ملى قطار Millie Rail: Towards a New Afghan Network

An Afghan railroad?

The Train, The Bus, and their Passengers

Since the end of the 19th century the surrounding countries of Afghanistan: Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan (then India) all had some sort of rail lines constructed, freight or passenger. At this time, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were under Soviet government control, and the region of Pakistan (India) was under colonial British rule. Many lines were built reaching the Afghan border, and many proposals were forwarded to the government by both the Soviets and the British, and other European states. During this time the Emir Abdurrahman Khan, grandfather of modernist reformer Amanullah Khan, was placed in the middle of the “Great Game”; a Cold War type battle for Afghanistan by Russian and British colonial forces. In order to protect his country from foreign interest, Abdurrahman wanted to keep his country as isolated as possible, free of a rail that could be utilized by invading forces.¹

This keyword of isolation is the exact issue at hand. Fast forward to 1994 and the end of the Afghan civil war post-Soviet withdrawal; the Taliban came out on top and immediately banned the internet to keep the country isolated from outside influence. 1994! This was the exact time to get on the internet. From 1994-2001 Afghanistan lacked internet network infrastructure. At a time so pivotal to the global development of individuals and societies on both the micro and macro scale, Afghanistan’s communication infrastructure was again left in the dark. The lack of a rail line in the name of “preservation” of country carried on by Abdurrahman, we believe, has had the same exact effect on the country as the internet ban by the Taliban has had. It is not that Afghanistan has remained “backwards”; there is a thriving economy, development, and infrastructural work happening at an exponential rate, but it has yet to have the opportunity to jump into the future on its own terms as a democratic, united people.²

On the public bus one would find a religious elder clad in turban and traditional clothing, a youth wearing western clothes, a woman with her hair flowing, and a veiled mother carrying her baby; it is an extremely beautiful image to see. In the short film titled آرزو The Wish (date unknown), a film by همایون مروت Homayun Morowat, the viewer is carried through a city montage of Kabul through a narrative told from the first person perspective of the bus itself.

The bus is anthropomorphized and tells the tales of the many different riders he knows and cares for, and how his job is to take care of the different people of Kabul by providing them this transportation service. It is a beautiful film that brought me to tears. Below are stills:

In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Walter Benjamin writes about the flaneur’s relationship to the city, forming the city as the true existence of the flaneur, without which the flaneur ceases to exist. On the topic of how an individual who may not identify as a flaneur must adapt themselves to the peculiarities of a city, Benjamin quotes sociologist Georg Simmel:

‘Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.’³

It is by the quick and simple visual sense of sight that humans can come to know one another, either through judgment, or inquiry, or even curiosity. But it is at this moment that Benjamin and Simmel are stating that something happens when humans are forced within the confines of the bus or the train, forced to exist in a confined space with one who is nothing like you, or even yet, nothing to you. Forced to enter or exit at the same spot, sit next to one another, or by God’s good grace even speak to one another, perhaps an understanding can be made. A sacred covenant between the the local Kabuli city dweller, and the worker visiting temporarily from the country side in Kunduz, can be made in those tense, stressful moments of forced co-existence. As the two part ways, the Kunduzi exists within the Kabuli, and the Kabuli exists within the Kunduzi. Who knows who else they may share that essence with?

The bus system in Kabul was a public bus system owned by the government called ملى بس Millie Bus, or National Bus; ملى millie means national in Farsi.⁴ Although named “National”, it only stayed within city limits. The bus was my family’s main method of transport in Kabul from its origins until they left in 1981. By the end of the soviet invasion and the civil war, Millie Bus’ infrastructure was completely destroyed. Today Millie Bus is gaining government attention and funding once more; the infrastructure was never able to recover after so many years of destruction, but the process is ongoing.⁵

A Fictional History, a Speculative Future

Utilizing the framework of the Millie Bus, a transport system used to unify a people and create a network of transfer between them within the city of Kabul, CAMEL proposes the ملى قطار Millie Rail (National Rail). ملى قطار Millie Rail will be utilized as a device to unify the entire people of Afghanistan and create a network of information and cultural transfer between them.

ملى قطار Millie Rail

Had a national passenger railway in Afghanistan been designed and implemented in the early 20th century, perhaps the Afghanistan of today would have ended up a little different. We are speculating, a pure and perhaps naive speculation, that through an experience of clashing cultures and ideologies accelerated by rail travel, the constant division the country has experienced since 1929, then 1979, then 1994, then 2001, then 2021, may have never occurred. Instead of this division, a unity umbrellaed by a network of the capital, major cities, towns, and villages had a potential to exist.

In order to demonstrate this concept within the constraints of this work, we will be using digital media, graphic design, and sketches to communicate a speculative vision for the Afghan national rail. The purpose of this is to create a fictional history through speculative means where the spirit of the idea of the train exists. Through image-making, we are hoping to provoke perceptions and realities of the history of Afghanistan, while using prior cultural context to inform a speculative reality. We will do this by designing actual artifacts, and writing supplemental text to give context to design decisions, concepts, and potential outcomes.

