5

A Short Flight in the Hindu Kush

I’d slept fitfully that night. Every car horn heralded danger, every dog bark a warning of lurking terrorists and every bang of a hammer was a bomb going off in the dark recesses of my imagination.

There was a knock on my door at seven thirty sharp. ‘Breakfast’s ready.’ It was Martin. ‘Quiet night last night. Only a few gunshots, did you hear them?’

I couldn’t tell if I had or not. I was just glad that we hadn’t been overrun in the night. I went up to the roof to get a view of the city. It was brilliant sunshine and the air was unusually clear, momentarily free of dust and sand. Away to the north, I could see the mountains looming, brown jagged peaks that pierced the blue sky. This was where it began. Somewhere up there, in a north-easterly direction, were the first glaciers and snow clad summits that heralded the Wakhan corridor, a narrow valley that juts out from the main body of the country like a mysterious tumour and acts as a buffer between Tajikistan, China and Pakistan. It was the wildest, most remote and inaccessible part of Afghanistan. It was also where my walk would begin; the very start of the Greater Himalaya range, where the Hindu Kush clashes in a violent upsurge with the Pamirs, and beyond them the Karakorum. A twisted knot of rock and ice, forced upwards by a tectonic clash, fifteen thousand feet high.

But first I had to get there. Malang had warned me when we spoke the first time that an overland route was out of the question for foreigners. He knew the dangers all too well, having driven the road from Ishkashim down to Kabul only a few days before.

‘It’s full of Taliban. The whole of Nuristan and the Panjshir is off limits. I had to dress up in my salwar kameez and hide in the back of a van the whole way. Two days!’

This morning though, he was dressed in trekking gear, with top-of-the-range Altberg boots and a Craghoppers fleece. He held a bright blue rucksack up to show me. He looked every inch the mountaineer.

‘See this. They’d cut my head off just for having it. They’d call me an infidel. Just talking to foreigners is a crime up there.’

I shivered at the thought.

He burst out laughing. ‘But I do like these trousers, so I don’t mind. The Taliban can go screw themselves.’

With the overland option out of the question, we returned to the airport to start our journey.

‘Don’t forget to tip the pilot,’ shouted Martin. ‘They like whisky better than vodka. It gets them drunk faster.’ He smiled mischievously and waved goodbye from beyond the concrete chicane.

A Turkish soldier thumbed my passport carelessly. The Turkish army had been given the mandate by ISAF of protecting the airport. It was a dull job in the scheme of things and the bored-looking man at the checkpoint waved me through without even making it to the visa page. We were inside the Military Zone now, and tall, concrete walls covered in razor-wire flanked the dusty road. The words ‘No Parking’ were painted everywhere. With the exception of a pregnant dog limping down the gauntlet, there was no one to be seen until we reached another gate, where a freshly painted barrier heralded the start of the runway.

I was on the back seat of a minibus with Malang, who was gazing thoughtfully out of the window. The sullen driver to whom Martin had relinquished his minding duties had barely uttered a word to us.

Once we were beyond the Turkish lines, he spoke up. ‘These bastards are so annoying. I see them every day. I’m white, I don’t wear a turban and still they demand to see my papers,’ he complained, with an unmistakable South African accent. I noticed the name badge pinned haphazardly to his high-vis jacket. Mike. That’s all it said; no surname, no job title.

‘Hang on a minute. Aren’t you the guy who walked the Nile?’ Mike turned around and looked over his sunglasses, directly at me. Before I could speak, or express my surprise, he thrust an enormous, hairy hand towards mine and pumped energetically.

‘Yes, yes, it’s you, you won’t remember me, but we met in Bedouin last year. We got pissed with Belcher.’ It clicked immediately. He was referring to the hotel where I had stayed in Juba, South Sudan. He was right. I didn’t remember him, but it didn’t surprise me. Juba, like Kabul, had a habit of attracting misfits and mercenaries.

He eyed me up and down. ‘Shit, you were a lot thinner then, weren’t you? Making up for lost time in London I guess.’

The minibus rumbled across the runway towards a vast, white helicopter with Mi-8, MTV-1 written down the side. Positioned at the bottom of the steps were three men in immaculate khaki uniforms with gold epaulettes and insignia. We met Oleg, our Moldovan pilot, who resembled a Bond villain and never deigned to remove his Aviator shades. I managed to provoke one smile, when I asked if any of them had been to the Wakhan corridor before.

