Image Source: Eurasianet
The unrecognized Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is experiencing its first period of peace in nearly fifty years. The Taliban-run state now must balance its desire for good relations with its neighbors with its need to provide basic necessities like water to its citizens. While Afghanistan regularly courts the occasional Kazakh dignitary in Kabul and sends ministers to charter business deals in Turkmenistan, it is also proceeding with an ambitious infrastructure project that will redefine Central Asia’s water landscape: the Qosh Tepa Canal.
Like the rest of Central Asia, Taliban-run Afghanistan struggles with food scarcity and rising temperatures due to climate change. Moreover, droughts that used to occur once a decade now happen every two years. Five decades of unrelenting war have left the country with crumbling infrastructure that is ill-equipped to handle these environmental stressors. To alleviate this problem, the planned 285-kilometer Qosh Tepa Canal would redistribute water from the Amu Darya River along the northern border to irrigate croplands in the north of Afghanistan.
But Afghanistan’s northern neighbors harbor concerns about the project.
International experts estimate that the completed canal would divert up to one-third of the river’s flow. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, who draw 80% of all their water resources from the Amu Darya, are especially anxious about this prospect. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan flagged Qosh Tepa as a concern for Central Asia in a speech in December 2022. Likewise, a hydrologist in Turkmenistan speaking anonymously called the canal “not a problem, but a disaster.”
Central Asia is already grappling with encroaching desertification because of water inefficiency. Immediately after World War II, Joseph Stalin settled on cotton production as one of the four pillars of the new Soviet economy, rerouting vast water resources in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic to quadruple their cotton production. Decades later, these crumbling Soviet-era canals leak as much as 37% of water siphoned off the Amu Darya in Uzbekistan. They have also led to long-reaching and devastating ecological consequences. The once-vast Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has disappeared, replaced by a windblown desert of toxic sand. The UN recently reported that an estimated 20% of Central Asia’s land is degraded, contributing to dust storms and lower agricultural yields.
The cotton industry still dominates life in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Uzbekistan is the world’s sixth-largest producer of the crop, growing and processing around 1 million tons of cotton per year. The new canal is poised to disrupt this.
The Turkmen and Uzbeks take issue not only with the existence of the new canal but also with the apparent shoddiness and haste of its construction. Qosh Tepa lacks any kind of liner to prevent water traveling through it from seeping into dry soil instead of reaching its intended destination. Satellite imagery reveals a canal construction bedeviled by spills and waste. This past November, analysts from the nonprofit Rivers Without Borders spotted what appeared to be a 30-meter-wide leak in the canal — though a lack of transparency from the Taliban has clouded the issue.
Unfortunately, several barriers prevent open cooperation to resolve this dispute. The Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan have all signed onto the UN Water Convention, which requires them to share their transboundary water resources with one another. The Taliban government, however, is not a signatory but insists it has upstream development rights on its canal. Further complicating cooperation is the fact that the Central Asian countries have yet to acknowledge the Taliban-run government. All are former Soviet, secular countries with longstanding concerns about Islamic fundamentalism. The leaders of Central Asia have slowly found common ground with Afghanistan’s new government, but the canal threatens to upend this process.
This looming water insecurity in Central Asia should concern the United States. Instability will make it difficult for the United States to develop its business relationships and secure its critical minerals supply chain in the region. Moreover, continued desertification will negatively impact regional health outcomes and spur widespread climate migration. The cost of action to combat land degradation in Central Asia is estimated to be five times lower than the cost of inaction.
Central Asian states should loop Afghanistan into some kind of regional water framework or agreement with haste. This does not require the formal recognition of the Taliban government, but simply a recognition that Afghans have the right under international law to pull water from the Amu Darya, even though their country was previously too unstable to capitalize on it until now. Although regular UN payments to Afghanistan keep their currency from freefalling and forestall a humanitarian crisis, the canal could help Afghanistan stand on its own two feet.
Although devoid of direct diplomatic leverage with the Taliban to influence the construction of Qosh Tepa, the United States can still play a productive role. U.S. engagement in Central Asia has recently blossomed as a result of the State Department’s C5+1 Initiative, a new and highly publicized diplomatic platform establishing high-level linkages between U.S. and Central Asian heads of state. The United States should leverage this platform to improve the existing water infrastructure in the region. Experts from the Army Corps of Engineers could consult on improving the efficiency of existing canals in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Likewise, the United States could fund the deployment of advanced water-monitoring tools like MODSNOW in Central Asia.
Ultimately, the United States can encourage diplomatic efforts from the sidelines while the Uzbeks use their networks and credibility to ensure that the Taliban’s new canal meets environmental standards. Regardless of the outcome of these negotiations, however, Central Asia needs to diversify its economy away from cotton in the coming decades. The annual drying up of waterbeds fuels a vicious cycle where increasingly more water is needed to prevent dust storms. The transition away from cotton will doubtlessly be a slow and painful one for Central Asia, and they will need international support to weather it.
While the United States is on the back foot diplomatically with the Taliban, the canal dispute is one area where it must step in. Russia and China, the largest powers bordering the Central Asian states, have little interest in the region’s economic diversity as they benefit from the status quo. The lower rungs of the Russian economy function off Central Asian migrant workers, and China seeks to develop a closed and highly extractive critical minerals supply chain in places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The United States and the West should lead efforts for Central Asia’s economic development away from thirsty cotton fields and towards more sustainable water practices.