[Reader-list] Damming Afghanistan

[Harsh Kapoor]

*****   Nick Cullather , "Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a
Buffer State," Journal of American History, 89 (Sept. 2002), 512-37.

The article as it appeared in the print journal (2.27 MB; PDF
format):
<http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ejah/teaching/archive/2002_09/article.pdf>

...A TVA for the Hindu Kush

Nothing becomes antiquated faster than symbols of the future, and it
is difficult, at only fifty years remove, to envision the hold
concrete dams once had on the global imagination. In the
mid-twentieth century, the austere lines of the Hoover Dam and its
radiating spans of high-tension wire inscribed federal power on the
American landscape. Vladimir Lenin famously remarked that Communism
was Soviet power plus electrification, an equation captured by the
David Lean film _Dr. Zhivago_ (1965) in the image of water surging,
as a kind of redemption, from the spillway of an immense Soviet dam.
In 1954, standing at the Bhakra-Nangal canal, Nehru described dams as
the temples of modern India. "Which place can be greater than this,"
he declared, "this Bhakra-Nangal, where thousands of men have worked,
have shed their blood and sweat, and laid down their lives as well? .
. . When we see big works, our stature grows with them, and our minds
open out a little."26 For Nehru, for Zahir Shah, for China today, the
great blank wall of a dam was a screen on which they would project
the future.

Dams also symbolized the sacrifice of the individual to the greater
good of the state. A dam project allows, even requires, a state to
appropriate and redistribute land, plan factories and economies, tell
people what to make and grow, design and build new housing, roads,
schools, and centers of commerce. Tour guides are fond of telling
about the worker (or workers) accidentally entombed in dams, and
construction of these vast works customarily requires huge, unnamed
sacrifices. To displace thousands from ancestral homes and farms,
bulldoze graveyards and mosques, and erase all trace of memory and
history from the land is a process familiar to us today as ethnic
cleansing. But when done in conjunction with dam construction, it is
called land reclamation and can be justified even in democratic
systems by the calculus of development. India's interior minister,
Morarji Desai, told a public gathering at the unfinished Pong Dam in
1961 that "we will request you to move from your houses after the dam
comes up. If you move, it will be good. Otherwise we shall release
the waters and drown you all."27

A dam-building project would vastly expand and intensify the
authority that could be exercised by the central government at Kabul.
Remaking and regulating the physical environment of an entire region
would, for the first time, translate Afghanistan into the legible
inventories of material and human resources in the manner of modern
states. In 1946, using its karakul revenue, the Afghan government
hired the largest American heavy engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen,
Inc., of Boise, Idaho, to build a dam. Morrison Knudsen, builder of
the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and later the launch
complex at Cape Canaveral, specialized in symbols of the future. The
firm operated all over the world, boring tunnels through the Andes in
Peru, laying airfields in Turkey. Its engineers, who called
themselves Emkayans, would be drawing up specifications for a complex
of dams in the gorges of the Yangtze River in 1949 when Mao Zedong's
People's Liberation Army drove them out.28 The firm set up shop in an
old Moghul palace outside Kandahar and began surveying the Helmand
Valley.

The Helmand and Arghandab rivers constitute Afghanistan's largest
river system, draining a watershed covering half the country.
Originating in the Hindu Kush a few miles from Kabul, the Helmand
travels through upland dells thick with orchards and vineyards before
merging with the Arghandab twenty-five miles from Kandahar, turning
west across the arid plain of Registan and emptying into the Sistan
marshes of Iran. The valley was reputedly the site of a vast
irrigation works destroyed by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century.
The entire area is dry, catching two to three inches of rain a year.
Consequently, river flows fluctuate unpredictably within a wide
range, varying from 2,000 to 60,000 cubic feet per second.29 Before
beginning, Morrison Knudsen had to create an infrastructure of roads
and bridges to allow the movement of equipment. Typically, they would
also conduct extensive studies on soils and drainage, but the company
and the Afghan government convinced themselves that in this case it
was not necessary, that "even a 20 percent margin of error . . .
could not detract from the project's intrinsic value."30