‘Never!’ he exclaimed. ‘Normally we only fly gangsters around Kabul, and sometimes take UN on sightseeing trips to Bamian. Same thing really. But we never go that far north. I hope she’ll make it.’ He grinned and patted the nose of the thirty-five-year-old Russian aircraft.

Malang looked queasy but did his best to hide it.

‘I’ve never been on a helicopter,’ he said.

‘You’re in for one hell of a ride,’ said Oleg. ‘We have to fly over some big hills.’

The ‘big hills’ to which Oleg so casually referred were the infamous Hindu Kush mountains–or the Hindu Killers–so named because of the vast numbers of Indian slaves who died while being transported through them en route to the Khanates of Central Asia, during the Middle Ages.

Oleg sparked up a cigarette on the runway, as his co-pilot, a hulking man who looked like a wrestler, tinkered absentmindedly with a spanner on the fuselage. The final uniformed Moldovan threw our rucksacks into the helicopter with utter disdain and then simply nodded at us to follow.

‘Get in,’ said Oleg. ‘We’re good to go.’

No safety brief, no dos and don’ts, no seatbelts. Just ‘get in’.

So we did. Malang climbed up the few steps into the main body of the Mi-8. As far as helicopters go, it was pretty spacious inside; apart from our bags, it was virtually empty. The seats were basic, fold-down types, and the cushions and carpet that had been thrown in gave the whole thing an air of alarming apathy.

On closer inspection, these had probably been added as draught excluders; the holes in the wooden floor and gaps in the metal work revealed the wheel arches below. The windows had latches on them so that you could open them, and Oleg said he’d leave the slide door open ‘for a better view’. A ‘gunction box’, was the only thing discernible in (attempted) English. I presumed it was a spelling mistake, but couldn’t be sure. It was painted grey, like everything else inside the machine, and they were the only words I could read. Everything else was in Russian.

Oleg donned a set of headphones, connected by wires for intercommunication with his two co-pilots. The wrestler was perched on a control box between the two front seats, his shoulders pressed up against his countrymen. He removed his shirt and handed it to Malang.

‘Put it on the hook,’ he ordered, and Malang did as he was told. The wrestler, now comfortable in just his string vest, chest hair sprouting through every gap, flashed us a gold-toothed grimace and pressed a button.

The deafening roar of engines disturbed the relative peace as the rotor blades swung into action. They began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until they were going so quickly they appeared to be going the opposite way. We began to move. The helicopter shuffled forward, tentatively bouncing about on the runway, teasing us with its ineptitude. It jolted back down to earth. I glanced at Malang to see his reaction. I’d been in plenty of helicopters before, but I could only imagine what my new shepherd friend was going through.

He forced a smile but immediately looked back out of the window across the runway, past the rows of military aircraft and the hangars towards the brown hills beyond. Finally we began to move in earnest; this time it was forward, driving on the wheels, but worryingly, very much attached to the earth. For a moment it seemed as though we might take off like a plane. Speed and momentum gathered and we tore along the runway. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before we lurched into the air. Up we went, right above the airport and the road we’d been stuck in traffic on only yesterday.

I gripped tightly onto my seat as we wobbled through the thermals above the city and distracted myself with the views out of the open door. Soon the irregular shapes of shanties and walled compounds gave way to fields, irrigation ditches and jaunty, angular dirt roads that dissected the agricultural lands. Tall, earthen chimneys poked up from farms. These were the rustic factories that produced homemade mud bricks. Trees were few and far between; only spindly poplars lined the streams. Levees and mounds signified centuries of human habitation along the banks of the Kabul river that meandered out of the mountains.

Our flight path was due north, and we screamed out of the city airspace, past Bagram airport, and with it, the last flat plains I would see for the next couple of months at least. The brown hills rose sharply and we darted up and over them with the freedom and unsteadiness of a sparrow finding its wings for the first time.

We flew just low enough to make out the crumbling huts and watchtowers nestled amid defiles and craggy ledges, and the occasional figure of a lonely shepherd with his flock. Soon enough, the relentless brown hills transformed into real mountains, topped with glistening white snow. We almost skimmed ghostly peaks, which seemed to close in on all sides. The helicopter sped through gorges, up and up, over a snow-capped pass, and into the notorious Panjshir Valley.

