How climate change helped the Taliban win
One of the decisive factors behind the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan this summer has been hidden in plain sight – climate change. Afghanistan is rated among the six most vulnerable countries to the accelerated changes in climate and environment now being witnessed across all continents.
This year Afghanistan has been gripped by drought – as bad as that in 2018 when thousands died and hundreds of thousands migrated to the cities and to the borders with Iran and Pakistan and beyond.
Anything between 40 and 60 per cent of the Afghan population of around 40 million live by agriculture, grain, pomegranates, pine nuts, opium poppy, hash, to mention but a few. Last year many of the crops failed, and others weren’t planted. Increasingly farmers turned to poppy, which can grow in arid conditions though still requires a modicum of water.
Much of the countryside was threatened by wars and rumours of war, a chronic condition now in Afghanistan. There was no help from the authorities of the beleaguered Ghani government in Kabul. Bereft and frightened villagers turned to the Taliban and their offer of tough governance for stability. Many joined their ranks as they took over province after province.
This was history repeating itself. In much the same way, the Taliban took to the field in 1994 and within two years had seized power in Kabul – then held by squabbling Mujahedin factions and clans, utterly discredited and hated for their self-indulgent and corrupt ways.
Details, eyewitness descriptions and anecdotes abound – but the facts and statistics of the case are hard to come by – and for very good reason. The stark facts of the case are put in the emergency appeal from the World Food Programme, which has been operating in Afghanistan for some 50 years. Of the 40m population, says the WFP, at least 14 million are “food insecure” – meaning they will die if they don’t get at least some food aid. At least $200 million is needed for an emergency programme for the basics of food, water and medicines if disaster is to be averted before winter.
Climate change is being observed as a driver for conflict in an increasing number of hot spots. Mali, Somalia, Syria and Yemen are seeing desperate people being driven to desperate acts. We seem to be on a threshold of the new wars of desolation and despair – the explosions of people with no food, no shelter, no hope, no life.
It is little wonder that the new Taliban regime immediately announced it wanted to engage with the outside world on the matter of climate change. They must be fearful about the little they can do to mitigate the worst effects of this year’s drought and the erratic rains and floods in some areas from the surge in melt from the region’s high glaciers. The scarcity of water and the fights over access have played to their aggressive politics in the recent years – but now they have to own the problem. Afghanistan and Yemen are the two nations rated most vulnerable to water and food stress by the UN Development Programme. Pakistan is in equally dire straits – rated by the UN as the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change overall.
Across the whole region climate experts have been warning in journals like National Geographic that the ice volume in the great glaciers could reduce by 60 per cent by the end of the century – and if average temperatures rise by four degrees Celsius or more, a lot worse is likely to happen, and a lot quicker.
One wonders how much of all this and its consequences will make it onto the agenda for the COP-26 summit conference at Glasgow this November. Not much, one suspects, given the slow progress being reported from the two sponsors, UK and Italy.
Equally worrying is how little of the impact of the climatic convulsion was mentioned by the strategists and statesmen when asked to assess why the Taliban took over in Kabul with such speed and ease. The generals didn’t seem to understand the coordinates and language of these new forms of conflict. At best they talked in the clichés of 20th century warfare, and even the once-trendy jargon of phenomena like “counter-insurgency” (COIN), “counter-terrorism” (CT) and even the whiskery and venerable term “asymmetric warfare” seem horribly out of date and all but irrelevant.
But someone in the Taliban seems to have understood. Two of the most decisive moves in their spring campaign were the capture of major dams outside Herat in the west, and Kandahar in the south. They also realised the early season fighting set more than half a million refugees on the move.