The promise of dams is that they are a renewable resource, furnishing
power and water indefinitely and with little effort once the project
is complete, but dam projects are subject to ecological constraints
that are often more severe outside of the temperate zone. Siltation,
which now threatens many New Deal-era dams, advances more quickly in
arid and tropical climates. Canal irrigation involves a special set
of hazards. Arundhati Roy, the voice of India's antidam movement,
explains that "perennial irrigation does to soil roughly what
anabolic steroids do to the human body," stimulating ordinary earth
to produce multiple crops in the first years while slowly rendering
the soil infertile.31 Large reservoirs raise the water table in the
surrounding area, a problem worsened by extensive irrigation.
Waterlogging itself can destroy harvests, but it produces more
permanent damage, too. In waterlogged soils, capillary action pulls
soluble salts and alkalies to the surface, leading to
desertification. Early reports warned that the Helmand Valley was
vulnerable, that it had gravelly subsoils and salt deposits. The
Emkayans knew Middle Eastern rivers were often unsuited to extensive
irrigation schemes. But these apprehensions' "impact was minimized by
one or both parties."32 From the start, the Helmand project was
primarily about national prestige and only secondarily about the
social benefits of increasing agricultural productivity.

Signs of trouble appeared almost immediately. Even when only half
completed, the first dam, a small diversion dam at the mouth of the
Boghra canal, raised the water table to within a few inches of the
surface of the ground. A snowy crust of salt could be seen in areas
around the reservoir. In 1949, the engineers and the government faced
a decision. Tearing down the dam would have resulted in a loss of
face for the monarchy and Morrison Knudsen, but from an engineering
standpoint the project could no longer be justified. The necessary
reconsideration never took place, however, because it was at this
moment that the unlucky Boghra works was enfolded into the global
project of development.

Truman's Point IV address reconfigured the relationship between the
United States and newly independent nations. The confrontation
between colonizer and colonized, rich and poor, was with a rhetorical
gesture replaced by a world order in which all nations were either
developed or developing. The president explicitly linked development
to American strategic and economic objectives. Poverty was a threat
not just to the poor but to their richer neighbors, he argued, and
alleviating misery would assure a general prosperity, lessening the
chances of war.33 But the "triumphant action" of development
superseded the merely ideological conflict of the Cold War: Communism
and capitalism were competing carriers bound for the same
destination. Development justified interventions on a grand scale and
made obedience to foreign technicians the duty of every responsible
government. Afghanistan -- solvent, untouched by the recent war, and
able to hire technicians when it needed them -- suddenly became
"underdeveloped" and, owing to its position bordering the Soviet
Union, the likely recipient of substantial assistance. Point IV's
technical aid could take many forms - -clinics, schools, new
livestock breeds, assays for minerals and petroleum -- but the
uncompleted Boghra works was an invitation to something grander, a
reproduction of an American developmental triumph.

When Truman thought of aid, he thought of dams, specifically of the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the complex of dams on the
Tennessee River that transformed the economy of the upper South. "A
TVA in the Yangtze Valley and the Danube," he proposed to the TVA's
director, David Lilienthal; "These things can be done and don't let
anybody tell you different. When they happen, when millions and
millions of people are no longer hungry and pushed and harassed, then
the causes of war will be less by that much." Truman's
internationalization of the TVA repositioned the New Deal for a
McCarthyite age. Dams were the American alternative to Communist land
reform, Arthur M. Schlesinger argued in The Vital Center. Instead of
a "crude redistribution" of land, American engineers could create
"wonderlands of vegetation and power" from the desert. The TVA was "a
weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social
ruthlessness of the Communists for the support of the peoples of
Asia."34