Below, a scene of violent beauty unfolded. Sheer cliffs fell into deep crevasses and brown sandstone dipped into patches of iridescent green terraces. Rivulets and streams crashed down in untamed passion from the glaciers above. On the valley floor, sporadic settlements interrupted the natural wilderness. Pencil-thin sheep tracks connected habitations of high-walled fortresses and ancient castles. It was a scene of fearsome isolation.

As Malang had warned, the Panjshir was full of Taliban. It translates as the valley of the five lions, and harks back to the days when the roar of Asian lions could still be heard among the rocky outcrops. In more recent times, it was the domain of equally ferocious predators. This was the hidden homeland of the Tajik warriors who formed that backbone of the Mujahideen and fought the Russian invaders of 1979. The valley became synonymous with bloody ambushes and Soviet defeats at the hands of the guerrillas, led by the revered Afghan hero, Ahmad Shah Massoud–the lion of the Panjshir.

I looked down and wondered just how many terrified Russians had met their end among the boulders and ridges during the war. And also, of more concern, how many Mi-8 helicopters had been shot down by their stinger missiles over the years. It was a chilling prospect.

Nowadays, the Mujahideen had become indistinguishable from the Taliban. As I learnt during my own days fighting them in the south, they were no longer a cohesive force, but rather gangs of fighters; usually mercenaries or just criminals, willing and able to fight for whoever paid them the most. The old adage was true; the Afghans simply loved fighting each other. But when foreign powers dare to invade, they have a habit of putting their differences aside and ganging up to oust the invader. Most of them weren’t, and still aren’t, particularly inspired by religious fanaticism, but rather an innate sense of war, one that is in the blood after centuries of violence.

After all, the Soviets were by no means the first foreigners to try to tame the Afghans.

Afghanistan has been a battlefield for millennia. Its geographical position–at the crossroads of Asia–has made invasion an all too frequent feature of Afghanistan’s history.

It was no coincidence that Rudyard Kipling decided to set his novel The Man Who Would be King, in the country that unfolded beneath me. The Panjshir, and the high passes to north and east, used to be known as Kafiristan–the land of the unbelievers. It was so named by the Muslim rulers because they had failed for hundreds of years to conquer the hostile tribes of the region; parts of the area didn’t succumb to Islam until as late as 1895. Even now, shamanist undertones bubble away. In the nineteenth century their physical isolation, combined with a formidable reputation for violence and barbarity, gave the inhabitants an almost mythical status among the Afghans, who were already notorious in Asia for their warrior skills and savagery.

In the story, Kipling sends a pair of maverick British ex-soldiers into Kafiristan as they attempt to flee charges of minor fraud and extortion during the heyday of the Raj. The pair of rascals have a plan–to use their soldierly cunning and English charm to make their way over the high mountain passes into a land that no white man had ever passed. On the way they convince the warring tribes to unite and in doing so they establish a new kingdom and get rather rich in the process.

In a predictable show of hubris, the overzealous duo fail to read their history books; legends of invaders have abounded here since time immemorial. Their almost perfect plan comes crashing down when one of them takes it a step too far and attempts to pass himself off as a reincarnated Sikander, the Asian name for Alexander the Great.

Without wishing to spoil the ending to Kipling’s novella, it serves as a tale of warning for anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to invade Afghanistan, and one that successive armies really ought to have taken heed of. The British in particular.

Legends of Alexander have flourished in these mountains for over two thousand years. Allegedly, this was where the great conqueror first felt fear, doubting his ability to subdue the natives. Perhaps then, choosing his bride–the princess Roxanne, unrivalled in beauty and fairness–from these valleys, was a tactical decision. He became so enamoured with the untameable landscape that he left garrisons of his men stationed in clifftop castles, even after he carried on east in his efforts to invade India. He never returned to collect these men, and so they stayed, marrying the local girls; a new hybrid civilisation, the Gandhara, was formed.

