The Durand Line, which serves as the de facto border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, has never been officially recognised by any Kabul government. It cuts through the heart of Pashtun tribes, who share family ties, religion and traditions. For most of its existence, it made little practical difference to the lives of the people living on either side. However, Pakistan’s decision in 2017 to fence the entire Line, a project which is now almost complete, has physically split communities. In this report, guest author Sabawoon Samim looks at what that has meant to the lives of those living on the Durand Line, exploring the damage done and some of the partial solutions found by locals, albeit at some cost and some risk.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the download button below.
Many of the interviews for this report described the fence built by Pakistan as “passing not through the land, but through [our] hearts.” It follows the 2,640-kilometre-long Durand Line, signed in 1893 between the Afghan king, Amir Abdul Rahman Khan, and the British foreign secretary for India, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand. Much has been written about how the agreement was reached, its legal status and how it affects the politics of the two countries. However, there is a dearth of information about the damage done to local communities, socially, economically and culturally, by Pakistan’s fencing of the Line. This report, based on 16 in-depth interviews with Afghan nationals from the border provinces, tries to remedy that.
After providing a brief historical background, it delves into who the local communities are and the bonds between them. It examines the recent restrictions put in place along the Durand Line, particularly Pakistan’s fence, and how it has split communities and prevented what used to be normal travel. It explores how locals are coping with losing the freedom of movement they used to enjoy and the means they employ to try to cut through, go under or otherwise, circumvent the fence – and the risks and costs that entails.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking the download button below.
The Oscar-winner and the Nobel laureate have teamed up to make Bread & Roses, a new film about the abuse of women in Afghanistan. In an emotional interview, they warn that the west ignores its message at their peril.
“Strong women are not easy women,” says Jennifer Lawrence, “and a woman’s life is lonely. So much of our experience cannot be shared or understood by men, and our rights are in their hands. That’s why we need each other.”
The two other people on our video call nod in agreement. One is Malala Yousafzai, who, with Lawrence, has produced a new documentary about the oppression of Afghan women by the Taliban after US troops withdrew in 2021. The other is Sahra Mani, who directed it.
Bread & Roses is also a story of three women. Sharifa incarcerates herself at home in accordance with new laws that ban women from school, work or going out other than in certain chaperoned circumstances, wearing full-body coverings. Zahra is a dentist whose activism lands her in jail. Taranom seeks refuge in Pakistan and mourns her homeland. “Strong women are always lonely women,” she says near the end of the film, bereft.
No arguing with that today. “That’s why we’re here,” says Malala. “Because it is a lonely journey, and we are joining each other to share empathy, and solidarity with all Afghan women.” Mani hasn’t returned to Kabul since the Taliban took control again. Seeing school friends married off as minors further spurred her to gain an education. Her own brother objected. “You have to fight in your community, in your family,” she says. Then, once you enter “male-dominated society, they’re not ready to accept you as someone who has a brain. So yes, it’s really lonely.”
Today, of course, the situation is yet worse. “If you are born as a girl in Afghanistan,” says Malala, “the systematic gender oppression by the Taliban has decided your future for you. This is the worst form of discrimination: women denied every basic right and opportunity.”
In fact, adds Mani, her film sanitises current events. We see protesters attacked with water cannons; in reality many were “killed, kidnapped and illegally detained. The situation is much worse than I say in the film.”
The genesis of Bread & Roses began three years ago, after Lawrence was appalled by news reports about the plight of these women, and by the prospect of their being forgotten. “I think it’s really easy to be ruled by our constantly moving news cycle,” she says – less peppy, more sober and, later in the call, more emotional than the familiar chatshow charmer. “By the time the information gets to us, it has been so distilled through our western lens.”
Agreeing with Malala that “storytelling is the soul of any activism”, Lawrence commissioned Mani to coordinate the shooting of first-person testimonies. “Hopefully this movie,” says Lawrence, “made by Afghan women, through their perspective of this moment, will mean it’s not just a flash of a story in a pan. It is a resistance happening right now. These women need the world to witness this so that they are not suffering in vain, and we need to pressure our governments to hold the Taliban accountable.”
Progress has been slow. The US administration has not taken responsibility for the repercussions of its military retreat. Western feminists tend to focus on matters of immediate domestic import, and on identity politics, rather than the massive and dramatic human rights abuse in the Middle East.
“It is a reality that breaks your heart,” says Malala. “Why is there silence? Why is there inaction? Activists and storytellers cannot spend too much time thinking about it.” The ultimate obligation lies with the general public, she believes. “I think it’s the job of the people to hold their leaders to account and put more pressure on them. So I hope that people will begin to question their representatives and ask them what they have been doing. What do they mean when they say they’re committed to gender equality – those nice fancy words – when they don’t take any action to protect women’s rights and girls’ education in Afghanistan?”
Why haven’t they yet? Racism and ignorance certainly contribute, agrees Malala, ever measured and collected. “Sometimes when people talk about Afghanistan or Pakistan they assume that this is normal, expected. But when women are systematically oppressed we should not excuse that based on religion and culture.” Zahra, Sharifa and Taranom are trying to define themselves within their society and faith: now a radical act, but less so 100 years ago, when female education and modern dress were encouraged, and forced or child marriage abolished. (All such reforms have been repealed, reinstated and repealed again many times.) “I think culture is defined by people,” Malala continues, “and oftentimes women are not included in that.”
In the film, men are curiously absent. Even Zahra’s fiance, Omid, although tearful at the prospect of her departure, does not visibly back her protests. Such inertia is standard, says Mani. “In the minds of Afghan men, women’s education is a women’s problem. Not theirs.” Some are even enabled by the lockdown: one woman sobs reporting beatings by her husband, who has been liberated by the isolation (a WHO report nine years ago found 90% of Afghan women had experienced domestic violence). Mani’s previous film, 2018’s A Thousand Girls Like Me, told of a young Afghan woman seeking to expose the abuse within her family – and the failings of the country’s judicial system.
Sexism also helps account for the muted international response, says Mani. Had men been the victims, we could have expected a different tenor of outcry. “What Afghan women face today has not come from God. They are victims of male politicians who made a wrong decision – and children and women pay the price.”
At one point, women on a march are threatened by unseen male hecklers: go home and shut up or we will kill you, they say. One woman succinctly slaps him down: “You are desperate for power over us.”
How much is that a universalism? “All of this is universal,” says Lawrence. “This misogyny is dangerous. And the paralysis that comes over us when we don’t know what to do or how to help is dangerous.”
Yes, I say: the Taliban behaving like this is not unexpected; the tacit complicity of loved ones feels the greater betrayal. Or perhaps that’s too strong a word?
‘You are desperate for power over us’ – a still from Bread & Roses. Photograph: Courtesy of Apple
“Not strong enough of a word,” says Lawrence. “Of course it’s a betrayal. We of course felt that betrayal when our supreme court turned over Roe v Wade. How can you not see me as an equal? It doesn’t decrease the amount of abortions, it just increases the amount of death. Women die. It’s a massive betrayal.”
The strength of Lawrence’s response to that rollback was reported at the time. Her home state of Kentucky was one of the first to ban abortions after the 2022 ruling, reopening a rift with her Republican family that had begun during Trump’s presidency, and which Lawrence had been trying to repair since giving birth to her son, Cy, now three.
“I just worked so hard in the last five years to forgive my dad and my family and try to understand,” she told Vogue in 2022. “I’ve tried to get over it and I really can’t … I can’t fuck with people who aren’t political any more … It’s too dire. Politics are killing people … How could you raise a daughter from birth and believe that she doesn’t deserve equality?”
One of the outcomes of that ire today is that she refers to her day job as “purely just a way to be able to get a film like this made”. Using her platform “makes me feel a little hopeless. But it’s something. Obviously it was scary to reach out to Sahra and offer to get her funds and equipment. There were many people in my life that didn’t want me to get involved in something that would make the Taliban not like me. It’s scary and it is overwhelming, but the scariest possible outcome is ignoring it and pretending like it’s not happening.”
Lawrence’s investment in the project is also evident when she begins weeping. This comes when speaking about people “whose rights are taken away and their homes are stolen. These people have to be separated from their families. Nobody wants to go to a refugee camp in Germany where they have to share a tent with thousands of people. The living situation is so dire that a part of me just can’t even believe that we … it’s just unbelievable.”
That we allow this to happen? “Yes. And that this is the terrorist response: little boys are easier to manipulate into becoming young soldiers if their mothers aren’t educated. So they stop education for young girls from sixth grade. It’s an unbelievable way to treat humans, your fellow citizens, the women who are your wives, who are your mothers, your sisters. It’s so overwhelming.”
Lawrence’s voice shakes. “I do understand and sympathise with the freeze response. I have to fight it myself. But the alternative is so much more horrifying, because the Taliban is a terrorist organisation to the world. And the longer we ignore the rights of women in our own country and countries around the world it makes the world a more dangerous place.”
This, agrees Mani, is where the international strategy of silence seems perverse as well as cruel. Compassion shouldn’t be a luxury – but other countries should seek to curb the Taliban through self-interest, too.
Men are conspicuously absent here … a still from Bread & Roses. Photograph: Courtesy of Apple
“We shouldn’t trust them. If Afghan women are paying the price today, the rest of the world may pay tomorrow. We don’t want something horrible like 9/11 to happen again.”
