| The Ancient Romans built their roads rather like our bureaucrats fabricate our economic policies, on a day to day basis, a few days in advance of need. `By the peak of the Empire,’ the Encyclopedia Britannica informs us, `the Romans had built nearly 53,000 miles (85,000 kilometres) of road connecting the capital with the frontiers of the far-flung empire.’ (By comparison, the United States has only 42,000 miles of interstate highways.) The durability of these viae militares or military roads was such that even today, almost two thousand years later, some sections of the extensive network constructed by Rome’s military engineers (the equivalent of our Frontier Works Organisation) are still strong enough to withstand pounding by modern traffic. That cannot be said of our own highways including the new M2 Motorway which aims to connect, just as those radiating roads did the capital of Rome with its distant colonies, Islamabad with the far flung colonies of the Punjab, the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan. [EXTRACT] |
| Publsihed in DAWN 27 June 1998, and reprinted in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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