits to what should have been the target population. Results: disillusionment with the process and the foreign doner community, increased opium poppy cultivation, growing corruption, and decreased security even with a number of new roads. A causal relationship? I think so.