Instead, she says, the west appears to be funding its own destruction. “We handed part of our world to terrorists and told them: ‘You can have it! Plus: we will pay you millions of dollars every week!’ The Taliban receives a lot of financial support from international communities without any accountability.”
She leans forward, urgent and angry. “So what is the game? There is a horror happening. What is the story behind all of this?”
‘Why the silence? Why the inaction? It breaks my heart’: Malala and Jennifer Lawrence take on the Taliban
For anyone who has spent any time in Kabul, handcart sellers and street vendors are a familiar sight, as they walk around the city hawking their wares from dusk to dawn trying to eke out a meagre living for their families. Street vendors say that more and more young Afghans have been joining their ranks, trying to earn a living during a time of high unemployment. The municipality, worried about the impact on traffic congestion, revived a half-hearted policy of the Islamic Republic and banned mobile selling, insisting the vendors must buy a fixed booth and then pay monthly rent. At a time of economic hardship, those added costs have just added to the difficulties of trying to earn a living selling goods on the streets of the Afghan capital, as AAN’s Sayed Asadullah Sadat found out when he spoke to two vendors.40-year-old Amanullah [not his real name] is a street vendor who supports a family of ten selling vegetables.
For the past ten years, I’ve been selling vegetables from a handcart in the Pul-e Bagh Umumi area of Kabul. These days, this way of earning a living has become ever more difficult. The number of street vendors in Kabul has been on the rise since the economy went bad and the jobs dried up. More and more people arrive in Kabul every day in search of a living; many end up on the streets selling everything from vegetables to clothing to used electronics. Unfortunately, this has worsened the already bad traffic situation in Kabul. You’ll see handcart vendors weaving through the vehicles trying to sell their goods, competing for space with the cars – and the streets were already crowded!
Last year, Kabul municipality came up with a plan to reduce traffic in the city and part of that was building white stationary stalls for street vendors to rent.[1] They told us we were banned from hawking our wares from handcarts or on foot. So, I borrowed 15,000 afghanis [USD 209] from my brother-in-law for the initial cost of a stall. There’s also the ongoing rent, which varies from 3,000 to 30,000 afghanis [USD 42 to 417] a month, depending on the size of the stall and its location. I could only afford the least expensive one, so my rent is 3,000 afghanis [USD 42] a month.
At first, business was good and I was able to provide for my family. But a few months ago, the municipality moved our stalls to a remote commercial vegetable market. They hadn’t even told us beforehand. One morning when I went to work, my stall was gone. I went to the police station, but they said they didn’t know anything about it and that I had to go to the municipality. At first, the municipality said they didn’t know anything about it either. Finally, after searching for most of the day, another street vendor told me the stalls had been moved to this commercial produce market near the Kabul River. That is where I finally found my stall. My vegetables were damaged from sitting in the heat all day.
I went back to the municipality to ask why the stall had been moved and they said the original location had been designated as a ‘green area’, so the stalls had to be moved to another place. I told them the new place was a private market and the owner wanted to charge an additional amount for rent. The officials told me they couldn’t do anything about that. Now, in addition to the monthly rent I pay the city, I have to pay another 1,600 afghanis [USD 22] for ground rent to the owner of the market.
Many of the other street sellers have taken their stalls home and started selling on the street [ie in front of or near their homes] again. I’m thinking of doing the same. I’m not making much money because the market’s out of the way and few people come there to shop. I’ve asked if I can move my stall to another location, with a higher footfall, but they said this was the location allocated to me and that If I wanted to move, I had to apply for another location and pay another fee.
Things didn’t used to be like this before. Street vendors didn’t have to pay money to anyone during the Republic. We weren’t hunted down like thieves and we were never taken to the police station. It’s true that in some areas, criminal gangs forced us to pay protection money and some shopkeepers charged a small fee for allowing us to set up in front of their shops, but these were not high amounts. Vendors were making enough money to provide for their families and even put some aside for a rainy day.
Hamidullah [not his real name] is a 28-year-old street vendor with a university degree, originally from Paktia province. He’s been selling children’s clothes in Kabul for the past year to support his family of nine back home.
Last year, I lost my office job and had to find work to provide for my family. I came to Kabul from Paktia province, hoping to find a job. Initially, I’d planned to go to Iran, but my friends who were already there warned me against it. They said the economy was bad, the Iranian rial had devalued, and the money you could earn wasn’t worth as much as it used to be. Plus, it was expensive to live there. They were struggling to make ends meet and couldn’t send money back home to their families. Additionally, the Iranian government had stepped up deportations, and the risk of being sent back with nothing was high. Therefore, I decided to sell children’s clothes on the streets of Kabul instead. I live in a rented room with some friends from my village who also sell things on the street. We work during the day and spend the evenings together, talking about the day that passed and our plans for the future. Sometimes, we don’t sell anything and we share what we have with each other.
It’s not easy being a street seller. The economy’s bad and people don’t have enough money to buy clothes. Still, I’m in a much better position than many other clothes vendors because I sell children’s clothes and people are more likely to spend money on their kids, especially at the start of the school year or before an Eid.
The municipality wants us to rent stalls from them, which they say is to help reduce traffic in Kabul. They put up about 200 stalls next to the Kabul River and sold them to people. Then one day, they removed all of them and leased the land to a businessman who built a modern market in their place. They call it a ‘public-private partnership’. The market has about 500 small shops, but most are empty because it’s expensive to rent one. It costs 7,000 dollars upfront and 3,000 afghanis [USD 42] rent per month. As for me, I don’t even have the money to buy a handcart, so renting a stall’s out of the question.
I have a deal with a shopkeeper who gives me the clothes on credit. Every morning, I pick up the clothes. From early morning until the end of the day, I carry the clothes in my hands, looking for customers and trying to dodge the police. In the evenings, I take what’s left back to the shop, along with the day’s earnings, and he gives me my cut. On good days, I can make as much as 300 afghanis [USD 4.20], but there are days when I don’t make a single sale.
You have to be on the lookout for the police. Since the municipality started its policy of forcing street sellers to rent stalls, they don’t allow us to sell on the street. They hunt us down and harass us. I, myself, have been taken to the police station several times. Each time, they confiscate my goods and make me promise to stop selling on the street. When they give back my stock, many of the items are damaged or soiled and sometimes things go missing. Once, I lost around 20,000 afghanis worth [USD 278] of children’s clothes. I’m still paying off the debt to the shopkeeper.
My roommates and I have started putting a little money aside each month so that we can rent a stall together. It means living more frugally than we already are and asking our families back home to do the same. It’s not easy, but we have to tolerate it. We have no other choice. We have to tighten our belts and pool our funds to secure a stable location so that we can earn money on the right side of the law and without fear of being harassed.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
References
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Kabul Municipality’s plan to designate locations and establish fixed booths to regulate the activities of street vendors and reduce traffic congestion in Kabul dates back to the days of the Islamic Republic, but it was only enacted half-heartedly. After the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, the municipality revived the plan (see this April 2022 ToloNews report) and has enforced it strictly, with higher costs (both initial outlay and rent) for the vendors. See also AAN special report published in September 2022, ‘Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state’.
The Daily Hustle: The trials and tribulations of being a street vendor in Kabul
A farmer from Khoshob village walks near his water reservoir near Kandahar airfield, in southern Afghanistan. Credit: Kern Hendricks
From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Managing Producer Jenni Doering with freelance journalist Lynzy Billing.
JENNI DOERING: The war in Afghanistan was the longest the U.S. military has engaged in with the last of American troops withdrawing in 2021. Over twenty years, the U.S. military dropped tens of thousands of bombs in Afghanistan and more than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians died as a direct result of the war.
The prolonged conflict also left many Afghan people without adequate food, clean water, and shelter, making them vulnerable to natural disasters, including the devastating earthquakes that have taken thousands of lives in recent days. But there is another cost to the war that is often overlooked.
Afghan civilians are now living among dangerous pollutants left behind in the wake of the fighting, according to reporting from Lynzy Billing. She’s a freelance journalist who was born in Afghanistan and dug into this for our media partner Inside Climate News and New Lines Magazine.
Lynzy, welcome to Living on Earth!
Lynzy Billing reported on environmental and public health issues around three former U.S. military bases in Afghanistan in 2022. Credit: photo courtesy Lynzy Billing.
LYNZY BILLING: Thank you for having me.
DOERING: So we often think of the direct injuries that bombs and other weapons can inflict during a war, but they can also leave behind dangerous chemicals. So what kinds of toxic substances can munitions have?
BILLING: I think that beyond the obvious impacts of the bombs and weapons during the American war in Afghanistan, there was a longer lasting effect that came with the war. And that really is the chemicals and residue attached to these weapons and munitions. If we’re speaking about bombs alone, tens of thousands of bombs were dropped on Afghanistan over the last 20 years. And most of these included explosives like RDX. And RDX has been described as being potentially carcinogenic. There’s a whole array of munitions that are left behind.
But it’s also the bases themselves, the military bases, and their waste disposal practices, and their activities during the war that also left behind the environmental effects that really we haven’t had a chance to look at properly until now. I think I really wanted to get away from just talking about the weapons that are still left half buried or uncovered and really look at the longer lasting health impacts from the war in general, which are in soil and are in water and in the air and in people’s food and what they eat and drink from on a daily basis.
