By PETER WONACOTT
GHORMACH DISTRICT, Afghanistan -- Khalid Khan's small construction firm was supposed to build a road here that would open his strife-scarred land to commerce and improve its prospects for peace. Instead he wound up in the hands of the Taliban, hanging upside down.
On an April evening, says Mr. Khan, about 20 armed militants broke into his home and marched him and 14 of his employees to a remote village. The 30-year-old contractor says he was accused of helping the Americans and shoved into a well waist-deep with water. At other times during his two-month captivity he was chained to a roof by his feet. Ultimately, relatives raised a $100,000 ransom.
"I lost my money, my health," says Mr. Khan, who estimates he shed more than 60 pounds in captivity. "I lost everything for this project."
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Construction workers on the Shomali Plains paved a road that links to the ring road.
The project in question: paving 3.7 miles over a dusty donkey trail traversing the wheat fields and parched riverbeds of impoverished northwest Afghanistan. It's a tiny piece of a 1,925-mile rim of asphalt -- called the national ring road -- that aims to connect Afghanistan's cities.
The highway has become a litmus test of President Hamid Karzai's ability to govern the country. The final links of the $2.5 billion project -- or roughly 10% of the total length -- are being held up in part by the Taliban's attacks on construction sites and workers. In the face of a hardened insurgency, Mr. Karzai has struggled to show he can build and defend the infrastructure needed for a viable state.
"The government of Afghanistan needs to demonstrate it can have a road network and can keep it open. The insurgents recognize that and are working against it," says Brig. Gen. Frank McKenzie, a staff member for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The ring road, adds Gen. McKenzie, "is a symbol of governance."
The attacks on the road, including bombings, kidnappings and drive-by shootings, reflect broader security woes underlying Afghanistan's shaky transition to democratic rule ahead of the Aug. 20 national election, which Mr. Karzai is favored to win. According to internal government estimates, about 14% of the country's polling stations are considered too dangerous for people to vote.
A reminder of the volatile situation came Saturday morning, as a Taliban suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden car near the heavily fortified headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Afghanistan task force in Kabul. The bomb killed at least seven people.
One of Mr. Karzai's challengers, Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister, says if it had been completed earlier, the national ring road could have been a potent counterinsurgency weapon -- by generating trade, employment and support for the government. Instead, says Mr. Ghani, "it's become a road of broken promises."
Project backers say insurgents have stepped up attacks on the road to sow discord between foreign donors, who are mostly funding construction, and Afghan officials, who are responsible for the police guarding the road.
"We are eager to work in places where we don't get shot at," says Craig Steffensen, country chief for the Asian Development Bank, the single largest donor for Afghanistan's ring road. "We aren't eager to work in places where we aren't sure we can go home the next day."
Since the 1960's, Afghan planners have dreamed of a ring road to transport the country out of poverty. A highway system encircling the poor and landlocked nation could help farmers, factories and the country's resource-rich mines get goods to the market. It could ultimately position Afghanistan as a bridge between its Central Asian neighbors and the big markets of Iran, India and China. That would make trade in copper, coal, oil and gas, as well as fruits, nuts and wheat, viable alternatives to opium, now the country's biggest export.
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Yet three decades of war prevented that dream from being realized. It wasn't until after the 2001 U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban regime that the country mustered the money from foreign donors and expertise to refurbish the parts that had been built and finish the rest. The U.S. government, whose aid arm estimates that two-thirds of Afghanistan live within 31 miles of the road, pumped $492 million into rehabilitating the southern arch from Kabul in the east to Herat in the west. The ADB has contributed an additional $900 million.
Construction came with heavy costs. Between 2003 and early 2008, 162 contractors lost their lives building the southern half of the highway's ring, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog that has studied the U.S. Agency for International Development's projects in Afghanistan. The report didn't specify how the workers were killed, only that the death toll made it the most dangerous of any other USAID-funded project in the country.
Parts of the road have had to be rebuilt after they were completed. In May, USAID announced it had rebuilt a strip between Kabul and Kandahar that had been "mined, bombed and pockmarked by neglect." The section, which goes through the heart of Taliban territory, remains one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan to drive.
The northern half of the ring has proved just as perilous and costly. The ADB says it has confronted repeated security-related delays and cost overruns. After a string of kidnappings and killings, the bank recently agreed to pay an additional $2.5 million to train and dispatch nearly 500 police to guard road crews.
Top Afghan officials maintain security is good enough for the road to speed ahead. In an interview, the minister of finance, Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, blamed a contractor, China Railway Shisiju Group Corp., for the two stalled sections in north Faryab Province.
"We need to apply pressure on the Chinese," said Mr. Zakhilwal, who is also the chief economic adviser to the president. "They are going awfully slow."
In an indication of the security woes bedeviling the roadways, Mr. Zakhilwal arrived at the interview late -- after the Taliban blew up an oil tanker ahead of him, he says, and fired down from a mountain at his convoy. The finance minister dismissed the attack with a wave of the hand.
