Afghan President Hamid Karzai has stepped up international fundraising efforts in recent weeks, seeking a fresh package of military and reconstruction aid from the US, together with stronger strategic guarantees. But Karzai's relationship with his sponsors has begun to sour, in part owing to charges that his government has failed to stop the resurgence of Afghanistan's huge opium trade.
Underlying the opium trade issue is a security threat of another kind, one overlooked since the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime in 2001, despite the grave risk it poses to Afghanistan's long-term stability, and that of the region.
In countries like Afghanistan, where 80 percent of the population lives on what they grow and where many communities live far from any water source, environmental damage can be both economically devastating and politically momentous. That lesson should have been absorbed and understood, not least by US strategists, long before the Taliban's fall.
After all, desertification and deforestation helped fuel the rise, two decades earlier, of the Maoist guerilla group Shining Path in Peru. The group, which supplemented its income with drug production and timber smuggling, deliberately chose drought-weakened and deforested mountain villages as the stronghold of its insurgency. Similarly, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal exploits the desperation of mountain villagers hit by flash floods -- the result of deforestation higher up. No Maoist group could ever gain a toehold in Afghanistan's parched Pashtun south (these were, after all, people who, bare-knuckled, smashed the Soviets). But the Taliban's rapid rise in the 1990s was inextricably linked to the failure of irrigation systems. Villagers whose crops shriveled and whose livestock died in a prolonged drought saw joining the Taliban as an economic opportunity. Had there been more irrigation, the Taliban's gains might have been far less impressive.
The Taliban are now an increasingly spent force, but lack of water reinforced the logic of opium production across its former strongholds in the south. Irrigation has failed or is inadequate in Helmand, Uruzgan and Kandahar -- three of the top five opium-producing provinces -- where indebted farmers are hooked by the economics: opium brings in eight times as much cash as wheat and uses less water. Without serious investment in irrigation, including construction of reservoirs to make use of the snowfall in the Hindu Kush, and in new cash crops such as saffron and rose oil, Afghanistan's drift toward narco-statehood will continue, with all the instability that this implies.
Clear-cutting of old growth forests in the mountains bordering Pakistan may prove as problematic. Agriculture has been damaged by the cutting of walnut, apricot and mulberry trees for winter fuel, and by a failure to re-plant poplar, willow and tamarisk -- the trees that hold fragile meadows in place. These sorts of trees can be restored with a concerted campaign and investment in nurseries to produce local varieties. Loss of the ancient cedar, pine, fir and oak forests on the slopes above is another matter. This year's snowmelt caused landslides and flooding -- a warning of more soil erosion and destruction of arable land to come; hundreds died and thousands lost their livelihoods.
Forestry has always been a problem in Afghanistan. In 1960, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) spoke of wasteful logging practices, such as "head-skidding" (in which a log is rolled downhill, ripping up plants and soil). Aerial photographers were called in, and a large budget was set aside. But, in 1976, the FAO admitted that forest and watershed management activities had "turned out to be quite limited."
The 1976 plan called for sustainable logging and basic forest-fire control, but war intervened, costing Afghanistan half its forest cover. Up to 60 percent of the old growth forest in Nangahar, the second largest opium-producing province, may have been cut during the war years. Mujahidin factions and later the Taliban exported stands of fine-grained cedar by the truckload from Nangahar and surrounding provinces to Pakistan, often in return for arms.
Illegal logging continues today, with only ineffectual efforts made to stop it. At the current rate, Afghanistan's old growth forest could vanish within a decade.
The UN acknowledges the problem, but it is unwilling to risk sending forestry experts into a tribal region where US and allied troops venture only in armored convoys. Safety concerns and cost also limit intervention by international conservation organizations.
A new initiative called the Green Corps includes 300 forest rangers charged with stopping illegal logging, and the ministry hopes to boost their numbers within a year. But the initiative is unlikely to have much effect. Illegal logging crews number 200 or more. They have chainsaws and trucks. They are armed and work with the backing of drug and emerald smugglers -- and often local officials. The price of plank cedar in Lahore is incentive enough to corrupt or kill any Green Corps men brave enough to stand in their way.
Environmental issues are of paramount importance in marginal countries because their impact on human survival is immediate and direct. The inadequate response to pressing questions of natural resource management, whether of water or trees, merely strengthens the hands of opium dealers and malcontents in what is already the most disaffected and sensitive part of Afghanistan -- the clear-cut mountain slopes where intelligence officers believe Osama bin Laden is most likely holed up.
Jonathan Ledgard is working with the Afghan government to establish Ajar, an Alpine wilderness in the western Hindu Kush, as a national park.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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