Damming Afghanistan

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   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

...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....

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

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