DOERING:Yes, from what I understand, the U.S. military consistently dumped sewage into agricultural fields where Afghan people were growing their food. What pollutants were in that sewage, and what kinds of impacts did that have?
BILLING: One of the things that kept coming up around the three bases that I visited, which were in Nangarhar, Kandahar, and Parwan provinces, these were three of the largest US bases in the country, it was a lot of agricultural land, and farmers working in that land were telling me the same story, which was that U.S. military contractors were bringing tankers out to their fields and dumping sewage or wastewater in them. And they all relayed that either the sewage was blue, or it was gray.
And the gray wastewater and black wastewater comes from toilet facilities at the base. So it could be like sinks and showers. And it’s like grey water, and it has a residue in it, which contains phosphates and other chemicals. The blue that they were seeing was a dye that comes from portable toilets, which also had an array of chemicals that can have different levels of toxicities that are harmful to human health. So I started looking at studies that were done on wastewater and sewage sludge in other countries where, for example, sewage would go through a treatment process. And even that sewage had chemicals in it that couldn’t be removed, such as PFAS, which are also known as forever chemicals, just because they have a really long shelf life.
A water outflow from Bagram Airfield, formerly America’s largest military base in Afghanistan. Credit: Kern Hendricks
And those chemicals have been linked to a whole array of health problems: kidney problems, cancer. So I started to realize that this sewage and wastewater that was being dumped in the fields was, you know, incredibly harmful to the farmers who were working there. And children that were working there as well.
DOERING:Those PFAS “forever chemicals,” municipalities here in the U.S. are spending many millions of dollars per facility to install systems that remove those chemicals. And we know that military bases often use these chemicals in their operations. So I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be in Afghanistan.
BILLING:As well as the residents living around the bases, I spoke with contractors who were tasked with the job of hauling this waste off the bases and finding somewhere to dump it. And they just relayed a really big problem just because of the amount of waste the bases were producing. Some of them had 40,000 troops on them at one point. And there was just so much waste, it couldn’t all be burned in a burn pit. It had to go somewhere. And one of the other areas aside from fields for sewage was waterways. And for the contractors, one of the reasons one relayed was that they could save on fuel if they found somewhere close by to dump. And in terms of those in charge at the bases, the waste really wasn’t their priority at the time, they were fighting a war, and the responsibility really went with the contractors to come up with their own solution of where to put the waste. No one was really checking it or thinking about any long term impacts at the time. And there were no laws or any prohibitions, really, from a U.S. military perspective, or international perspective, that was stopping them from dumping in waterways and fields and land or burning in areas around, also.
DOERING:A couple of years ago, when the U.S. finally did pull out of Afghanistan, there was a lot of talk about how important it was, this moral obligation that we had to help out some of the Afghans who had helped us during the war, and who had worked with the U.S. military, interpreted for the U.S. military, done a whole range of different things. So some of those people were able to come to the U.S. and flee the Taliban. But it seems like there’s kind of a lack of understanding of the obligation that we have to protect Afghans from the environmental degradation that we’ve caused there.
BILLING:Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any responsibility from the American military to protect Afghans. And I think that one of the reasons that we don’t know much about the U.S. military waste is that they’re not required to share what they do with their waste. There’s this whole black box on responsibility just because they don’t actually have to share that information. And I think on top of that, there’s actually a DOD prohibition that means the U.S. military doesn’t actually have to clean up its bases when it leaves a country overseas. And that it’s then the host nation’s responsibility to clean up.
And you know, you look at the amount of bases in Afghanistan and the size of them. They are still sitting exactly the same today as August 2021 when America left. You can see it on satellite today, you can still see the amount of scrap and broken tanks and engines. And then on top of that, you can still see the burn pits, some as big as three football fields, still scorched and charred from how they were left. So there was a lack of care when they were there at the bases for both their own service members and for the entire Afghan population, but then a definite lack after they left because they don’t need to, there’s no requirement for them to care about the environmental damage that they had on the country.
DOERING:What kinds of health impacts did you see on the ground while in Afghanistan? Can you tell us a story or two from Afghan civilians that really stood out to you?
BILLING:There were a lot, a lot of stories. I spoke to a lot of people. One thing, though, that does come up is that there’s definitely a pattern with the same health problems, which very much mirror the health problems of U.S. service members who were returning from deployment. One around Jalalabad airfield, there was a farmer and his name’s Khan Mohammad.
He had been working there for 20 years in a field just by the base, and his whole family helped him work in this field. And he had two sons, who were five and seven, who both have kidney problems. He had another son who had other health problems, their cousins had kidney problems, his mother had a skin rash, a persistent skin rash, and she was working the land as well in that field.
And so you have this whole family working in this field where tankers are dumping sewage waste, and they’re coming down with really serious kidney problems, even at the ages of five and seven. And they really believe that they’re sick from the waste being dumped in their fields. But the reality is that they can’t afford the medical treatment they need, or they can’t afford to constantly go and see doctors. And there’s really not much they can do. And then you’d go to speak with a farmer next to Khan Muhammad. There was another one next to him called Wali Rahman. He had the exact same problem. He had the same kidney problems. Doctors in that area know what’s happening. They know the waste is being dumped there. And they say, “There’s a pattern here. People are getting sick from the same things. They’re drinking and washing in the same rivers. They’re working on the same land, they’re eating the food they grow in the fields. It’s all connected.”
DOERING: And like you say, they don’t really have the resources to get the medical help they need. In your story, there was somebody who maybe would need a kidney transplant at some point. But that’s several thousands of dollars.
BILLING:And also, there are people in areas that didn’t have the possibility to travel to get the medical treatment they needed before, because there was ongoing fighting going on. A lot of people traveled to Pakistan to get treatment just because Afghanistan doesn’t have the resources or medicines available for it, as well.
DOERING: I think in your story, you came upon a couple of kids who were collecting scrap metal from one of the piles of waste that was left behind. Can you tell us about that?
BILLING: They had a little shop across the road from Kandahar airfields. And they’d moved there after their father had died. And they were making a living off scrap metal collecting. And outside of bases in Jalalabad, Kandahar and Bagram are just rows and rows of little shops, with a whole array of scrap in them, all of which comes from the bases. And these two boys, you know, they had everything from broken motors and seats from Humvees to grenades, like whole grenades still, and—
DOERING:Live grenades?
BILLING: Live grenades, still with the key hole. And, you know, unexploded artillery shells. So there’s all these dangers of them collecting these things. The scrap metal collectors, not just in Kandahar, had persistent skin rashes and problems as well. And the doctors were telling me about this also. And this is just because of the materials that they’re dealing with on a daily basis.
DOERING:This is really heavy reporting, Lynzy. What keeps you going back to Afghanistan to report stories like this, about the environmental pollution left behind by the U.S. military?
BILLING: I think I’ll keep going back to Afghanistan until I can’t get in anymore. And it is getting harder to get in. I think that Afghanistan is a country in which the effects of this kind of environmental damage, and the effects of the war in general, they didn’t go away when the U.S. left in 2021. And they’re still there, and people are still there waiting for answers and some level of accountability.
An Afghan scientist collects soil samples from a family farm near the site of a former American base in Jalalabad. Credit: Kern Hendricks
And this is an American war in Afghanistan. And I think, especially Americans should really know about what happened there and what happened with these waste disposal practices. And also just because the U.S. military is in so many countries around the world using the exact same waste disposal practices, and right now there is no law saying they have to clean up, there is nothing that’s stopping it.
DOERING: Lynzy Billing is a freelance journalist who wrote about this for Inside Climate News and New Lines Magazine. Thank you so much, Lynzy.
BILLING:Thank you so much for having me.
America’s 20-Year War in Afghanistan Is Over, but Some of the U.S. Military’s Waste May Last Forever
Mr. Costa was the special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. Mr. Clarke is the director of research at the Soufan Group.
For all of the counterterrorism wins that the United States has had in its fight against the Islamic State — and there have been many — we still have not figured out how to defeat it.
A terrorist attack targeting a concert hall in the Russian capital of Moscow on March 22 killed more than 130 people and left many others severely wounded. It served as the latest deadly reminder that the Islamic State — and particularly its Khorasan branch, ISIS-K, which is active in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan — remains a potent threat. It’s a painful lesson Afghans and Americans alike learned in August 2021, when ISIS-K conducted a complex suicide operation that killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 American service members in Kabul, in the midst of a chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Since the start of the new year, ISIS-K has launched lethal assaults in Iran and Turkey. Several ISIS-K plots in Europe have been disrupted, with arrests in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands. On Tuesday, four days after the Moscow attack, the ISIS-affiliated al-Battar Media published a message threatening Italy, France, Spain and Britain: “Who’s next?” Both France and Italy have since raised their terror threat levels.
All of these events point to what we now know: Stripping the Islamic State of its self-proclaimed caliphate is not the same as beating it. At its peak, the caliphate was as large as the territory of Britain, stretching from the Levant to Southeast Asia, and boasted over 40,000 foreign fighters from more than 80 countries. Forced from this redoubt, ISIS has reconstituted itself in other countries, going underground in less detectable — but more dangerous — forms.
