The President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, discussed the political and economic priorities of the Afghan government with Robert Rubin, co-chair of the Council on Foreign Relations in the USA on 26 March 2015.

There were a number of mentions of railways, including:

Now in the next 25 years, Asia is going to become the largest continental economy. What happened in the United States in 1869 when the continental railroads were integrated is like—very likely to happen in Asia in the next 25 years. Without Afghanistan, central Asia, south Asia, east Asia and west Asia will not be connected, so this is our first advantage. We—our goal is to become a transit country, for transport, for power transmission, for gas pipelines, for fiber optics. It’s a networked approach to the economy because this will create massive jobs and opportunities.

The constraint, of course, is lack of infrastructure. We have created the road network, but the railway network—we have only one of our cities linked to our neighboring country, which is with Uzebekistan. But now, our attempt is to get linked to China and to all our neighbors. So this is the first step.

There is a mention of the Chinese copper mine project needing a railway: “Without rail, there is no possibility of creating the economies of scale.”

Our first great law (ph) in terms of transit is coming by Central Asia to Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey. In three years, we hope to be reaching Europe within five days. So, Caspian is really becoming simple to our—our economy. And in three years, we could have 70 percent of our imports and exports by the Caspian.