The TVA had totemic significance for American liberals, but in the
diplomatic setting it had the additional function of redefining
political conflict as a technical problem. Britain's solution to
Afghanistan's tribal wars had been to script feuds of blood, honor,
and faith within the linear logic of boundary commissions, containing
conflict within two-dimensional space. The United States set aside
the maps and replotted tribal enmities on hydrologic charts.
Resolution became a matter of apportioning cubic yards of water and
kilowatt-hours of energy. Assurances of inevitable progress further
displaced conflict into the future; if all sides could be convinced
that resource flows would increase, problems would vanish, in
bureaucratic parlance, downstream. Over the next two decades the
United States would propose river authority schemes as solutions to
the most intractable international conflicts: Palestine ("Water for
Peace") and the Kashmir dispute. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson famously
suggested a Mekong River Authority as an alternative to the Vietnam
War.35

Afghanistan applied for and received a $12 million Export-Import Bank
loan for the Helmand Valley in 1950, the first of over $80 million
over the next fifteen years. Afghanistan's loan request contained a
line for soil surveys, but the bank refused it as an unnecessary
expense. Point IV supplied technical support.36 In 1952, the national
government created the Helmand Valley Authority -- later the Helmand
and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) -- removing 1,800 square miles
of river valley from local control and placing it under the
jurisdiction of expert commissions in Kabul. The monarchy poured
money into the project; a fifth of the central government's total
expenditures went into HAVA in the 1950s and early 1960s. From 1946
on, the salaries of Morrison Knudsen's advisers and technicians
absorbed an amount equivalent to Afghanistan's total exports. Without
adequate mechanisms for tax collection, the royal treasury passed
costs on to agricultural producers through inflation and the
diversion of export revenue, offsetting any gains irrigation
produced.37 Although it pulled in millions in international funding,
HAVA soaked up the small reserves of individual farmers and may well
have reduced the total national investment in agriculture.

HAVA supplemented the initial dam with a vast complex of dams. Two
large dams -- the 200-foot-high Arghandab Dam and the 320-foot-high
Kajakai Dam -- for storage and hydropower were supplemented by
diversion dams, drainage works, and irrigation canals. Reaching out
from the reservoirs were three hundred miles of concrete-lined
canals. Three of the longer canals, the Tarnak, Darweshan, and
Shamalan, fed riparian lands already intensively cultivated and
irrigated by an elaborate system of tunnels, flumes, and canals known
as juis. The new, wider canals furnished an ampler and purportedly
more reliable water source. The Zahir Shah Canal supplied Kandahar
with water from the Arghandab reservoir, and two canals stretched out
into the desert to polders of reclaimed desert: Marja and Nad-i-Ali.
Each extension of the project required more land acquisition and
displaced more people. To remain flexible, the royal government and
Morrison Knudsen kept the question of who actually owned the land in
abeyance. No system of titles was instituted, and the bulk of the
reclaimed land was farmed by tenants of Morrison Knudsen, the
government, or contractors hired by the government.38

The new systems magnified the problems encountered at the Boghra
works and added new ones. Waterlogging created a persistent weed
problem. The storage dams removed silt that once rejuvenated fields
downstream. Deposits of salt or gypsum would erupt into long-distance
canals and be carried off to deaden the soil of distant fields. The
Emkayans had to contend with unpredictable flows triggered by
snowmelt in the Hindu Kush. In 1957, floods nearly breached dams in
two places, and water tables rose, salinating soils throughout the
region. The reservoirs and large canals also lowered the water
temperature, making plots that once held vineyards and orchards
suitable only for growing grain.39 After a decade of work, HAVA could
not set a schedule or a plan for completion. As its engineering
failures mounted, HAVA's symbolic weight in the Cold War and in
Afghanistan's ethnic politics steadily grew.

Like the TVA, HAVA was a multipurpose river authority. U.S. officials
described it as "a major social engineering project," responsible for
river development but also for education, housing, health care,
roads, communications, agricultural research and extension, and
industrial development in the valley. The U.S. ambassador in Kabul in
1962 noted that, if successful, HAVA would boost Afghanistan's
"earnings of foreign exchange and, if properly devised, could foster
the growth of a strata of small holders which would give the country
more stability." This billiard-ball alignment of capital
accumulation, class formation, and political evolution was a core
proposition of the social science approach to modernization that was
just making the leap from university think tanks to centers of policy
making. An uneasiness about the massive, barely understood forces
impelling two-thirds of the world in simultaneous and irreversible
social movement -- surging population growth, urbanization, the
collapse of traditional authority -- overshadowed policy toward
"underdeveloped" areas. Modernization theory offered reassurance that
the techniques of Point IV could discipline these processes and turn
them to the advantage of the United States. Development, the
economists Walt W. Rostow and Max Millikan of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology assured the cia (Central Intelligence Agency)
in 1954, could create "an environment in which societies which
directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve."40