To stop that threat from reaching America and its allies, the United States must prevent two decades of counterterrorism expertise from atrophying. There are other serious threats that deserve Washington’s attention, including Chinese adventurism and the challenge of artificial intelligence. But to keep Americans safe, counterterrorism must remain a strategic priority — and that includes finding a way to keep eyes on the Islamic State in parts of the world where we no longer have a footprint.
After the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda of Sept. 11, 2001, the American public was told to brace itself, that the war on terror would be a generational one. The United States made some profound blunders in the decades-long fight that followed, and eventually, Washington turned its national security focus to different geopolitical threats. But neither of those facts obviated the need to remain committed to countering transnational terrorism. By pulling back troops and intelligence assets from active conflict zones, the United States has allowed groups like ISIS-K to rebound. It’s not the time to let up, or predictably, we will find ourselves facing a resurgent adversary.
The Islamic State is nothing if not resilient. Aggressive Western military campaigns helped dismantle the caliphate and have in recent years severely curtailed the operations of ISIS militants in other countries, including the Philippines and Syria. Rather than disappear, they have gone on to rebrand, enlist new fighters under the same banner and plot new attacks. Some have reappeared in other countries, better trained and harder to find and protect against. Some are intent on committing acts of terrorism like those we’re witnessing now, traveling across borders to infiltrate target countries.
How did a jihadist group operating from a remote region of Afghanistan manage to expand its networks and begin planning external operations with such global reach?
Part of the answer is that we left. Before the United States withdrew, ISIS-K was far more constrained, particularly its ability to launch external attacks. In a 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban signed in Doha, Qatar, the Taliban agreed to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies. In return, Washington agreed to fully withdraw its forces from the country. The stipulation to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan asian operating base was primarily relevant to the Taliban’s longstanding, cozy relationship with Al Qaeda. The Taliban and ISIS-K, on the other hand, are mortal enemies and have been fighting each other since ISIS-K started operating in the country in 2015, at the apex of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate.
Either way, it’s unrealistic to expect the Taliban to be a reliable counterterrorism partner in an international effort to defeat ISIS-K. But some level of cooperation, however unappealing, is necessary. The human intelligence so critical in counterterrorism can only be gathered on the ground. With no American footprint left in the country, our counterterrorism interests would be better served with intelligence derived from Taliban security and intelligence operations directed against ISIS-K — a mutual enemy. The cooperation should remain limited to information sharing and should not extend to training or the provision of equipment.
Intelligence history is replete with examples of marriages of convenience between intelligence services for sharing threat information, even between adversarial countries. Although a “shadow war” has played out between Iran and the United States for decades, the United States still reportedly shared threat warnings on an impending terrorist attack with the Iranians in January. Washington did the same with Moscow two weeks before the ISIS-K attack on the concert hall.
Of course, coming to any kind of agreement with the Taliban is a deeply complicated and controversial endeavor. Even a highly restricted relationship with the Taliban would be distasteful and fraught with ethical dilemmas, given the regime’s human rights record.
But it’s been considered before. And the alternative is worse: a devastating attack directed at Americans overseas or at home.
Christopher P. Costa was a career intelligence officer and was the special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. Colin P. Clarke is the director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm based in New York City.
ISIS-K’s recent attack on the Russian capital was, in part, intended to assert the organization’s growing capacity to inflict terror beyond its home base of Afghanistan. “By reaching Moscow, ISIS-K is trying to signal it has the geographic reach to hit anywhere in the world,” says USIP’s Asfandyar Mir.
U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124.
Transcript
Laura Coates: Asfandyar Mir is the USIP senior expert for South Asia. There’s really been a thought process and a lot of pieces surrounding what happened at that Moscow concert hall attack. Our guest says it will have far reaching impact and he is here today to give us a little more information about that very point. Asfandyar, welcome. How are you?
Asfandyar Mir: Good. Thanks for having me on, Laura.
Laura Coates: Thank you for being here today. Now, there are a lot of questions that people have. One is, what exactly ISIS-K is and what was its intent in Moscow. They, of course, have claimed responsibility for the attack. And I wanted to understand more about this organization, if we can even call it that this group, what is ISIS-K?
Asfandyar Mir: Sure. So, ISIS-K is the Afghanistan based branch of ISIS in the Middle East, which has now been around for roughly 10 years. It first emerged in early 2015. And ever since, it has been active in the region, it has been fighting there. The Taliban, of course, you know, back when the United States had a presence in the region, you know, ISIS-K was attacking the United States. And around the time that the U.S. evacuated from Afghanistan, if you remember, in August 2021, there was a big attack. A terrorist attack during the evacuation, which killed around 13 service members, as well as 200 or so Afghans who were trying to evacuate. And ISIS-K was responsible for that attack as well. So, this is a nasty group. It is doggedly persistent. And now it is attacking countries both in the region. It has struck Iran, it has struck Pakistan, it has attacked in Central Asia. And it has finally managed to reach parts of Europe as well. We heard about some foiled plots, terrorist plots in Europe and more recently, we saw this attack in Moscow.
Laura Coates: Why now? It’s not an emergence, but why do you think it is becoming so much more active now?
Asfandyar Mir: Look, it has been active, it’s just not been in our news cycle, as much. But the group seems to have this goal of punishing disbelievers and infidels, you know, as per its doctrine. And in line with that it has been actively consistently plotting in the region, outside of Afghanistan, but also aiming for parts of Europe. The U.S. military has been warning that we could see an attack against Western states, U.S. interests, which is code for targets in Europe, in six months, with little to no warning. And this attack is very much in line with that warning.
Laura Coates: When What do you think the intent was in Moscow, specifically, obviously, Putin a very strong force in the region, why there?
Asfandyar Mir: I think multiple motivations were at play for one, ISIS and Russia have, you know, have sort of sparred with each other. Remember Russia backed the regime of Bashar Al Assad in the Syrian Civil War, in which the Assad regime was also fighting ISIS. And the Russians came on the side of Assad in a big way. And ISIS has not forgotten that ISIS-K is angry and upset about that. Another motivation is competition with the Taliban, which now runs the government of Afghanistan. And ISIS-K, wants to show that it is the most audacious terrorist group around, that it sort of holds the mantle of the global jihadi vanguard. And it really seeks to outperform, you know, militants like the Taliban who tend to reserve themselves or limit themselves to the boundaries of Afghanistan or its immediate neighborhood. By reaching Moscow ISIS-K is trying to signal that, that it has the geographic reach to hit anywhere in the world in the way that the Taliban won’t.
Laura Coates: Really, really important. Thank you so much for joining us today, Asfandyar Mir, for all of your expertise. Thank you.
In January 2002, during his State of the Union address, President George W Bush said that in “four short months” the US had “rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists … and terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own”.
The term “war on terror” had been coined a few days after al-Qaida’s attacks of 9/11 to describe the most extensive and ambitious counter-terrorism operation the world had seen. As Bush spoke, it all seemed to be going rather well.
Two decades later, with more than 300,000 people killed in Iraq, according to some estimates, and perhaps 240,000 deaths in Afghanistan, the violence of the “war on terror” can be seen to have created further chaos and carnage. Even excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, the numbers killed in terrorist attacks around the world rose from 109 a month in the years before 9/11, according to one study, to 158 a month during the six years that followed. Meanwhile, some of those whom Bush said were running for their lives are now in power in Kabul.
In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the conflict came largely to an end – after 30 years – once British governments began to use the military and police to contain, rather than attempt to brutally extirpate, anti-state violence. Security forces patiently developed their intelligence-gathering capacities, while government ministers acknowledged the political causes of terrorism and, eventually, formed partnerships with those whom they had been fighting.
Richard English, the author of Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, is a professor of political history at Queen’s University Belfast, and has dedicated decades to the analysis of terrorism and to governments’ efforts to overcome it. Given that the choices made in counter-terrorism policy impact directly upon each of us every day, it is a vitally important area of study.
His previous work includes a 2016 volume, Does Terrorism Work?, and a highly regarded history of the IRA. Here, he offers a thoughtful and authoritative dissection of the counter-terrorism efforts of the “war on terror”, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and the lessons that each can offer.
English believes that post-9/11 counter-terrorism was far too short-termist, that the histories of Afghanistan and Iraq were “substantially ignored in a disgraceful fashion” and that the US became overly impressed with its own early military successes in both countries.
In Iraq, the claim that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power was a necessary part of a global counter-terrorist campaign was, of course, founded on the false claim that Saddam was supporting al-Qaida and the mistaken belief that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, English writes, the assumption that the Middle East could be recast “through naive invasion” took no account of the region’s past, its complex allegiances, or the possibility of something simply going wrong.
He cautions that very few counter-terrorism campaigns will ever achieve complete strategic success. Unconvinced by those who claim bullishly that the Provisional IRA was “defeated”, he argues persuasively that the republican movement’s sustainable campaign of violence was suspended only because its pragmatic leaders decided that they might more likely achieve their objective – a united Ireland – by peaceful means. Equally, he is sceptical of those among his fellow academics who argue that counter-terrorism operations will inevitably promote terrorism.
However, he writes, there are times when “those who criticise counter-terrorists for worsening their state’s strategic position regarding terrorism, and those who celebrate tactical-operational successes against terrorist adversaries, might shout past each other while yet both being right”.
