Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [46]
Yes, religious fanaticism, ethnic hatreds, and imperial ambitions are the larger moving pieces, but climate change also fuels the conflict in Afghanistan. First, the violence began as the result of a drought forty years ago. Second, climate stress creates poverty and desperation, which now feeds the insurgency against NATO occupation. Third, climate change causes interstate rivalries, which play out as covert operations inside Afghanistan. Finally, and very importantly, opium poppy is drought resistant to an extent alternative crops are not, and NATO attacks poppy while the Taliban defends it. Let us begin the story with the drought and the coup that deposed King Zahir Shah.
Vacation King
In 1969 the rains in many parts of Afghanistan failed completely. During the next two years, they failed again. Then came a very severe winter; to survive, many farmers were forced to eat their seeds and slaughter their bullocks, leaving them little to plant and few animals to pull plows. As a result, the 1972 wheat crop was inadequate, and by April famine swept northern and central Afghanistan. According to Raja Anwar, it was “the most terrible famine in Afghan history.”6
Ghor Province, in the remote interior of the country, was hardest hit. A thousand years ago the place was heavily forested, but its hills also held mineral deposits, so Ghor’s trees were felled and burned to smelt the local ore. Then, the denuded region became the heart of medieval Afghanistan’s cattle industry, but the cows, goats, and sheep destroyed the land. Now, Ghor almost looks like the moon—totally barren. Only along the rivers and streambeds is farming possible. For most people, small sage bushes gathered during the summer on faraway hills are the single source of fuel.7
The first journalist to break the story of the 1972 famine was Abdul Haq Waleh, editor of a local newspaper called Caravan. He traveled to Chakhcharan, the small dusty capital of Ghor, and found a terrifying scene: corpses littered the street; survivors could not dig graves fast enough to keep hungry dogs at bay; scores of children had been abandoned by parents who could no longer feed them or orphaned by parents who had starved.
The next journalist to visit was James Sterba of the New York Times. At first Sterba’s editors on the foreign desk refused to run his story because it didn’t contain enough statistics. How many people had died? He tried to explain that Afghanistan was not a land of statistics; no one even knew the population of Afghanistan; guesses varied by 5 million in either direction. Finally, Sterba sent back three rolls of film that he had shot in Ghor. The horror was undeniable, and the Times ran Sterba’s story about the abandoned children of the famine. Here is an excerpt: “The boy’s spindly body sank slowly to the dusty gravel road. He lowered his head to the pebbles, resting his sunken cheek on his hand. His dry, cracked lips did not close. He tried to cover his feet, but the torn, dirt encrusted rags he wore were not long enough. He placed an empty tin can, his only possession, near his stomach. And then he started to cry.”8
While thousands starved to death in the mountains, little was said or done about the problem in Kabul. As one report put it, “What killed the people stricken by the drought, in the view of Afghan and foreign observers, was not only lack of food in their regions but also governmental indifference, and greed and official corruption.”9
King Mohammed Zahir Shah had taken power in 1933 at the age of nineteen when his father was assassinated. Young, weak, and unconcerned with the plight of his people, Zahir Shah was dominated by his cousins and uncles; they ruled and used the young king as a ceremonial ornament and a key to the palace. From these arrangements emerged an inept and passive style