Kajaki revisited

You remember the story. It was a triumph of British military cunning, as a giant hydroelectric turbine was smuggled through the desert, past Taliban ambushes, and installed at the Kajaki dam on the Helmand River. The effort was a clear signal to the locals that the British were serious about their welfare, and were there for the long haul. With the new turbine, power generation and irrigation on a much larger scale would be possible.

I was reminded of all this fine sentiment when reading Eric Newby’s very funny book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, recounting his travels in Afghanistan in 1956 – 3 years after the Kajaki dam was completed, by American contractors.

Sticky with melon, we arrived at a town called Girishk on the Helmand River. There, under a mulberry tree, squatted the proprietor of a chaie khana [tea shop], a long-headed, grey-bearded Pathan, chanting a dirge on the passing of a newly founded civilisation, no new thing in this part of the world.

‘There is no light in the bazaar. the Americans brought light when they came to build the great dam, but when they left they took the machine with them, and now there is no more light. [...] Once I worked in a German woollen mill but now I am poor; we are all poor.’

[...] We asked him about the dam, that vast scheme of which so much vague ill had been spoken all along the way.

‘It is all salt,’ he moaned, ‘the land below the American dam. They did not trouble to find out and now the people will eat salt for ever and ever.’

We rose to leave.

‘You will be in Kandahar in two hours’ he went on. ‘The Americans build the road; they have not taken that away.’

This environmental degradation has affected not just local Afghans, but the delicate ecosystem across the border in eastern Iran, where the Helmand drains into Lake Hamun. There’s long been an agreement between the two countries about the level of water that should flow across the border, but it hasn’t always worked in practice – the Taliban, in particular, cut the flow dramatically. There have been social consequences too, with displaced Afghanis moving into the eastern Iranian province, and Iranian farmers moving out as competition for resources drives down the productivity of their land.

Still, I’m sure more thought has been put into things this time round.

Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush, 1956
photographed by his traveling companion Hugh Carless

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