English judges that if any counter-terrorism campaign is to achieve even partial strategic victory, it must be conducted in a patient, well-resourced manner, with clear objectives. Given that terrorists often seek to provoke outrage and overreaction, the public should be encouraged to be realistic about the limits to what can be accomplished.
He also concludes that to avoid failure, counter-terrorist efforts must be integrated into broader political initiatives: “We should not mistake the terrorist symptom for the more profound issues that are at stake.”
Although this book was written before the Hamas attacks of 7 October and the war in Gaza, English was already convinced that Israeli counter-terrorism tactics, no matter how carefully conceived or brilliantly executed, will not resolve the conflict unless there is a strategic engagement with Palestinian grievances and desire for statehood.
Finally, he cautions that his three case studies present serious warnings about the self-harm that can be inflicted by state actions judged to lack morality. All three have involved the abuse of prisoners; that an overreliance on aggressive military methods can shatter public support; that technical surveillance should be lawful and proportionate; and, as a senior British police officer warned in a report published this month, that there are serious questions to be asked about the morality and legality of allowing informants within terrorist organisations to commit serious crimes.
“A successful counter-terrorism will be a just counter-terrorism,” English writes: legally bound, accountable and proportionate. To stray from this, he says, risks delegitimising the objectives of the state. Or as a mural in Northern Ireland used to say: “When those who make the law, break the law, in the name of the law, there is no law.”
Ian Cobain is the author of Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island(Granta)
Does Counter-Terrorism Work? by Richard English is published by Oxford University Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Does Counter-Terrorism Work? by Richard English review – a thoughtful and authoritative analysis
The last few weeks have finally seen rain and snowfall in Afghanistan, raising hopes for farmers and herders that this year could be better than the last three drought years. Afghans typically categorise a drought year as one where the low amount of precipitation causes problems for agriculture – a poor harvest or crop failure or not enough grazing for livestock. At its worst, a drought also affects drinking water. The long-term future for Afghan agriculture is grim: scientists predict the global climate crisis will bring more severe droughts more frequently. But this year, AAN’s Kate Clark found, together with Ali Mohammad Sabawoon, Rohullah Sorush and Sayed Asadullah Sadat, farmers hope there might be enough rain and snow to, at least, avert another year of drought.Afghanistan has had three consecutive drought years (khushk sali), with terrible consequences for many farmers and herders. Winter and spring is when most precipitation in Afghanistan should fall, but this winter began with two dry months. Since then, there has been some good snow and rainfall, but coming into the Afghan new year, Nawruz, which falls on the spring equinox, cumulative precipitation was still only creeping up towards average levels. See the Food Security Outlook for Afghanistan from the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET), which this report will quote from extensively, for more detail.
Afghans usually view drought through the prism of agriculture,[1] not surprisingly, given it is the backbone of the Afghan economy, providing jobs, income, food for households and more than a third of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).[2] Those cultivating rain-fed land (lalmi) are most vulnerable to drought, but farmers who have access to irrigation also suffer the consequences of low rain and snowfall, with springs drying up or streams running dry at times of the year when they should not. The greater variation in the rain-fed wheat harvest when there is drought, compared to the irrigated crop, can be seen in the chart below, which shows Afghan annual wheat production from 2005 to 2020.[3] Lack of snowfall on the mountains, or higher spring temperatures leading to premature snowmelt, can also result in a shortage of irrigation water downstream at critical times.[4] Herders are also hit hard if pasture is too little to sustain their flocks and herds. Scientists modelling the effects of greenhouse gases on the climate forecast that Afghanistan will see more frequent and harsher droughts, as well as warmer temperatures, a general shift from snow to rainfall, and heavier spring rains.[5]
Annual Afghan wheat production, rain-fed and irrigated, 2005-2020. Data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock; chart compiled by Mohammad Fahim Zaheer, FEWS NET regional scientist with the University of California, Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Center.
For this report, we spoke to farmers in Helmand, Daikundi, Ghazni, Paktia, Laghman and Kunduz to get a sense of their outlook for the coming year. Most had some access to irrigated, as well as rain-fed land, and many also had a small number of livestock.[6] We found that after the distressingly dry early winter, there is renewed hope that this year will be wetter and crops and pasture might flourish. Still, most famers we spoke to worried that spring rains would not fall in enough quantity or not at the right time to ensure a healthy crop and fear for the longer-term future.
The interviews were conducted in mid-March, just before the Afghan New Year (Nawruz). Farmers refer to the Afghan months: the last month of winter, Hut (20 February to 19 March) and the three months of spring: Hamal (20 March to 19 April), Saur (20 April-20 May) and Jawza (21 May to 20 June).
Farming in uncertain times
The winter of 2023/24 was unremittingly dry, until finally, in the month of Hut (beginning on 20 February), rain or snow fell, and it has rained or snowed several times since.
A farmer in Zurmat district of Paktia, said those two dry months at the start of winter had made people worry if there would even be drinking water this year. He has ten jeribs of irrigated and three jeribs of rain-fed land, plus five jeribs shared with a neighbour; he grows wheat for the household and maize, beans, onions, tomatoes and potatoes to sell. He also has two cows and a 20-strong flock of sheep and goats. After so many dry years, he said he had not bothered to sow winter wheat on his rain-fed land in the autumn. Those few people in the village who had saw the wheat dry up, or be eaten by birds or, at best, it had cost more to get it to harvest than it brought in.[7] The snow that fell in the last month of winter had come too late to save the winter wheat, but at least there was hope for the spring crops and people had been spurred into action:
The weather was cold, but it made the people happy. It snowed four times in all, although not more than 30 cm in depth. Then, it rained and the snow melted. As a result, the underground water level has increased a little and there is water in the wells. Water in our village’s karez is running again because water has come down from the mountains.[8]Agriculture is renewed. People are busy sowing crops, wheat, some are even planting trees. Everyone’s busy and happy. A few days ago, I was able to sow barley. The earth is soft and moist and the barley should grow very welI. I hope it will rain again so that we get a good harvest.
Another farmer,from Jaghatu district of Ghazni province, who is landless and cultivates irrigated land as a sharecropper, said they had had about 40 cm of snow, enough for drinking water and the animals (he has 25 sheep, four cows and a calf) and a slight improvement for the crops.
In years when there’s more water [than average], we can get a harvest large enough not only for my family and the landlord, but also with a surplus to sell. But for the last three or four years, we just didn’t get enough rain and snow and I’ve only been able to meet my family’s needs. We’ve had so many losses – we weren’t able to grow winter wheat and had to buy flour and potatoes and I’ve had to reduce the herd and flock by half, while the price of animals had gone down.
A farmer in Qarghahi district of Laghman said, “It recently rained so much that it went a long way towards quenching the earth’s thirst – not enough yet to meet the needs of farmers, but much better than last year or the year before.” He grows wheat for household use and a second crop of barley for sale on three jeribs and vegetables – cucumbers, chives, green onions and cauliflowers – all for sale on another two jeribs of his own land, as well as on six jeribs which he rents with his brother. He also has five cows and ten sheep grazing on his land and grows fodder crops for them. Laghmani farmers, he said, generally have access to water for irrigation from the Kabul and Panjshir Rivers and, in some areas, canals. Despite that, he said, rain is invaluable:
Compared to water from the river, rain can double the harvest. It functions like fertilizer. Last year, we grew winter wheat, but it dried up due to a lack of water and we had no harvest. When it snows on the mountains for three consecutive months, the water in the rivers increases and the groundwater level rises. When there’s no snow or rain, the water level drops. In the summer months when it gets hot, the water level in the river also goes down and people face a water shortage. When there’s a lot of rain, of course, the water in the springs that was reduced or dried up increases again and the springs flow.
Prospects had also turned for a farmer from Nad Ali district of Helmand Province who cultivates winter wheat on 5.5 jeribs to feed his household, and spring crops on another one-and-a-half jeribs – vegetables to eat and sell and cotton to sell. He also has 10 goats. The dry winter followed a long drought – not a single drop of rain had fallen in spring 2023, he said, and that had badly affected his winter crops.
The wheat turned yellow because of the lack of rain and was very weak. It was only around ten centimetres tall when the grain started to fill out and the cumin was about to dry up. [But then], it rained in the month of Hut, the wheat turned green again and began growing taller and the cumin got better. The wheat and cumin crops are happy now, very happy. We hadn’t watered our crops for around 50 days because the canal was dry.
The rain in Hut, he said, had “more than 90 per cent” addressed the drought. A local well-digger had told him the water table had risen from a depth of about 18 to 20 metres to 11 metres. “People are now ploughing their land,” he said, “and preparing to sow the new crops.” However, elsewhere in the province, the rain in February had come just in time, and the situation remains precarious:
The population of some districts of Helmand like Washer, Nawzad, Kajaki and Musa Qala were about to migrate because of the shortage of water. They were lacking even drinking water. Now the karezes there are full of water again. In Nawzad and Washer districts, snow fell. If the rain continues, I mean if it rains occasionally in Hamal [began 20 March], the drought in those districts will be addressed. If not, they will still have severe problems irrigating their crops.
