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ABSTRACT For the past nine years, Afghanistan has been recovering from three decades of war and conflict. There is a shortage of trained engineers, skilled labor, and capital for construction is scarce. Transportation infrastructure is not completely developed and threatened by rock slides, avalanches and other slope failures. Mining currently consists of a few under-capitalized mines that are dangerous due to lack of adequate tools for ground stabilization. The oil and gas industry is in disrepair and development will require consideration of petrophysical properties of rocks encountered during drilling. Historical preservation of stone monuments using modern techniques is underway and many construction projects are in need of rock engineering input.
1. INTRODUCTION Afghanistan is a mountainous, land-locked, and arid to semi-arid country of 652,230 km2 at the crossroads between south Asia, central Asia, and the Middle East. Its history is one of conflict and isolation. Educational institutions suffered during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the civil war in the early 1990s, and the Taliban government from 1996 to 2001. As infrastructure and institutions are rebuilding and expanding, there is considerable need for capacity building. In the area of rock engineering, many past projects have been the state of the art for their time, but the capacity to maintain them and develop additional ones has been weakened. The country has a short supply of engineering skill sets at all levels from blue collar labor to design engineering and project management. In addition, the economic engine to take the country to the next level needs to be developed. This paper summarizes Afghanistan’s rock engineering past and present as well as its needs. The rock engineering environment of the country is a function of its geologic and tectonic history which will be briefly described. The state of the various economic and industrial sectors will then be described in terms of the use of rock mechanics in those sectors. Sectors that will be reviewed are:
(i) Transportation infrastructure
(ii) Mining
(iii) Oil and gas
(iv) Cultural resources and monuments, and
(v) Construction The state of rock mechanics in higher education will be addressed because this is a key area where rock assistance in rock engineering can make a positive impact. Four companion papers at this symposium will be presented by engineering professors from Kabul University and Kabul Polytechnic University. These papers describe the state of rock engineering in mining, oil and gas, construction, and slope-stability straight from the practitioners.
2. GEOTECTONIC SETTING Afghanistan is in a seismically active region on the west side of the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates (Figure 1). It is a patchwork of allochthonous terranes that were accreted onto the Eurasian continent at various times in the past. There are hundreds of Quaternary faults with potential to cause earthquakes in response to the Indian Plate converging on Eurasia at about 3 to 4 cm per year [1]. The Indian Plate is plunging northward beneath the Pamir Ranges in northeast Afghanistan, northern Kashmir, and southern Tajikistan
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