Khyber Pass

Khyber Pass, mountain pass in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan, on the border with Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. The pass connects Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, with Peshawar, Pakistan. The name Khyber is also applied to the range through which the pass runs—a series of arid broken hills that form the last spurs of the Spīn Ghar (Pashto: “White Mountains”) Range. On either side of the connecting ridge are the sources of two small streams, the beds of which form the Khyber gorge. This gorge forms most of the Khyber Pass, winding between cliffs of shale and limestone 600–1,000 feet (180–300 metres) high. At its southeastern end, the pass enters the Khyber Hills from the Shadi Bagiar opening, a few miles west of Jamrud, Pakistan, and it continues northwestward for about 33 miles (53 km) to the Afghan border at the town of Torkham. Beyond Torkham a valley descends to Afghanistan’s barren Lowyah Dakkah plain, which stretches northward to the Kabul River.

After a steep ascent at its southeastern entrance, the Khyber Pass rises gradually westward and northwestward to Fort Ali Masjid (3,174 feet [967 metres]), where the Khyber River leaves the pass to the south. Below the fort stands its namesake mosque, Ali Masjid, which is associated in legend with ʿAlī, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, who is believed to have traveled through the Khyber Pass and built the mosque with his own hands (though history contradicts this story). For 5 miles (8 km) northwestward from Ali Masjid the pass becomes a narrow passage, not more than 600 feet wide, flanked by imposing and precipitous walls. From Zintara village northward the pass becomes a valley a mile or more wide, with forts, villages, and scattered cultivation plots. About 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Ali Masjid lies the fort and cantonment of Landi Kotal (3,518 feet [1,072 metres]). This, the highest point in the Khyber Pass, is an important market centre with an alternate route back to Peshawar. There the summit widens northward for 2 miles (3 km). The main pass, however, descends northwestward from Landi Kotal through the Pashtun Shinwārī people’s territory to the station of Landi Khana, where it runs through another gorge and enters Afghan territory at the border post of Torkham (Towr Kham; 2,300 feet [700 metres]). Beyond Torkham a valley winds another 10 miles to Lowyah Dakkah.

The Khyber Pass is threaded by a caravan track and by a hard-surface road. Near its southeastern entrance the pass may be skirted by following a different road from Jamrud—one that enters the Khyber Hills about 9 miles (14 km) northeast of town and emerges at Lowyah Dakkah.

When it opened in the 1920s, the Khyber Pass Railway, with its 34 tunnels and 92 bridges and culverts, revolutionized transportation in the area. The British had long considered the Khyber Pass to be strategically important, as they believed it was a potential route for the Russian Empire to invade the British Raj. Consequently, work on a railway started during the late 19th century, but that effort was halted after the 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente. In 1920 work went ahead on a single broad-gauge track, and the railway opened in November 1925 from Peshawar up to Landi Khana, 2 miles (3 km) short of the Durand Line, which separates present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. Railway services were suspended in 2007 because of civil unrest in the region and flooding that had washed out sections of track.

The Khyber Pass has historically been a gateway for invasions of the Indian subcontinent from the northwest. Indeed, few passes have had such continuing strategic importance or so many historic associations. Through it have passed Persians, Greeks, Mughals, and Afghans as well as the British, for whom it was the key point for controlling the Afghan border. In the 5th century bce Darius I of Persia conquered the country around what is now Kabul and marched through the Khyber Pass to the Indus River. Two centuries later Hephaestion and Perdiccas, generals of Alexander the Great, probably used the pass. Buddhism flourished in and around the Khyber when it was part of the kingdom of Ashoka of the Mauryan dynasty of India (3rd century bce). Buddhist remains include Kafir Kot (Citadel of the Kafirs), Shopla stupa (also called the Khyber Top), and the stupa near Ali Masjid. The pass was part of the Silk Road between Taxila (now in northwestern Pakistan) and Kabul, and it was also used by Muslim forces during multiple invasions of the Indian subcontinent. In 1000 ce Maḥmūd of Ghazna (now Ghaznī, in east-central Afghanistan) launched the first of his 17 or so invasions of India through the Khyber Pass, taking over some of the forts on the frontier of the Hindu Shahi king Jayapala at Peshawar. Muḥammad of Ghūr (now Ghowr, in west-central Afghanistan) used the pass to reach the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent in 1191, before being defeated by the king Prithviraj Chauhan in the First Battle of Taraori (Tarain). The next year, however, he won the Second Battle of Taraori, which laid the foundation for Islamic rule in India by the Delhi sultanate. The great Mongol leader Genghis Khan, after conquering Khwārezm (a region now in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), used the Khyber Pass to follow Jalāl al-Dīn Mingburnu, the last ruler of the Khwārezm-Shah dynasty, into the Indian subcontinent and defeated him at the Battle of the Indus in 1221. Bābur, then the ruler of Kabul and later the founder of the Mughal Empire, entered the Indian subcontinent through the Khyber Pass before defeating Ibrāhīm Lodī, the last Afghan sultan of Delhi, in 1526 at the First Battle of Panipat. The Iranian ruler Nādir Shah, his Afghan successor Aḥmad Shah Durrānī, and Aḥmad Shah’s grandson Zamān Shah also used the Khyber Pass in their invasions of India. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, extended his kingdom as far as Jamrud in the early 19th century.

The Pashtun Afrīdī people of the Khyber area long resisted external control, and numerous punitive expeditions, as far back as the 16th century, were undertaken against them, first by the Mughals and then by the British. The first British advance northwestward into the Khyber took place in 1839, and during the First Anglo-Afghan War (see Anglo-Afghan Wars) the pass was the scene of many skirmishes with the Afrīdīs. The Treaty of Gandamak, which was signed during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1879, left the people of the Khyber area under British control. In 1897 the Afrīdīs seized the pass and held it for several months but were defeated in the Tīrāh expedition of that year. The British thenceforth became responsible for the safety of the pass.

Since the founding of Pakistan, in 1947, the Khyber Pass has been in Pakistani territory. During the Afghanistan War, which began in 2001, the pass demonstrated its strategic importance once again, serving as the conduit for 75 percent of NATO coalition supplies. From Karachi, on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, those supplies traveled to Peshawar, then through the pass to Torkham, and on to Kabul. Traffic through the pass has been frequently disrupted by extremist activity in the region.