Changing and chaotic weather patterns and ‘untimely rain’
Precipitation is crucial at various points in the growing cycle. Wheat, for example, needs water to germinate and for the initial growth, and then for flowering and finally for the grain to swell. The farmers stressed that it was not only the overall amount of rain and snowfall that was crucial, but also its timing and whether it was in or out of sync with what used to be the normal weather patterns – which their crops are adapted to. One interviewee in Daikundi province referred to the problem of ‘untimely rain’ (bidun-e mowqa), ie rain falling at the wrong time. He could also have referred to ‘untimely warmth’ and ‘untimely cold’ as equally serious problems brought about by climate change.
Two fruit farmers from the same province, from Khadir and Kiti districts, both described how untimely warmth had affected their fruit trees, especially almonds. The dry early winter had been unseasonably warm (that is, such warmth was unseasonable prior to climate change). Sudden snow and rain had prompted the fruit trees to come into blossom early. Then, a cold snap devastated the blossom. As a result, they said there would be no crop of almonds or stone fruit, or only a very poor crop, this year. “The experience of the past few years,” one added, “has shown me that changes in the weather, and late rains are usually more harmful than beneficial. They also increase the likelihood and number of pests, which people don’t have the capacity to deal with.”
The farmers in Paktia and Laghman both also described the harm of rain that is too heavy. In spring 2023, such rainfall had caused flooding and damage to the crops. The interviewee in Laghman warned that rain in the third month of spring, Jawza (21 May-20 June), was also problematic; the earth cannot absorb the water, he said, and it can lead to floods. Indeed, it is generally difficult for the soil dried out by the multi-year drought, to hold and absorb water, especially if it rains heavily. With Afghanistan now likely to see more droughts, warmer springs and heavier spring rainfall, catastrophic run-off and more frequent flooding is forecast (an upcoming report will delve into this). The other major change affecting agriculture is snow melting too early and too quickly. That causes a sudden rush of meltwater when farmers need it to come gradually, so they can use it for irrigation across the growing season.
Storing water
Pressure on water resources is not only due to the climate crisis, but also changing water use. The development of turbo wells, whether powered by diesel or solar, has enabled farmers to draw water up from deeper levels than was previously possible and expand the area of cultivation – crops can now even be grown in the dasht (desert) if water can be drawn up from the deep aquifers. As a result, groundwater is being extracted at a rate greater than it is being re-supplied by precipitation or run-off, only adding to the risk of water shortages and crop failure.[9] Many of our interviewees mentioned the water that was ‘stored’ in the environment, whether in reservoirs, canals, or aquifers, or as it flowed in springs, streams and canals. Most said the recent rain and snow was not yet enough to end their worry over whether they could count on water being available in the coming months.
The farmer in Zurmat, for example, said he only has access to irrigation from the public karez and because water levels are low everyone only gets their turn every 12 days, which is not sufficient. People have mostly been using water from wells, deploying solar power, he said, but again, water levels are low in the wells as well.
If it had snowed at the beginning and during the winter, it would have been useful, as the water storage could get full. The snow and rain in the month of Hut is not that effective, but it’s still good. If it rains and snows for three months in winter, we can call that year a water year because the springs and ground water come alive with it. [In that case] there will be enough water in the wells and the water will be flowing during the month of Jawza and Saratan [21 May to 20 July] and people will be able to irrigate their lands. However, this year, there was snow only at the end of winter, and then it rained and the snow melted. The greater the quantity of snow on the mountains and on the ground and the longer it remains, the more useful it is.
Re-charging the streams and aquifers and the very soil itself after three years of drought will take prolonged precipitation, as the farmer from Jaghatu explained. Following the recent snow fall, he said the water in their small spring [saqawa] had increased, but so much more was needed.
If there’s wet, heavy snow [tarbarf] and it snows four or five times during the winter and each time it is more than 50 cm, that’s good and we’ll have enough water. However, because there’s been drought for several years and the land is completely dry, it has to snow a lot and for the entire winter for us to say the drought has ended.
Looking to the past… and to the future
Every farmer we spoke to had stories of just how different the weather was not so long ago. The farmer in Kunduz, who is 50 years old, said that when he was a child, it had snowed a great deal in Dasht-e Archi and the canal behind his home had frozen in winter, so hard that the cows could cross it. “My family returned from Pakistan around 15 years ago,” he said, “and I haven’t seen the canal frozen since.” The farmer in Laghman, now in his early 40s, also recalled colder and wetter winters in his childhood, which meant that “every valley in Laghman flowed with water. In recent years, that’s much reduced. The water level in the wells used to be three metres and you could easily get water out, but now they’re down to 25 metres.” The interviewee in Paktia also recalled:
When I was a child, there was so much snow that even the street to the mosque was blocked and the people in the neighbourhood would gather to clear it and open up the way. We used to get at least one metre of snow, but now, it’s not more than a span [a hand’s width). We’d take water from our well with a jar: you could just put the jar in the water and get it out. Now the level is down to 50 metres. Winters used to be very cold. Now, they’re warm.
The farmer in Ghazni remembered how, during his childhood, it would start snowing at the end of autumn.
It snowed through the entire winter and we could have snow even during the first full month of spring. There was more than enough water, but now climate change has had its effect and there has been severe drought. As a result, we can’t keep a lot of animals and we can’t grow enough.
Those days of regular plentiful rain and snow in most years falling at the right time, are gone. Yet, how to respond, said one interviewee from Daikundi, is complicated by the fact that the crisis facing Afghan agriculture and the rural economy goes wider and deeper than ‘just’ climate change. There are now more people to feed, he said, and at the same time, natural resources are damaged, diminished or lost. He spoke about the loss of vegetation, soil and upland forests and the lack of a plan to restore them. He described how the loss of ground cover meant that when it does rain, or the snow melts, water now runs off the hills and is not absorbed by the soil. Avalanches and spring floods have destroyed cultivated land, orchards and water resources. At the same time, the people lack water storage in the foothills and around the sources of springs. And all of this, he said, is the backdrop to a growing population and expanding villages:
A patch of land on which a hundred man [450 kilogrammes] of grain could be grown, fifty years ago, would support one family. Now, that same patch of land is expected to support at least five and even up to ten families. Agricultural land can no longer, in no way, answer the food needs of the local people.
While Afghans can do nothing about the changing climate – Afghanistan is one of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gasses – there are ways to minimise the ill-effects. Better water management is urgent, to ensure what water there is goes further and that flooding and loss of soil in run-off is minimised. Measures include harvesting water in reservoirs, ponds, diversion dams and check dams,[10] changing irrigation methods, growing cover crops to reduce transpiration and ensuring there is vegetation cover, including trees, planted at the higher altitudes to reduce and slow down run-off.
There should be international help for this: the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement recognised that countries like Afghanistan are suffering out of all proportion to the contribution they have made to damaging the planet’s atmosphere and climate. Yet, as AAN guest author Assem Mayar reported in 2022, Afghanistan is largely blocked from accessing global funds dedicated to helping poor countries mitigate the effects of climate change because their government, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is not recognised.
Hopes and worries for the next few months
In the short-term, the outlook this spring is better than it has been for the last few years. The deficit in cumulative precipitation from October 2023 through to the end of February, of 60 per cent below-average and 70 per cent below-average in the driest areas, as reported by FEWS NET, is now reducing because of the recent snow and rain. If there is average precipitation from March to May, FEWS NET said, the cumulative deficit will be further reduced and there will be enough moisture to support the all-important spring wheat crop.
However, FEWS NET also has a warning: the snowpack, which is the mass of lying snow that is compressed and hardened by its own weight, whose melting is so important for providing irrigation water to many communities, will likely be below-average. “Near-record low snow-water volumes,” it said, “have been recorded through much of the winter.” It said the snowpack needs to develop in March and April to ensure “water availability in the summer for downstream areas where irrigated crops are cultivated.” However, high temperatures are forecast for April and May 2024, which would result in early snow melt and high evapotranspiration rates and, potentially then, causing stress to both pasture and rainfed crops because of the lack of moisture in the soil.
FEWS NET also had other forecasts about harvests and livestock. This year, it still expects national wheat production and second-season crop production to be below-average, although vegetable and cotton production could be near-average. It also expects the condition of pastures to be near-average, although with a later decline in the warmer areas, and the bodily condition of livestock and production of milk to be below-average.[11] All of this means that even after the recent relief of rain and snow, the outlook for farmers and herders remains precarious.
Farmers everywhere are always acutely aware of the weather and the climate and pondering what to do for the best. That anxiety has been exacerbated by the chaos to weather patterns brought about by the climate crisis. In Afghanistan, where so many live on the breadline, the worry is especially acute. Watching the skies and hoping, they contemplate various futures this year, as one of our interviewees in Daikundi concluded:
If the spring rains continue to fall regularly, rain-fed crops and the grass and mountain plants will improve and thrive. The pastures and fields in our region will be green. But if the spring rains stop, pests will thrive and the harvest will be insignificant.
The recent rain and snowfall have turned despair into hope, but still, the fear lingers.
Edited by Martine van Bijlert
References
References
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Scientists have different categories of droughts. Meteorological drought occurs when there is a prolonged period with less than average precipitation. Hydrological drought occurs when water reserves fall short in aquifers, lakes and reservoirs, run-off and stream-flow. In Afghanistan, drought usually refers to agricultural drought, when crops or pasture becomes stressed because of lack of moisture. That is often due to a meteorological drought, but could also be due to evaporation and low soil moisture.
