Kushan Pass in the context of "Salang tunnel"

Bagram (/bəɡrɑːm/; Pashto/Dari: بگرام) is a town and seat in Bagram District in Parwan Province of Afghanistan, about 60 kilometers north of the capital Kabul. It is the site of an ancient city located at the junction of the Ghorband and Panjshir Valley, near today's city of Charikar, Afghanistan. The location of this historical town made it a key passage from Ancient India along the Silk Road, leading westwards through the mountains towards Bamiyan, and north over the Kushan Pass to the Baghlan Valley and past the Kushan archeological site at Surkh Kotal, to the commercial centre of Balkh and the rest of northern Afghanistan. Bagram was the capital of the Kushan Empire in the first century [AD].

The Salang Pass (Dari: كتل سالنگ Kutal-i Salang, el. 3,878 m or 12,723 ft) is the primary mountain pass connecting northern Afghanistan with Parwan Province, with onward connections to Kabul Province, southern Afghanistan. Located on the border of Parwan Province and Baghlan Province, it is just to the east of the Kushan Pass, and both of them were of great importance in early times as they provided the most direct connections between the Kabul region with northern Afghanistan or Tokharistan. The Salang River originates nearby and flows south.

The pass crosses the Hindu Kush mountains but is now bypassed through the Salang Tunnel, which runs underneath it at a height of about 3,400 m. The tunnel was built by engineers and construction crews from the Soviet Union in 1958 – 1964 as part of a wide-ranging infrastructure build out in Afghanistan carried out by the USSR. During the Afghan civil war it was blown up in 1997 by forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud in order to prevent Taliban fighters from coming through it. In 2002 the Russian Ministry Of Emergency Situations (RMES) organized the work to rebuild the tunnel and the repairs were completed within a month.

Khawak Pass (elevation 3,848 m (12,625 ft)) sits across the route heading to the northwest from near the head of the Panjshir Valley through the Hindu Kush range to northern Afghanistan via Andarab and Baghlan.

This is the route traditionally thought to have been followed by Alexander the Great in the spring of 329 BCE when he led his army from the Kabul Valley across the mountains to Bactria (later Tokharistan in the north). Vincent Smith states that Alexander took his troops across both the Khāwak and the Kaoshān or Kushan Pass. According to some scholars, there is no proof of this.