Several recent Afghan projects in power transmission, road construction, industrial land and cold storage point to the same underlying industrial challenge: factories need connected infrastructure, not just plots of land.
Four power projects in Kabul and Parwan include substation expansions and a 220kV line. Reliable electricity affects machinery use, operating hours and unit costs, while greater grid capacity can make it easier to connect new industrial users.
More than 75 kilometres of the second Kabul-Jalalabad highway is under construction, adding potential transport capacity between Kabul and eastern Afghanistan. For manufacturers, roads determine how efficiently raw materials reach factories and finished goods reach markets or border crossings.
In Herat, a 3,000-ton cold-storage facility addresses a different part of the supply chain. Agricultural producers need storage to reduce spoilage and avoid selling everything at harvest-time prices, but cold storage itself also depends on reliable electricity.
Afghanistan's large industrial-land programme adds the physical space for factories. The stronger measure of success, however, will be operating plants, usable infrastructure, sustained jobs and actual production. The combined effect of power, roads, storage and serviced industrial land will matter more than any one project in isolation.