***** 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.35Afghanistan 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 Ni�o 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 d�tente 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....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ejah/teaching/archive/2002_09/>.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