Half Asian, half Greek, it lasted a thousand years. Archaeologists have dug up coins from these same mountains that bear reliefs of Macedonian warriors’ heads on one side, and humped buffaloes on the other. In Taxila, on the far side of the Hindu Kush, now in Pakistan, you can still see ancient statues of Buddha, but they are unlike images to which we are accustomed. The living god is draped in a Greek toga, with Greek eyes and wears a thick, curly Greek beard. It’s no coincidence either that Pakols, the flat woollen hats worn by all the mountain men in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are almost identical to the ancient Macedonian Kausia. The Gandhara legacy is still alive today; you only have to browse through pictures of the people that live in Nuristan and the Kailash valley to see the piercing blue eyes and Mediterranean faces of a tribe that lost its way.

Maybe it was Alexander’s descendants then that made up the dots beneath us, standing motionless in the fields, gawping up at the big white metal bird that tore through their skies.

We were heading beyond the Panjshir, beyond even Nuristan, to Badakhshan–the country’s most isolated province. Nestled between the natural boundary of the Hindu Kush to the south and the Amu Darya river to the north, Badakhshan is a forgotten corner of the Himalayas. The Amu Darya is the local Persian name for what the Ancient Greeks called the Oxus, the famed river of classical civilisation; synonymous with being the edge of the known world. Beyond its banks lay nothingness–a dark, savage wilderness, so extreme in its environment that nobody who entered would ever return. It was a place from which no real news was ever received. Vague and strange myths sometimes returned, of dog-headed men, strange horned beasts, hairy giants, cave-dwelling tribes, human blood drinkers, devil-worshippers and other practices too brutal to contemplate.

‘It hasn’t changed much,’ shouted Oleg, over the noise of the engine.

‘I thought you said you’ve never been?’ I shouted back.

‘My uncle fought these monsters back in ’85. He never made it back; they couldn’t find his body. It’s down there somewhere. Word has it, they stitched his balls into his mouth and made him bleed to death.’

He grinned. I had no idea if he was saying it for effect or whether it was true.

The strangest bit of Badakhshan though was our destination, the thin protrusion of the Wakhan corridor. The long valley follows the Oxus all the way to its source near the Chinese border. To the north is Tajikistan, once the Soviet frontier–where Oleg’s ill-fated uncle would have come from in his tank and the direction in which the last of the Russians fled, when they finally gave up the ghost in 1989. This is the route that Marco Polo took on his epic journey to the court of Kublai Khan in 1229, naming a breed of sheep after himself that survives to this day. To the south were the equally notorious valleys of the northern regions of Pakistan, where it was thought Osama bin Laden fled to in the wake of 9/11.

The reason that this remote strip of land belongs to Afghanistan is that it provided a convenient buffer zone during perhaps the most intriguing of all the political conflicts of recent times: the Great Game. A term coined by the British, this was the period in the nineteenth century that should really be known as the original cold war. As the Tsarist Russian Empire grew and took over more and more territory in Central Asia, so did the British in India. Both sides deemed it prudent to have a no-man’s-land, and the mountainous wilds of the western Himalayas provided an obvious natural barrier. But it wasn’t impregnable, and in a half-century-long bid to gain the upper hand, both sides sent in their hardiest soldiers and spies to reconnoitre the high passes on the ‘roof of the world’.

It was the height of imperial designs and a golden age of exploration in Asia. Young European eccentrics dressed themselves in rags and furs and passed themselves off as Pashtun horse traders or Hindu preachers, all the while sketching secret maps on yak hide canvases for the glory of their respective emperors. I’d read extensively about these brave and intriguing young romantics in my youth and I could barely contain my excitement now at the prospect of following in their footsteps, on my own Himalayan adventure.

We flew further north-east, over the settlements of Rukah and Pukh–now nothing but a collection of mud huts, but once important waypoints in an ancient trade route that had all but disappeared. The mountains appeared as brilliant white diamonds on either side, blinding and sublime. I looked out of the window. We’d already been flying for about two hours before I laid eyes on something I’d waited for a decade to see. Rising from the Hindu Kush was a triangle with a sheer face; a mountain called Mir Samir. At just over nineteen thousand feet it isn’t a particularly high Himalayan peak, and is really a dwarf compared to Mount Noshaq, which Malang had conquered in 2003. But it fascinated me because it was the peak made famous in the book that had inspired me most to make my own forays into the mountains.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is one of the most celebrated pieces of travel writing from the mid-twentieth century. Written by Eric Newby in 1958, it describes the hilarious account of his failed expedition to summit the unconquered peak with his companion, the British diplomat Hugh Carless. The pair of amateur hill walkers encountered all sorts on their journey, from gun-toting bandits to murderous policemen, and even bumped into that most eccentric of explorers–Wilfred Thesiger, who famously called them a ‘couple of pansies’.

