[ad_1]
August 20, 2023 at 2:00 am EDT
The village chief, Mohammed Ishfaq, raised his hands. If everyone could hold out for two more years, he said, then the bulldozers and engineers would arrive, hundreds of them already at work on the horizon. “If we only had that water,” Ishfaq said, “everything would be resolved.”
Two years after taking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban are overseeing their first major infrastructure project, the 115-mile Qosh Tepa canal, designed to divert 20 percent of the Amu Darya River’s water through the parched plains of northern Afghanistan. Afghanistan.
The channel promises to be a game changer for towns like Ishfaq in Jowzjan province. As in other parts of the country, residents here suffer from a confluence of food shortages, four decades of war, three consecutive seasons of severe drought, and a changing climate that has wreaked havoc on rainfall patterns. Average temperatures in Afghanistan have risen by 1.8 degrees Celsius in the past 70 years (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), or twice the global average.
Once the canal is completed (tentatively, two years from now), it could irrigate 550,000 hectares (over 2,100 square miles) of desert, effectively increasing Afghanistan’s arable land by a third and even making the country self-sufficient in food production for the first time. time since the 1980s, according to Afghan officials and researchers. “It could affect every single household in the country,” said Zabibullah Miri, the project’s chief engineer at the state-owned National Development Corporation (NDC).
But for the internationally isolated Taliban, the canal represents a crucial test of their ability to govern.
The canal project was initially envisioned in the 1970s under the first Afghan president, Mohammed Daoud Khan, with construction finally beginning in 2021 under the last, Ashraf Ghani. When the Taliban seized power in August 2021, they inherited the project and promptly approved some $100 million for its construction, representing about a quarter of Afghanistan’s annual tax revenue.
Around 6,000 workers are now operating bulldozers and heavy trucks 24 hours a day, working to dig a 100-meter (328 ft)-wide trench, wider than the California Aqueduct.
Taliban leaders have used the channel as a tool to polish their image.
“Praise God, the work is proceeding as planned,” Abdul Ghani Baradar, deputy prime minister and senior Taliban leader, said in March during one of several visits to the site. The project would be completed “whatever it takes,” he said on his X page (formerly known as Twitter), which sometimes shares aerial images of construction, photos of Taliban officials inspecting the work and triumphant music.
“Qosh Tepa provides the Taliban with a good narrative: ‘Look, this is a project fully designed and fully funded by Afghans with no foreign support; we can do everything that the previous government could not with the support of the West,’” said Mohammed Faizee, a former deputy foreign minister in the previous Afghan government, responsible for overseeing water and border issues.
The canal will be built and financed not by international aid, but by Afghan revenue from domestic coal mines, NDC officials say. But Afghan experts abroad say the country could face challenges not only in building the megacanal, but also in its operation.
To save costs, the canal bed was not sealed with cement, and in some sections, salty groundwater has already seeped into the canal, contaminating fresh water intended for irrigation.
Najibullah Sadid, a water resources engineer and researcher at Germany’s Federal Institute for Waterway Engineering and Research, said feasibility studies have shown that 22 percent of the water would be lost through seepage along some sections. Sediment could also clog the inlet mechanism where the channel joins the Amu Darya, which could require prohibitively expensive repairs, he said.
Sadid, who previously trained employees at the Afghan water ministry, said he met with project officials in Afghanistan to show them his computer models, but received mostly blank comments. “I don’t think the channel authority has employees with specialized expertise,” he said. “You have to be 100 percent sure with the design. There is no such thing as random engineering.”
Then there is the question of how much water Afghanistan will extract from the Amu Darya. Neighboring Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have already raised concerns that the reduced flow of the Amu Darya will affect their lucrative cotton fields. Uzbekistan’s Minister of Water Resources Shavkat Khamraev said in June that a delegation had been sent to Kabul to convey Uzbekistan’s concerns.
Faizee, the former diplomat, said he feared the Taliban lacked the diplomatic and technical expertise to negotiate over water, one of the hottest sticking points in Central Asia, an increasingly parched region.
Afghanistan, troubled by internal conflict, has long struggled to assert its claims to transboundary water resources, while its neighbors including Iran, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have used more than their fair share, Faizee said. Although four Soviet Central Asian republics signed an agreement to allocate the Amu Darya water in 1987, the agreement eliminated Afghanistan.
If the new northern canal is not managed properly, Faizee said, it could lead to a conflict similar to Afghanistan’s perennial dispute over the Helmand River with Iran, which has sometimes led Iranian residents to attack Afghan refugees and Iranian officials threatening to invade Afghanistan. After three border guards, two Iranians and one Afghan, were killed in a gun battle in May, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to the area to defend “Iranians’ water rights.”
In a statement, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for the Afghan Foreign Ministry, acknowledged that there were “doubts” about the Taliban’s ability to manage the canal and contain disputes over water, but said they would be resolved.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has experts in water management and remains committed to the neighbors’ water rights in accordance with existing treaties,” Balkhi said. “As climate change has disproportionately damaged Afghanistan and the region due to consecutive years of drought and depleted water supplies, it is vital that major carbon emitting countries take the lead in addressing this crisis.”
Today, construction has advanced about 100 miles, reaching deep into a part of Afghanistan that researchers say has become increasingly desertified over the past century.
At a bend in the Amu Darya, workers are still driving piles into the earth for the canal intake. The first 30-mile stretch is already filled with groundwater, and workers have been experimenting with growing saplings along the graded banks, next to towering sand dunes. After that, the channel dries up. The sun-baked terrain seems devoid of life except for bushes and construction workers toiling amid layers of sand and rock that blend with the sky.
Past the 100 mile mark, the canal is still just a blueprint. Ishfaq, the village chief, said he was told he would cross near the Aqcha bazaar, a kilometer away, and that the surveyors had already arrived. But other villagers didn’t know much about the project. They only knew how their land and rivers had changed over two generations, and how much they needed them.
The river’s water in central Afghanistan, which used to flow until August, now dries up in March. Droughts used to happen once a decade, not every two years.
Even wheat crops failed, said Azizullah Walizada, 62, as he shredded ears on his fingers that were too dry to produce grain. The northern drought began three years ago and their income began to decline. Like other villagers, Walizada sold his cattle to earn money to buy food and was left with one last emaciated cow.
“Even the trees are dying,” Walizada said.
#Large #Taliban #canal #bring #water #arid #plains #Afghanistan