China Rail executives didn't respond to faxed and emailed questions about the status of the ring road or the April kidnapping of its contractor, Mr. Khan. In 2004, China Rail lost 11 employees in a late-night attack on its compound in northeastern Kunduz Province. The company has estimated that it's been targeted in 10 other terrorist attacks.
The ring road's potential benefits are on display in Maimana, the capital of Faryab. With a new portion of the road from the east connecting the town with the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, goods have poured in from abroad: shampoos from Iran, soap from Ukraine, rice from India and knockoff British perfumes made in China.
Fruit prices have fallen by half from a year ago, say merchants, mainly due to a drop in transport costs. Mullah Mohammed Latif, a Maimana vegetable salesman, says he used to take at least four days to make the round trip by truck to Mazar-e-Sharif. En route, he says, he would lose large amounts of his melons and grapes to the sun and the hands of hungry thieves. Now he hires a taxi to do the trip in a day.
The brisk produce sales have filtered down to farmers in the area, so that local stall owners are now adjusting to a novel phenomenon: disposable income. "People are coming to Maimana to spend money," exalts Sakhi Mohammed, sitting inside a roadside store selling Chinese-made electric kettles and children's clothing.
The road going west from Maimana, skirting the border of Turkmenistan, is a different story. Much of it remains unpaved and construction on the China Rail sections has slowed to a standstill.
In July, Mr. Steffensen, the ADB's 51-year-old country chief, led a small team to the China Rail compound in the town of Qaisar to try to kick-start construction. An armored convoy of Norwegian troops escorted the team past the rusted carcasses of Soviet tanks, the relics of an earlier war.
At the Chinese camp, the ADB team sat around a conference table with the China Rail executives. In the middle: a map showing the project's torpid progress.
Chen Zhe, a China Rail manager, said his company underestimated costs and the level of security needed. He said the road sections that were supposed to be finished by the end of last year are only 20% complete.
Mr. Steffensen said top Afghan officials were angry as they watched the nearby South Korean crew working feverishly and not China Rail. ADB was now paying $50,000 a week for the extra Afghan police, he said, apparently to guard idle construction equipment. Build the road and worry about money later, advised Mr. Steffenson. "Everybody wants to see action, big action," he said. "We need to haul a -- ."
Mr. Chen cleared his throat. "We will try our best to finish this project," he said.
Mr. Khan's kidnapping had been a major setback. The crew's abduction stalled a crucial 3.7-mile stretch in Ghormach district, roughly 70 miles from Maimana, and sent shivers of anxiety through the entire project team. Barricaded in their compounds, Chinese executives complained they could hear gunshots at night.
In Ghormach, Mr. Khan said, he had been living in a house next to a police checkpoint, but the Taliban were able to move into his house and then march his crew into the hills without a shot being fired.
Asked about the lack of police response, Abdul Khalil Andarabi, Faryab's police chief, said investigators later found that the kidnappers had help from inside the police force. He says the police arrested two suspects as well as some relatives of the kidnappers.
In interviews, Mr. Khan recounted his two-month ordeal, the broad outlines of which were confirmed by the ADB, the China Rail team and Muhammad Ajmal Jami, an engineer who was also kidnapped. Mr. Khan says he knew he was a ripe target -- reviled for working on a foreign-backed project and seen as rich enough to afford a big ransom. Yet he says he almost fooled his captors into releasing him. He told them his name was Abdullah and that he drove a gravel truck. They initially demanded a relatively paltry $8,000 ransom.
But just before his uncle arrived with the money, the Taliban discovered Mr. Khan's real identity. He says they took the $8,000 and then asked for $300,000 more. Mr. Khan was forced into the well. After 10 days, Mr. Khan says, the Taliban chained him up by his feet to the roof. When he asked for water, they poured it down his throat, choking him.
Mr. Khan was later marched to a spot where another engineer had been executed. He was told to say his final prayer and then someone fired a shot at the ground between his legs. Another evening, he knelt down in the same spot and felt a bullet pass his cheek. Both times, he was ordered to call his mother afterward and plead to hurry up with the money.
Mr. Khan recalls his mind going numb. "Because I worked for the Americans," he remembers the young men telling him, "Islamic law permitted them to kill me."
The Taliban eventually reduced the ransom to $100,000 and a Toyota Land Cruiser. Borrowing from friends and family, Mr. Khan's uncle handed over the cash and the car in June.
His problems weren't over after the release. Hoping to extract another $100,000, the Taliban has held onto another of his engineers.
Despite the dangers, Mr. Khan's team has resumed construction near the site of their kidnapping. Mr. Khan himself remains in Kabul, wavering over whether to return to the site, or leave the country. Even in Kabul, he says, he fears he is a target.
"It's not difficult to shoot me or send a suicide bomber to Kabul," says Mr. Khan. "There are still plenty of Taliban here."
—Habib Zahori, Anand Gopal and Sue Feng contributed to this article.Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com
