Afghanistan Bananistan

View of the man-made lake at Band-e Sardeh behind the husk of an abandoned Soviet armored personnel carrier.

Came across this interesting comment by James on Military Photos dot net:

Outside Kabul and Kandahar I recall pre-fab Soviet roads, basically slabs of concrete laid over the desert, maybe a meter thick. I guess it worked for them in Siberia and they did the same in the desert. No shoulders, just the occasional dirt mound of you needed to get off the road.

Couldn't find anything to confirm his story, but I did come across a story from 2011 by C.J. Chivers in The New York Times about the Soviet "Try" in Afghanistan:

Many accounts of the Soviet-Afghan war use military lenses. They emphasize Soviet military tactics and behaviors, including the doctrinal use of heavy weapons, indiscriminate aerial bombing and artillery bombardment, and a reliance on large-scale operations that Afghan guerrillas often easily eluded. But the Soviet Union’s long try in Afghanistan had many other elements. Moscow built schools, roads, airports and dams, and sponsored ministries, too. Soviet officials recruited students and bureaucrats for all manner of training, and invited the country’s elite and its officer-, civil-service and intellectual classes to long periods of study in the Soviet Union. Education, development and modernization — like this dam, which still influences both flood control and irrigation downstream — played no small part in the Kremlin’s Afghan policy, which ultimately failed.