Vincent Arthur Smith CIE (3 June 1843 – 6 February 1920) was an Irish Indologist, historian, member of the Indian Civil Service, and curator. He was one of the prominent figures in Indian historiography during the British Raj.
In the 1890s, he was key to exposing the forgeries of Alois Anton Führer, then working for the Archaeological Survey of India, who Smith caught in the act of making fake inscriptions.
The Kushan Pass or Kaoshan Pass (el. about 4,370 m or 14,340 ft) is a mountain pass just west of the famous Salang Pass (3,878 m. or 12,723 ft.) in the Hindu Kush mountain range of northern Afghanistan. These two passes provided the most direct, if difficult, routes across the imposing east–west wall of the Hindu Kush mountains which divide northern Afghanistan or Tokharistan from Kabul province, which is closely connected to southern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nowadays, the Salang tunnel constructed by the Soviets in the 1960s, and the paved road through it make it by far the easiest route through the Hindu Kush Mountains.
Vincent Smith states that Alexander the Great took his troops across both the Khawak Pass and the Kaoshān or Kushan Pass.
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.