...The Helmand project offered a way to counter Soviet influence by
giving Daoud what he wanted, a Pashtun homeland. As originally
envisioned, HAVA would irrigate enough new fertile land to settle
eighteen to twenty thousand families on fifteen-acre farms. Working
with Afghan officials, U.S. advisers launched a program to immobilize
the nomadic Pashtuns, whose migrations were a source of friction with
Pakistan.46 To American and royal government officials, this floating
population and its disregard for laws, taxes, and borders symbolized
the country's backwardness. Settling Pashtun nomads in a belt from
Kabul to Kandahar would create a secure political base for the
government and bring them within reach of modernization programs.
Diminishing the transborder flows would reduce smuggling and the
periodic incidents that inflamed the Pushtunistan issue. A
complementary dam development project in the Indus Valley, also
funded by the United States, settled Pashtun nomads on the other side
of the Durand Line.47...

Evidence for the efficiency of American techniques was scarce in the
Helmand Valley. The burden of American loans for the project and the
absence of tangible returns was creating, according to the New York
Times, "a dangerous strain on both the Afghan economy and the
nation's morale" which "may have unwittingly and indirectly
contributed to driving Afghanistan into Russian arms."57 Waterlogging
had advanced in the Shamalan area to the point that structural
foundations were giving way; mosques and houses were crumbling into
the growing bog. In the artificial oases, the problem was worse. An
impermeable crust of conglomerate underlay the Marja and Nad-i-Ali
tracts, intensifying both waterlogging and salinization. The remedy -
-a system of discharge channels leading to deep-bore drains -- would
remove 10 percent of the reclaimed land from cultivation. A 1965
study revealed that crop yields per acre had actually dropped since
the dams were built, sharply in areas already cultivated but evident
even in areas reclaimed from the desert. Withdrawing support from
HAVA was impossible. "With this project," the U.S. ambassador noted,
"the American reputation in Afghanistan is completely linked."58 For
reasons of credibility alone the United States kept pouring money in,
even though by 1965 it was clear the project was failing. Diplomats
complained that the reputation of the United States hung on "a strip
of concrete," but there was no going back. Afghanistan was an
economic Korea, but Helmand was an economic Vietnam, a quagmire that
consumed money and resources without the possibility of success, all
to avoid making failure obvious....

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations renewed the U.S. commitment
to HAVA with a fresh infusion of funds and initiatives, raising the
annual aid disbursement from $16 million to $40 million annually. The
"green revolution" approach pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation
would bring a new organizational system into play around the farmer.
In 1967, USAID and the royal government imported 170 tons of the
experimental dwarf wheat developed by Norman Borlaug in Mexico. The
high-yield seed, together with chemical fertilizers and tightly
controlled irrigation, were expected to produce grain surpluses that
would be distributed through new marketing and credit arrangements.
Resettlement subsidies had paid off by the mid-1960s, and the Helmand
Valley was beginning to have a lived-in look. The large corporate and
state farms had vanished, and nearly all of the land that could
successfully be farmed was privately held, much of it by
smallholders. Legal titles were still clouded by HAVA's inattention
to land surveys, but the settlers had nonetheless sculpted wide
tracts of empty land into irregular fifteen-acre parcels divided by
meandering juis, the tree-lined canals that served as boundary, water
source, and orchard for each farm.60

