Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [45]
In Afghanistan, the edge of the same weather system hit several eastern provinces, including Nangarhar, which was at the very periphery of the monsoon’s reach. Typically, August in Nangarhar is bone dry, with precipitation of less than five millimeters for the whole month.4 But that year, the skies opened, and the massive barrage of rain washed away crops, livestock, and twenty-five hundred houses, killing eighty people.
According to the security reports, Nangarhar is not only either parched or flooded but also violent: Twenty-three mostly war-related incidents were listed during the week I made my visit in September 2006. According to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), that week saw kidnapping threats, ongoing counterinsurgency operations, and “reported infiltration of a new group of AGE/Insurgents” made up of “Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis”; two vehicles used by “armed Taliban” were spotted in Sherzad District, and there were several rocket attacks. The ANSO reports portrayed a region beyond government control.
Only the drug trade has kept this region afloat economically, but eradication is a constant, if often distant, threat. Wazir recounted the panic of the local farmers when a poppy-eradication squad came down from Kabul. “The eradication campaign came, but they just took bribes,” said Wazir as we sat in his dera‚ a shaded outside visiting area, on rope and wooden cots called charpayi. “When we heard that they were coming, we went to the district governor and negotiated a price.” Wazir told me that the local commander, named Hasil, was chosen as the farmers’ envoy. After taking bribes, for the sake of the cameras the police destroyed some old, dry, spent poppy fields.
“If the governor had not accepted the bribe, we were ready to fight. If a farmer loses his poppy he can’t even have tea and sugar. He will borrow money from a rich person and lose his land.” Wazir said that emergency loans carry 100 percent interest rates.
Climatic stress, an initial catalyst for Afghan instability, is now fueling violence. This is what the catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence and climate change looks like in Afghanistan: eroded soil, limited water, greedy police, foreign troops, popular anger, and an insurgency that protects poppy crops from eradication.
The Role of Drought
In 2008 the British government issued a report describing what climate change will do to Afghanistan: “The most likely adverse impacts . . . are drought related, including associated dynamics of desertification and land degradation. Drought is likely to be regarded as the norm by 2030, rather than as a temporary or cyclical event. . . . Floods due to untimely rainfall and a general increase in temperature are of secondary importance. However, their impacts may be amplified due to more rapid spring snow melt as a result of higher temperatures, combined with the downstream effects of land degradation, loss of vegetative cover and land mismanagement.”5
Read the history of the war in Afghanistan closely, and a climate angle emerges. Central Asia is suffering water shocks—droughts and floods—that fit the pattern of anthropogenic global warming. Two-thirds of Afghans work in agriculture; yet, much of the country is desert, and its irrigation system is badly dilapidated. The extreme weather of climate change causes misery, which causes violence, which leads to more misery, and so on. At first glance, the most important cause of war in Afghanistan is the US presence there: the United States and its NATO allies are in Afghanistan to hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda and/or to build an Afghan state that will deny sanctuary to international terrorists. The Taliban, on the other hand, are fighting to eject the infidel invaders.
But there was war in Afghanistan before the United States intervened overtly and even before America’s first covert intervention under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. There was war before the Soviet intervention