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This is from the latest World Bank GDP figures, from 2022.
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FEWS NET reports that irrigated wheat typically makes up around 85 to 90 per cent of Afghanistan’s national wheat production, with rainfed wheat contributing around 10 to 15 per cent.
Modelling of what would happen to Afghanistan’s climate was carried out by WFP, UNEP and NEPA in 2015 and quoted in this 2022 report by AAN guest author, Assem Mayar The projections used what they called a ‘moderate’ scenario, which would see greenhouse gas emission peaking in 2040 and included:
Temperatures in Afghanistan would increase by more than the global average and there would be further melting of glaciers and snow cover, a shift in precipitation from snow to rainfall and a rise in demand for water for crops, with plants possibly requiring extra irrigation.
There would be an increase in drought and flood risks. Local droughts would become the norm by 2030, while floods would be a secondary risk.
Snowfall would diminish in the central highlands, potentially leading to reduced spring and summer flows in the Helmand, Harirud-Murghab and Northern River basins, while spring rainfall would decrease across most of the country.
In the northeast and small pockets of the south and west, along the border with Iran, there might be a five per cent or more increase in ‘heavy precipitation events’ that can lead to flash floods. However, these potentially devastating events might actually decrease across most of the south and other parts of the north.
In the medium-term, the frequency of snowmelt-related floods in spring might increase simply due to accelerated melting associated with higher spring temperatures.
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This report hears from those growing crops, who, typically, also have some livestock. The multi-year drought has also devastated livestock and the livelihoods of herders in Afghanistan. FEWS NET reported:
As a result of the early depletion of pasture and grazing areas last year and below-average straw availability following below-average domestic production, fodder availability for livestock in January and February, the peak of the lean season, is at below normal levels, which is negatively impacting livestock body conditions. Overall, herd sizes remain at below-normal levels as households are still recovering their herd sizes following the drought, but herd sizes are near average levels in the eastern, northeastern, and some parts of the southeast that were not impacted by the drought. According to field reports, the livestock sector has been significantly impacted by the drought in northern (Samangan, Faryab, and Jawzjan) provinces due to a lack of fodder and insufficient drinking water during the winter and the peak of the lean season, resulting in poor body condition and productivity.
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FEWS NET wrote that despite the multi-year drought and dry soil, some farmers did sow winter wheat, “expecting better precipitation due to the ongoing El Niño. By late January, irrigated crops sown in October were stressed due to a lack of available water for irrigation, low rainfall, and poor soil moisture.” There was also early germination in some lower-altitude areas because of above-average temperatures from October 2023 to January 2024, “leading to a need for moisture earlier than normal during the agricultural season.” Better precipitation at the end of the winter, it said, was “supporting the recovery of previously stressed crops.”
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A karez is formed from a series of well-like vertical shafts, connected by sloping tunnels, which tap into subterranean water to efficiently delivers large quantities of water to the surface by gravity, without need for pumping. More on this UNESCO website on how karez “allow water to be transported over long distances in hot dry climates without loss of much of the water to evaporation.”
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Similar problems are seen in the cities, where a growing population and mismanagement of water supplies has drained aquifers to deeper and deeper levels, meaning the wealthier may be able to dig ever deeper wells, but not the poorest.
The spring rainfed wheat harvest is expected to be lower than normal due to the drier start of the wet season, a reduction in planted area for rainfed wheat production, low snowpack development that will be important for water for irrigation during the dry season, and high temperatures. However, irrigated wheat production is likely to be average.
National wheat production is expected to be below average due to the cumulative impact of three years of drought and the poor start to the October to May precipitation season that negatively impacted winter wheat planting.
Vegetable production in eastern, southern, and central parts of the country is expected to be near average, with the harvest likely in April and May. Cotton production in southern Afghanistan is expected to be near average as it was not significantly impacted by the drier start of the wet season and is supported by groundwater. Second-season crop and horticulture production is anticipated to be below average due to limited water access for irrigation, high temperatures, and lower-than-normal water availability in the main water basins.
Pasture is expected to regenerate to at least average levels with the average March to May spring rains and remain at those levels through at least May. From May to September, pasture conditions in lower elevation areas of the country will decline and be below average due to high temperatures, leading to high evapotranspiration rates.
Livestock body conditions are anticipated to be below average from February to April due to lower-than-normal fodder availability and lack of grazing areas, specifically in northern, central, and western parts of the county. However, livestock body conditions will improve seasonally through September due to improved access to fodder and grazing areas following the anticipated average March to May spring rains.
Livestock milk production is expected to be below average nationally due to poor conception rates over the past three years. However, livestock milk production is expected to be better than last year as regenerating pastures during the March to May rains support livestock access to food.
Livestock prices are expected to be lower than the five-year average through most of the scenario period due to below-average body conditions, lower-than-normal demand, and below-average pasture conditions.
REVISIONS:
This article was last updated on 27 Mar 2024
Finally, Rain and Snow in Afghanistan: Will it be enough to avert another year of drought?
This past week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held hearings on the Biden administration’s controversial withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Retired Gens. Mark A. Milley and Kenneth McKenzie, who both served in leadership roles under President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, testified and faced questions from congressional leaders from both parties. In explaining Washington’s failures in Afghanistan, Milley told Congress that the U.S. “could not forge a nation.” He has previously stated that the U.S. had “lost the war.”
The hearings are not related to Congress’ bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission, which is investigating the entire 20-year period of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and whose report will be released later. Rather, they are an effort by congressional Republicans to draw negative attention to the Biden administration’s foreign policy in the runup to the November presidential election. As such, the hearings have become a renewed focal point for political narratives about blame. But they also create an opportunity to consider counterfactual hypothetical scenarios that could expand our understanding of the U.S failure in Afghanistan.
For many Democrats as well as Republicans, the mishandling of the withdrawal is seen as a moral blight on the U.S., which having first broken Afghanistan then walked away. Even for the majority of U.S. citizens who believed leaving was the right thing to do, the chaotic nature of the withdrawal itself and the failure to adequately protect Washington’s Afghan allies during and after the withdrawal have caused concern. A separate U.S. State Department report from 2022 traced the roots of the botched evacuation to the policies of both the Biden and Trump administrations.
Many criticisms from both sides of the aisle are well-founded, regardless of which of the two men battling for the White House this year are perceived to bear the greatest blame. When the U.S. announced its departure in 2021, it caused a swift collapse in the morale of the Afghan army, allowing the Taliban to sweep across the country. Since their takeover, repression is severe, food insecurity is rife, and women and girls face ongoing and worsening gender apartheid. The problems have been compounded by the Biden administration’s continued freeze of Afghanistan’s national reserves as well as crippling sanctions that have thrown the population into greater poverty. Amid these dynamics, al-Qaida has a resurgent presence in the country, as does the Islamic State, whose Afghanistan-based offshoot—the Islamic State-Khorasan, or IS-K—was responsible for the attack in Moscow that killed at least 137 people Friday.
But the deeper blame here with regard to the U.S. failure to improve the lives of Afghans and secure the region against terrorism can’t reasonably be pinned on either Trump or Biden. That’s because the problem wasn’t the failure to build a nation, win a war, stay longer or leave sooner, but rather the fact that the U.S. was never the right actor to create or oversee a sustainable peace once the immediate conflict with the Taliban ended in 2002. The decision to remain in the country fighting a counterinsurgency, rather than step back and allow the United Nations to take over, was taken by neither Trump nor Biden, but by then-President George W. Bush soon after 9/11. This meant Trump and Biden both inherited a lengthy “war” in Afghanistan that could have and should have been a multinational peace operation almost from the start.
Milley is right: The U.S. military is not good at nation-building, defined by political scientist James L. Payne as “the use of ground troops to support a deliberate effort to establish democracy.” But nor are most other invading countries good at it, which is why, Payne argues, “nation-building” conducted by the invader that topples the previous regime so often fails. In fact, political science research shows that international involvement on the side of a government to fight insurgencies, which frequently occurs once a regime is toppled, usually lengthens, broadens and complexifies the very civil wars that are often the impetus for such interventions.
But this doesn’t mean that international support to rebuild a society after toppling a repressive government is itself a bad idea or that the U.S. couldn’t have made it happen. In fact, there is a different paradigm for post-conflict societal reconstruction that actually has an excellent track record: peace-building under U.N. auspices. Such missions take as their starting point U.N. involvement as a neutral actor that does not back either side of a conflict but rather supports peace. According to research by the Rand Corporation, compared to the U.S. or other invading countries, this recipe more often than not actually works.
The problem in Afghanistan wasn’t the U.S. failure to build a nation or win a war, but the fact that the U.S. was never the right actor to create or oversee a sustainable peace once the conflict with the Taliban ended in 2002.