Newby sadly died in 2006, but I met Hugh Carless on a few occasions before he also passed away five years later.

It was the spring of 2008 and I was about to deploy to Afghanistan with the army when my friend Will Charlton invited me to lunch with his eighty-one-year-old grandfather at the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club. This was something not to miss. Hailing from a family of very respectable, very learned and utterly bonkers individuals, Mr Michael Charlton had had a long and very successful career as a news broadcaster, cricket commentator and war correspondent, covering live in his heyday Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam and the Moon landings.

‘I’ve got a very special guest coming today, my boy,’ he said with a refined, Australian lilt, slapping me on the back. ‘You’ll have a lot in common. Tell him where you’re off to.’

I was surprised to find the subject of Newby’s classic tale of adventure sitting at the table, already nursing a whisky and soda. In his early nineties, very frail and unsteady on his feet, he rose to greet us. There was no smile on his lips, but his handshake was firm and his eyes as young and sparkling as I imagined they were the day he set off into the Panjshir in 1956.

‘Sit down, Ambassador,’ said Michael. Will gave me a nudge, clearly enjoying the formal display of affectation.

‘So you’re off to Afghanistan?’ said Hugh, raising an eyebrow.

Before I could reply, Michael interjected, ‘He most certainly is, Ambassador. Down south, where Lord Roberts went. Kandahar. Terrible business it is, Ghazis everywhere. Hasn’t changed a jot.’

‘I went there you know,’ said ‘the Ambassador’.

I did know. I must have read A Short Walk half a dozen times and felt like I knew Carless all too well, such was the vividness of Newby’s writing. It was hard to reconcile the fearless, youthful character of the story with the old man sipping his whisky in front of me.

‘I spent a bit of time in Kabul,’ he said.

By ‘a bit of time’ I assumed he was referring to his two years as third secretary at the embassy, not to mention several expeditions into Nuristan and the Panjshir, including the famous 1956 journey.

Michael joined in. ‘He was in Tehran too; there isn’t a bit of that godforsaken place that the Ambassador doesn’t know. Speaks the lingo too, don’t you, Carless?’

‘Oh, I’ve forgotten it all now,’ said Carless.

‘Don’t be so modest, ’course you haven’t. Aren’t you jealous of this young chap though?’ He slapped me again. ‘Heading off to the war to have a snipe at the Ghazis. I can almost smell it. The crack of musketry, the wails of anguish. Oh God, I do miss it all now.’ Michael, a man of stocky stature–and presumably in his youth, strength–had closed his eyes, daydreaming of the romance of battle. I was a mere twenty-three-year old lieutenant; I was excited, but equally, terrified of the prospect of war.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Hugh. ‘He’ll have his fun, that’s for certain, but we mustn’t be nostalgic. It’s all changed now. Robots and drones and smart bombs.’ He uttered the words ‘smart bombs’ with disdainful, clipped precision.

Over lunch we spoke at length of how Afghanistan had changed over the years and yet at the same time just how remarkably constant some things had remained. He told me about his war years in the Middle East and Italy, and his days in the Foreign service, and finally about his companionship with Newby and the famous meeting with Thesiger.

‘He was an odd sort of fellow,’ said Hugh. ‘Very aggressive man. Used to box at Cambridge and never lost, or so I’m told. I don’t believe he was a homosexual, but he did have a habit for bringing young African boys to the Travellers’ Club. Dressed them up in good tweed too. Damned expensive business whatever it was.’

Before we parted, Carless gave me some of his maps from Afghanistan and some sage advice about how to silence a donkey if the enemy are nearby (a quick snip to the vocal cords apparently isn’t necessarily fatal). He promised to write. True to his word, he did. While stationed in Kandahar, I received long and often hilarious letters, mainly referring back to the exploits of Victorian spies and lamenting the loss of full regimental dress as a valid battlefield uniform.

