It is often supposed that Afghanistan has historically been the 'graveyard of empires'. It is today's textbook example of a 'failed state.' Afghans, however, should be considered among the most important empire builders of Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. In this paper it is shown that in South Asia, the physical infrastructure of caravanserais and roads created by Afghan nomadic caravan traders known as powindas was fundamental to the development of the empires of the Indo-Afghans (1451-1556), as well as to the Mughal empire (1526-1857), and ultimately the British Raj of the 19th and 20th centuries.