Exactly ten years ago, I flew up to the province of Faryab, in Afghanistan’s north, opening onto the great steppe which runs for thousands of miles across central Asia. I was accompanying Lt General James Bucknall, then deputy commander of the international force ISAF. We were hosted by a US artillery brigade and a brigade of the Afghan army, whose troops were mostly Uzbek. The deputy commander was a ferocious-looking Uzbek major who had an enormous scar the length of his face as if it had been freshly carved by barbed wire. He told me he had been involved in three major battles in the past 18 months. The US commander, it must be said, seemed completely out of it and offered a PowerPoint presentation whose Microsoft spaghetti graphics might have meant something in a back corridor of the Pentagon in Washington, but seemed to have no relevance to any of us discussing life and fate on the edge of the great steppe.
The Uzbek major was sharp and to the point. We were in one of the major centres of the Turkmen population of Afghanistan – and they were fighting the Uzbek elders and farmers for watering rights for their crops and their sheep – especially when they were rounded up at shearing time. Tajiks as well as Uzbeks got mixed up in the fights which were getting worse. Lately, a new element of Taliban Pashtu tribes people had come into the battle. They were extending their network across the north of Afghanistan, establishing enclaves in traditional Uzbek, Turkman, and Tajik areas of settlement. He said Pashtuns from the south and the borders with Pakistan were now established across the north.
The major said the thought that the changing conditions, especially in the fertile Fergana valley just to the north, would trigger more fighting as access to fertile land and grazing rights became more troublesome and scarce. The major wasn’t being prescient so much as realistic in acknowledging what had been going on for years already.
The Fergana valley of 22,000 square kilometres covers Kyrgyzstan, parts of Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan. It is one of the most fertile parts of the entire region and it is calculated that a quarter of the population of Central Asia live there. Fighting for this essential ground has been going on for decades – from the last day of the Soviet Union. By then the effects of climate change on the seasonal melt of the high glaciers was becoming noticeable. Some 16 per cent of the ice mass was lost in the past 40 years, directly affecting Kyrgyzstan – where the rise in average temperatures has been well ahead of the global average.
Uzbeks and Kyrgyz have been slugging it out over access to the water released through the sluices with the seasonal melt flood. Each community would appoint a water manager, a murab, an office which goes back to the Persian and Ottoman empires. A graphic report by Reuters from an Uzbek village in 2018 – the last major drought before this year’s – records rival farmers fatally felling each other with shovels as the water dried up.
The fate of the villagers and herdsmen of the Fergana valley is tied up with the most serious ice melt affecting human populations on planet earth. The great chain of Himalaya, Hindu Kush and Karakoram hosts some 8,500 glaciers of different sizes. Not for nothing is it known as the “third pole”. They feed fourteen of the great rivers of Asia, among them the Helmand, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya – in classical times the Oxus and a frontier of the civilized world, the Yangtze and Yellow River of China, the Mekong and Salween, and the four life-giving river systems of the Indian subcontinent, the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Irrawaddy. The main glacier sources of these great rivers are shrinking alarmingly and will be at least half their volume today by the end of the century. They nourish and support some two billion people at least today.
Climatologists and earth scientists are reluctant to define climate change as a cause of war and conflict – even given the topsy-turvy conditions and environmental stresses of today. They are experts in their own field and not in the policy, psychology and practice of conflict – formal and informal. But it is undeniable that climate stress – the shortage of water and food, excess flood, famine and unbearable heat, are now great catalysts to conflict and violence. Men and women don’t fight and oppress each other in the name of climate change, but the effects of climate change force extreme and violent action and reaction – war and conflict by any other name.
So it is all but astonishing that the generals and advisers of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson did not recognise that the collapse of so much of Afghanistan’s rural economy was a bonus for the Taliban – at least in the short term. It is down to climate change. The generals and the diplomats had seen the worsening plight of the farmers, driven increasingly to grow poppy, and getting deeper in debt to those that offered some promise of support – the warlords and Taliban.
Such movements and upheavals are as much the reality of the trouble spots of the world as the terrorist movements like al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and IS-Khorasan. Experts and leaders in strategic intelligence who are not taking in these new factors and phenomena do not seem so very intelligent after all.