Hugh Carless was representative of his time and age and belonged to a long tradition of mountaineers and explorers.

Before the twentieth century, there had been a vague interest in mountaineering by Victorian aesthetes, but it was generally confined to the Alps, and high-altitude walking was regarded as a healthy hobby rather than a serious pursuit. The Victorians saw the mountains of Asia as a point of strategic consideration and little more. There were valleys to be mapped, snowy passes to be navigated and Russians to be stopped. But why anyone would bother to scale a summit for any reason other than to gauge whether it might make a decent gun emplacement, was beyond Victorian sensibilities. The Himalayas were regarded as a mere buffer zone between empires; a no-man’s-land of mystery and intrigue. The harsh, unforgiving environment was viewed by most as unconquerable and best left to the unfathomable tribals that lived there. And anyway, the Holy Grail for romantic exploration in the mid- to late nineteenth century was of course the hunt for the source of the river Nile in Africa.

The turn of the century though heralded a newfound interest in mountains. There seemed to be a shift brought on by nationalism across Europe. Suddenly all eyes were on Asia and everyone wanted to reach the top of the world. It was the beginning of the era of mountaineering.

Other than a brief hiatus during the war years, the first half of the twentieth century was a period of intense exploration in the Himalayas that saw a number of great expeditions undertaken.

Mount Everest, of course, took centre stage. The tragic 1924 expedition which saw the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine captured the public imagination. Then there was the 1950 ascent of Annapurna (the first successful 8,000-metre peak) by Maurice Herzog and the subsequent first ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953 which brought the most acclaim. There were many more world records broken in this period too and they symbolised the last great mountaineering expeditions. As the century wore on, individuals and teams of British, European and North American climbers finally conquered virtually all the major summits.

After the great expeditions of the mid-twentieth century though, everything changed. China invaded Tibet, opening up one of the last great secrets in nature (only to close it down and keep it for themselves); the hippy trail of the 1960s and 70s saw thousands of Europeans pour into the mountains in search of enlightenment and cheap weed. Later, with the advent of mass tourism, facilitated by cheap commercial flights and the downfall of the neighbouring Soviet Union, the 1990s heralded an era of unsurpassed development in travel to the Himalayas. Nepal, once a secretive enclave that refused entry to foreigners, became the great backpacker hub of the continent. Northern India too, with its holy rivers that flowed out of the mountains, drew the crowds. Which gap-year student hasn’t hung around the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala hoping for a glimpse of His Holiness? Even Pakistan, with the building of the Karakorum Highway, now sees a steady stream of hardy trekkers heading into the hills.

Climbing has undergone a kind of post-modern transformation–more contrived, more manipulated. Speed challenges, supported and unsupported, with or without oxygen, flying off the top of… the list goes on. Of course, it doesn’t make the endeavour any less impressive, and even now, tens if not hundreds of people make it to the summit of Everest each year, not to mention a thousand other mountains–despite the very clear and present dangers.

I’d decided to bookend my journey with perhaps the two most unknown and sealed countries in the Himalayas–Bhutan, and here–the north-east of Afghanistan. I wasn’t here specifically to climb mountains (although I imagined it may be unavoidable at times), but to dig around beyond the clichés and figure out just what the appeal was to visitors and more importantly what the mountains meant to those who lived here.

Malang had been fumbling in his pocket as I pondered all of this and I watched him put his phone to his ear. He began shouting into the microphone in the Wakhi language. Before I could ask him who on earth he could be chatting to, and how on earth he had managed to get a signal in a chopper flying at fifteen thousand feet, he jumped up and whooped with joy and ran across the cabin towards the open door. I grabbed him by his jacket.

‘Careful, you lunatic, you’ll fall out.’

‘Look!’ he said, smiling like a mad man. ‘Ishkashim. It’s my home. I’m home!’ he shouted. With that he shoved his head right out of the door, clinging precariously to a rope attached with a clip to the roof of the helicopter, and waved down furiously.

‘That was my mum on the phone, she can see us.’

I looked down to see the patchwork brown and green of a small town straddling the Oxus river and surrounded to the north by the Pamir mountains. We were right on the border of Tajikistan, and with it the entrance to the Wakhan corridor.