Khyber Pass

• 1. Introduction

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  The Khyber Pass connects the town of Landi Kotal to the Valley of Peshawar at Jamrud, threading through the White Mountains along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. At its summit, the pass stands 3,373 feet above sea level. It is 25 miles from end to end within Pakistan, with another 8 miles extending into Afghanistan toward the town of Loya Daka.

  For thousands of years, armies, merchants, pilgrims, and nomads have squeezed through this corridor. Empires as distant as the Achaemenids and the Mughals made it a hinge point of history. A common phrase once described the full length of colonial British India as running from "Khyber to Kanyakumari." What is it about this particular fold in the mountains that has drawn so much of the world's attention? How did a 25-mile road become one of the most contested stretches of ground on earth? And what happens when the ancient logic of a choke point meets the supply chains of a modern war?

• 2. Gatekeepers of the Pass

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  To the south of the Khyber Pass lies Afridi Tirah, and the villages inside the pass itself are home to Afridi clansmen. To the north live the Shalmani and Mullagori tribes. For centuries, Pashtun clans, particularly the Afridis and the Afghan Shinwari, treated the pass as their own domain.

  The arrangement they enforced was straightforward: travelers paid a toll in exchange for safe passage. Because this toll was the primary source of income for these communities, any challenge to their authority was met with fierce resistance. The British later formalized a version of this same logic, paying local tribes to keep the route secure. Even into the early 2000s, the Pakistani government compensated the Afridi to maintain order along the pass. The mountain geography made policing it by outside forces nearly impossible, and the tribes understood that leverage well.

• 3. Ancient Corridors of Trade

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  Prior to the Kushan era, the Khyber Pass was not a widely used trade route. That changed as the Silk Road took shape, turning the pass into a critical link between East Asia and Europe.

  The Parthian Empire fought to control mountain passes like this one specifically to profit from the flow of silk, jade, rhubarb, and other luxuries moving out of China toward Western Asia and Europe. Through the Khyber, the region of Gandhara in present-day Pakistan became a regional hub, connecting Bagram in Afghanistan to Taxila in India. Indian goods entering this network included ivory, pepper, and textiles.

  Greek cultural influence moved eastward through the pass, while Buddhism expanded in the opposite direction, westward and northward. Military activity and commerce ran in parallel, and the pass proved durable enough to support both simultaneously.

• 4. Invasions and Empires

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  Darius I, Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Anushirvan each led forces through the Khyber Pass during their campaigns into the Indian subcontinent. Later, Mongol commanders including Duwa, Qutlugh Khwaja, and Kebek used the same route. The Achaemenid and Sassanid empires both ran military expeditions through it, alongside nomadic groups from Central Asia such as the Saka, Yuezhi, and White Huns.

  Indian empires rarely pushed their authority beyond the pass in the other direction. The Maurya king Chandragupta was an exception. During the Islamic period, Mahmud Ghaznavi, Muhammad of Ghor, Timur, Babur, and Nader Shah all used the Khyber and nearby passes to reach the subcontinent. The Mughals tried to hold the pass but found the local tribes resistant. Ahmad Shah Durrani was the last major Islamic conqueror to cross it, and his successors' campaigns left limited lasting influence.

• 5. The British Calculus

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  In the 19th century, the British East India Company moved to secure the Khyber Pass as part of what became known as the Great Game, the strategic rivalry with Russia over influence in Central Asia. The pass changed hands multiple times. Sikhs under Ranjit Singh captured it in 1837, and the Sikh general Hari Singh Nalwa built Jamrud Fort to anchor their hold.

  After the Second Anglo-Afghan War ended in 1880, the Khyber region came under British control. They built roads, railways, and telegraph lines through the pass. For strategic reasons, after World War I, the government of British India constructed the Khyber Pass Railway, running from Jamrud near Peshawar to the Afghan border near Landi Kotal. It opened in 1925. During World War II, the British erected concrete dragon's teeth on the valley floor, anticipating a possible Axis invasion of India through this exact corridor.

• 6. Supply Lines and Conflict

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  Following partition in 1947, the Khyber Pass became part of Pakistan. Travelers on what was known as the hippie trail in later decades would drive through it on their way from Kabul to Peshawar, passing British Indian Army monuments and hillside forts visible from the highway. The pass was then part of a Federally Administered Tribal Area where travelers were advised to stay on the road.

  When NATO forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, the Khyber Pass became the main overland supply corridor. Almost 80 percent of the road-transported NATO and US supplies moved through it. That dominance lasted until the situation destabilized. In January 2009, Pakistan sealed a bridge along the route during a military offensive targeting Taliban guerrillas around Jamrud. In 2010, after NATO helicopters crossed into Pakistan and killed three Pakistani soldiers, Pakistan closed the pass to NATO supply trucks. A waiting convoy was attacked by insurgents, who destroyed more than 29 oil tankers and trucks and killed several soldiers. A subsequent investigation found that American forces had misidentified the Pakistani soldiers as insurgents, leading to formal apologies. By August 2011, the Khyber Agency had again halted traffic through the pass due to further attack threats. The disruptions pushed NATO and the US to develop alternate supply routes through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and even the Iranian port of Chabahar was floated as a possibility.

• 7. The Pass in Imagination

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  Rudyard Kipling referenced the Khyber Pass in several poems: by name in "The Ballad of the King's Jest", as "the Pass" in "Arithmetic on the Frontier", and fictionalized as the Tongue of Jagai in "The Ballad of East and West". The 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King had a character describe fighting through the pass yard by yard during the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-1880.

  In Cockney rhyming slang, "Khyber Pass" means "arse", a usage the 1968 film Carry On Up the Khyber made explicit. The selective memoir Deshe Bideshe, published in 1948 by Syed Mujtaba Ali, described the bus journey through the pass with literary care. Tom Cochrane's song "Life Is a Highway", later covered by Rascal Flatts, references the pass, as does the Vampire Weekend song "M79". The Ministry album Rio Grande Blood from 2006 contains a track called "Khyber Pass" that named it as a possible hiding place for Osama bin Laden. That same song appeared at the end of the film The Hurt Locker.

  The pass also lent its name to places far from the mountains: a road in Mugdock Country Park near Glasgow, a suburb of Civil Lines in Delhi, a major road in Auckland's Newmarket suburb, a pedestrian alley in Stromness in Orkney, and a subway in King's Cross St Pancras tube station that was replaced after the King's Cross fire in November 1987. A mountain bike trail at Whistler, British Columbia carries the name as well, connecting the Top of the World trail to Whistler Creekside Village.