Unfortunately, the juis system proved incompatible with the new
plans. The small, hilly, picturesquely misshapen fields contributed
to runoff and drainage problems and prevented the regular, measured
applications of water, chemicals, and machine cultivation necessary
for modern agriculture. A green revolution would require, in effect,
a land reform in reverse: merging small holdings into large level
fields divided at regular intervals by laterals running from control
gates on the main canals. As the wheat improvement program got
underway, a team of U.S. Department of Agriculture advisers proposed
that HAVA remove all of the resettled families, "level the whole area
with bulldozers," and then redistribute property "in large, uniform,
smooth land plots."61 HAVA adopted the land preparation scheme, but
implementation proved difficult. Farmers objected to the removal of
trees, which had economic value and prevented wind erosion, but they
objected chiefly to the vagueness of HAVA's assurances. HAVA itself
acknowledged, as bulldozing proceeded, that questions of what to do
with the population while the land was being prepared, how to
redistribute the land after completion, and whether to charge
landowners for improvements were "yet to be worked out." When farmers
"met the bulldozers with rifles," according to a usaid report, it
presented a "very real constraint" that "consumed most of the time of
the American and Afghan staffs in the Valley throughout the
1960s."62...

By 1969, the new grains had spread to a modest 300,000 acres, leading
to expectations of an approaching "yield takeoff," but the 1971 El
Niño drought destroyed much of the crop. Monsoon rains failed through
1973, reducing the Helmand to a rivulet. In 1971, the Arghandab
reservoir dried up completely, a possibility not foreseen by
planners. With the coming of détente in 1970, levels of aid from both
the United States and the Soviet Union dropped sharply. The vision of
prosperous, irrigation-fed farms luring nomads into their green
embrace proved beyond HAVA's grasp. Wheat yields were among the
lowest in the world, four bushels an acre (Iowa farms produced 180);
farm incomes in the valley were below average for Afghanistan and
declining. State Department officials found it difficult to measure
the magnitude of the economic crisis "in Afghanistan where there are
no statistics," but student strikes and the suspension of parliament
pointed to a "creeping crisis" in mid-1972. "The food crisis," the
embassy reported, "seems to have been the real clincher for which
neither the King nor his government were prepared."64 In July 1973,
military units loyal to Mohammed Daoud deposed the king, who was
vacationing in Europe, and terminated both the monarchy and the
constitution. U.S. involvement in HAVA was scheduled to end in July
1974, and USAID officials strenuously opposed suggestions that it be
renewed. Nonetheless, when Henry Kissinger visited Kabul in February,
Daoud described the Helmand Valley as an "unfinished symphony" and
urged the United States not to abandon it.65 Kissinger relented. Land
reclamation officers remained with the project, while making little
progress against its persistent problems, until the pro-Soviet Khalq
party seized power in 1978.

Soviet economic development also failed to create a stable,
modernizing social class. The Khalq was not broadly enough based to
hold onto authority unaided. Against the threat of takeover by an
Islamic party, the Soviet Union launched the invasion of 1979. During
the Soviet war, both sides found ways to make use of the Helmand
Valley's infrastructure. In early 1980, according to M. Hassan Kakar,
"about a hundred prisoners" of the Khalq "were thrown out of
airplanes into the Arghandab reservoir." The project's concrete water
channels provided cover for the anti-Soviet Mujaheddin fighters, and
its broken terrain was the site of intense fighting between the
resistance and Soviet forces and among ethnic factions after the
Soviets withdrew in 1988. The warriors felled trees, smashed
irrigation canals, and planted mines throughout the fields and
orchards, driving the population into refugee camps in Pakistan.66
The Taliban movement began here in 1994 as an alliance of Pashtun
clans supported with arms and money from across the Durand Line. Even
after the capture of Kabul in 1996, Kandahar remained the Taliban
capital. The Helmand Valley provided the new regime's chief source of
revenue. The opium poppy grows well in dry climates and in alkaline
and saline soils. In 2000, according to the United Nations Drug
Control Programme, the Helmand Valley produced 39 percent of the
world's heroin.67 During its five years in power, the Taliban
government invested in the dams and finished one project begun but
not completed by the Americans: linking the Kajakai Dam's
hydroelectric plant to the city of Kandahar. Work was finished in
early 2001, just a few months before American bombers destroyed the
plant.68...

Nick Cullather is associate professor of history at Indiana University....