Naming

To name something is to give it existence. The names of our public institutions become significant to the cultural identification of our locations. In the Bay Area, we have Bay Area Rapid Transit, our geo-specific train transit. Nation wide, the passenger rail in the USA is called Amtrak, a portmanteau of the words “America” and “track”. For Afghanistan, the closest resemblance to an institution as such is the ملى بس Millie Bus, as discussed previously. This name carries a sense of nostalgia for our family and relatives who lived in Kabul. When asking our grandmother, Sharifa Simab, what the bus system was called, we could see her eyes light up with a whole vision of her past. Asking simply for the name of the bus, she began to recall the name of the streets, the certain bus stops she would take, the times she would need to make it on time. Our mother, Fariha Mohammad, who sat close by chimed in on how “cute” the young men who drove the buses were, noting how she and her girlfriends would take the same bus everyday to match with their favorite driver. The bus, for our teenage mother, became a form of a social network, meeting her friends, crushing on boys, and it was with the simple memory of the name that these memories came flowing back. At a much larger scale, could a railway have done the same thing?

Using ملى بس Millie Bus as the framework for much of this work, it feels natural to evolve from the bus to the train with ملى قطار Millie Rail. Here بس in Farsi transliterates to “bus”, where the word for bus is shared between Farsi/English. In the case of the train, قطار transliterates to “qataar”, a word meaning train/rail⁶ in Farsi, borrowed from Arabic which means a “row of camels” and “train”. ⁷. ملى قطار Millie Rail is to be used as a familiar device for those accustomed to the ملى بس Millie Bus institution.

Symbol

As with naming, the logo carries on the existence and soul of the institution it represents. For Bay Area natives, the BART logo represents home, and has been reconceptualized, remixed, and recycled as clothing logos, album art, stickers, etc. The BART logo has become culture itself. In our research of Afghan graphic design, we have been unsuccessful in uncovering graphic designers of the modern era and their works. We have just recently come across architectural references, but are having no luck with graphic design. We hope to come across this work soon.

The ملى بس Millie Bus logo surfaced itself in the آرزو The Wish documentary. A YouTube channel called “تلنگر Talangar”, created a documentary on the crumbling Millie Bus infrastructure ten years ago, and it is through this video that I have surfaced higher-resolution images of the ملى بس Millie Bus. The images above show the old logo in tact (at low resolution), and eventually an image that shows the lack of importance paid to the application, one stenciled with spray paint and the other decaying. There is no standard guideline for how to design the word mark, but the framework is there:

1: A circle frame that locks up the logo
2: A center horizontal band in yellow that reads the English “Millie-Bus” in black is constant on white backgrounds
3: The top portion reads ملىى Millie, where the last letter “ى” is stylized in a manner to shape the “tail” upwards into a quarter circle shape
4: The bottom portion reads بس Bus, where the last letter “س” is stylized in a manner to shape the “tail” downwards into a quarter circle shape

It appears that there is no standardization to the execution in the examples we have sourced, however following those guidelines seems to get the job done. We will be executing the ملى قطار Millie Rail logo in similar fashion.

The following are a set of proposed logos we designed based on the found material above demonstrating a shared identity between the Millie Bus and Millie Rail institutions.

The Millie Bus logo is replicated nearly 1:1 as it is found from the visual research I conducted, and the Millie Rail logo borrows similar visual relationships, with a custom drawn قطار lettering.

Map

The following is a proposed ملى قطار Millie Rail map based on a multitude of visual map research in regards to Afghanistan.⁸ The origins of this research revolve around Afghanistan’s Highway One, or A01. This highway is the world’s longest looped, consecutive ring road⁹, while more than two-thirds of the country’s population live within 30 miles of it.¹⁰ An invisible piece of infrastructure, the potential to create a national and cultural unity and identity, the ملى قطار Millie Rail is now superimposed on this existing network, connecting the most major cities, along with smaller towns and villages along the way. Offshoots exist in areas where populations exist a great scale outside the loop, while an inner loop may be executed during further research.

The loop, coincidentally and conveniently, borrows from the circular visual language existing in the original ملى بس Millie Bus logo. These semi and quarter circle shapes create a consistent relationship between the graphic identity, all centered around the constant idea of a “ring” connecting all of Afghanistan together.

Conclusion

The outcome we have presented is only a fraction of the work and research we have conducted in regards to the topic of Afghanistan and its lack of rail. It has been an extremely beautiful research process that we hope does not come to an end, however sources and citations on this topic are limited, as is with many topics regarding design, architecture, and communication technologies in Afghanistan; the purpose of this work is to finally change that and develop new work that can be traced, documented, and referenced in the future. For these reasons, in our work we approach Afghan design through a speculative lens, imagining pasts and futures through the small lens of Afghan culture that we possess.

With the research and work contained in this paper, we ourselves are now at the point of “so what?”. When we imagine ideal next steps, we hope to share this work in order to generate and kickstart the imagination of young Afghan students and thinkers to see how design can influence new ways of thinking about our country. We are hoping to push the design output to consist of urban poster mockups, architectural renders of train stations, and even the inside of an “Afghan car train” where people sit on the floor against Afghan rugs and pillows as they do in their homes. Pushing the boundaries of design through theoretical new media approaches is a space we see this work addressing, and hopefully inspiring more to do the same.

We by no means see this paper as being “done”, but as a device to kickstart the next chapter of work through dialogue and discourse, unlocking more historical research that will enable ourselves and other Afghan designers to develop a firm base to keep adding to. Perhaps one day all Afghans will come together to ride the ملى قطار Millie Rail from the north to the south, and from the east to the west of our beautiful homeland.

Berkeley, December 2024