U.N. personnel can help create peace by solving credible commitment problems, and they can help keep peace by providing inducements, persuasion and, if needed, coercive measures to enforce agreements. Beyond simple peacekeeping, democratic, rights-based institutions are also generally part of the peace-building recipe, but under U.N. auspices they use home-grown, culturally appropriate models rather than those imposed by specific Western powers. And the use of armed force in such missions is generally limited to that required to protect civilians from armed groups or the government. These strategies, when conducted by the U.N. rather than invading foreigners, have been shown to be extraordinarily effective across numerous U.N. missions using various indicators of success. This is a completely different paradigm from the counterinsurgency approach adopted by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Despite the current narrative of failure, the U.S. actually won the initial Afghanistan war, routing the Taliban quickly in late 2001 and early 2002 with help from a coalition of nonaligned Afghan tribes, the Northern Alliance. But then the U.S. threw itself behind the Western-styled, U.S.-funded Afghan national government while continuing to hunt terrorists in violation of U.N. human rights standards and conducting low-intensity “warfare” against the Taliban, which by then had become an insurgency. In so doing, the U.S. became a party to an ongoing civil war it couldn’t ever win and created a perception by the Afghan people that their national government was being propped up by the West. Under these circumstances, it was no surprise that the national government fell when the U.S. withdrew.
Imagine, however, a counterfactual history where the U.S. removed the Taliban but then immediately pivoted to supporting a truly multinational U.N. peacekeeping and peacebuilding force comprising not just Western troops but troops from the Global South—as was actually requested by the Taliban at the time, and again in 2009. In this scenario, the U.S. would have allowed the U.N. to negotiate an inclusive power-sharing agreement between the Taliban and a new Afghan national government when the Taliban was on the back foot, with Washington rallying funding and troop contributions from other U.N. members. The resulting large, inclusive, mostly non-Western U.N. peacekeeping mission would have overseen reconstruction in culturally sensitive ways consistent with both Afghan cultural normsand international human rights standards, and based on the will of the Afghan people. The U.S. would have leveraged the unprecedented international sympathy it enjoyed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to rally support from moderate Muslim-majority countries and Islamic scholars to conduct international trials of captured terrorists. The venue for those trials would have been a U.N. Security Council-initiated special ad hoc tribunal using processes the U.N. had mastered in trying crimes against humanity in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
In that scenario, many problems could still have arisen. But the U.S. military would never have been stuck in a quagmire unsuited to its training and job description; Afghanistan’s rural countryside would not have been ravaged by drone warfare for two decades, throwing sympathy back to the Taliban; the U.S. government would not have besmirched its own reputation in the Muslim world through extrajudicial executions and detainee-abuse scandals, providing recruitment material to the likes of ISIS; and the Afghan army would have been less dependent on U.S. backing from the start.
The events of August 2021 were made inevitable not just by the Biden administration’s hurried evacuation or even by the Trump administration’s sidelining of the Afghan national government in its 2020 negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, but also by the 20 years of counterinsurgency that preceded the withdrawal. Rather than allowing the U.N. to broker, enforce and build on a sustainable peace, the U.S. sided with one belligerent in what became an ongoing civil war. By the time Biden took office, as described in the White House’s own 2023 report on the evacuation, he felt his hands had been tied.
This is not to say Trump and Biden did not make meaningful choices. Trump could have avoided throwing the national government under the bus. Biden could have reversed Trump’s timetable, begun the evacuation sooner or extended it over a longer period. And his administration could still do much more to streamline red tape for Afghans and assist many more to reach the United States.
But if the overall U.S. record in Afghanistan was a failure, it wasn’t a failure to “win a war” or “forge a nation,” but rather to build a postwar peace starting in 2002. That failure of imagination was inherited by both of the presidents being blamed in these congressional hearings now. By expanding their imagination now, analysts and U.S. citizens can draw smarter lessons for future interventions.
Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter.
The U.S. Failure in Afghanistan Was Not the Withdrawal
Why Countries Get External Security From Washington—and Internal Security From Beijing
On a visit to Budapest in late February, China’s minister of public security, Wang Xiaohong, secured a face-to-face meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to establish a new bilateral security arrangement. China and Hungary agreed to cooperate on law enforcement, policing, and counterterrorism, putting security ties at the center of their relationship.
In many ways, it was a puzzling agreement, since Hungary is already a member of a security alliance—NATO—that protects it from armed attack. But Budapest’s pursuit of security relationships with both Beijing and Washington is a notable example of a global trend. Overlapping security relationships are increasingly common. Countries as diverse as Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam are courting Chinese and U.S. security cooperation at the same time.
This phenomenon has a simple explanation: Beijing and Washington are offering different products, reflecting their distinctive concepts of security and the types of support each is best suited to provide. The United States shores up external security, protecting its partners militarily against regional threats. China, meanwhile, provides internal security, giving governments the tools to combat social disorder and political opposition.
Even though their engagement takes different forms, the United States and China are both using security relationships to compete for influence, intensifying the U.S.-Chinese rivalry and increasing the risk of miscalculation. Through the types of support they provide to third countries, Washington and Beijing also impart their own ideas about the appropriate role of security in a society. U.S. policymakers must learn to manage this new competition—and use U.S. security partnerships to advance forms of security that do not impinge on democracy or human rights.
INTERNAL VS. EXTERNAL SECURITY
It may seem risky for a country to pursue security cooperation with two great powers that are directly competing with each other. If the country already receives reliable security assistance from one great power, exploring a partnership with the other could throw the existing relationship into jeopardy. Yet many countries are appealing to both the United States and China, rather than choosing just one. And so far, Washington and Beijing are allowing it.
Countries have been able to pursue these dual relationships because they are often not in direct competition. The United States’ primary offering is regional security: it defends allies and partners against threatening neighbors, provides extended nuclear deterrence, and combats transnational terrorist groups, leaning heavily on U.S. advantages in high-end military capabilities. Washington has built up a network of allies with mutual defense treaties and other bilateral security partnerships to address challenges to peace and stability, including threats posed by China and North Korea in East Asia, Iran in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe.
The Department of Defense usually leads U.S. international security efforts. It establishes partnerships with other countries’ defense ministries and armed forces, and uses these relationships to project U.S. military power in priority regions. Where law enforcement and intelligence cooperation factor into U.S. security partnerships, the focus is still on external threats, such as transnational terrorist organizations or drug cartels.
Many countries are appealing to both the United States and China, rather than choosing just one.
China, meanwhile, offers foreign governments domestic and regime security. Through cooperation on law enforcement and public security measures such as digital surveillance, police training, and riot management, Beijing helps its partners maintain control at home. China is not trying to replicate the United States’ network of military alliances; in the Middle East, for instance, Beijing has largely deferred to Washington’s position as a regional security leader. In its recent outreach to Hungary, too, China is not positioning itself as a substitute for U.S. military power in Europe. Instead, China’s domestic security agencies have established their own channels of bilateral cooperation focused on internal stability and political control.
There is some overlap in U.S. and Chinese security cooperation with foreign partners. Beijing does engage in traditional military outreach, selling arms to and participating in joint military exercises and training with countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Iran, Myanmar, and Russia. Like the United States, China conducts regular naval diplomacy to signal its military presence and capabilities. Some countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, have received substantial military aid from both Beijing and Washington. China and the United States also both devote considerable attention to helping partner militaries develop their capacity for disaster relief and humanitarian assistance operations.
But this overlap is a small piece of a larger picture in which the United States and China operate under starkly different security paradigms. Washington and Beijing have both articulated expansive national security objectives driven in part by their perception of the other as a threat, but each country puts forward its own ideas about what security is and how to achieve it.
The United States is focused on regional security, developing and deploying military power to help its partners balance against, deter, and combat external threats such as Russian aggression in Ukraine and Pyongyang’s advancing nuclear and conventional military capabilities on the Korean Peninsula. The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy emphasizes the importance of “America’s unmatched network of alliances and partnerships” and the role of its armed forces in “backstopping diplomacy, confronting aggression, deterring conflict, projecting strength, and protecting the American people and their economic interests.” It is less focused on domestic security issues, such as threats to public safety from violent crime, and—unlike U.S. strategy during the Cold War—does not promote aid to repressive internal security forces that might keep “friendly” dictators in power.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s concept of national security, however, is based on “political security”—the protection of China’s socialist system, Chinese Communist Party leadership, and Xi himself. For Xi, security requires what he has called a “comprehensive” approach that gives priority to internal threats and the security of the regime. The international dimension, which dominates U.S. national security thinking, in China serves only as “a support” for what is primarily a domestic project, according to Xi’s report to the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Party Congress in 2022. Both at home and abroad, China relies much more heavily than the United States does on its law enforcement, paramilitary, and secret police agencies to carry out security policy. And Beijing is increasingly ready and willing to work with partners who voice similar regime security demands.
TWO PATRONS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
Astute middle and small powers can take advantage of this uneven U.S.-Chinese security competition. As long as both great powers provide security goods without demanding an exclusive arrangement, third countries can reap the benefits.
Hungary is an illustrative case. Its China policy has long diverged from those of its European partners; Hungary was the first EU participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. By obstructing European aid to Ukraine and delaying Sweden’s NATO accession in tacit support of Russian objectives, Hungary has shown it is willing to play major powers off one another in order to extract concessions.
So far, Budapest has managed to maintain this balance. As a NATO ally, Hungary enjoys the external security provided by the United States. But as Orban’s government works to undermine Hungary’s democratic institutions, Budapest also benefits from a domestic security partnership with Beijing that will soon see Chinese police patrols on Hungarian streets.
It is telling that Beijing sent its domestic police chief to Budapest, not the defense or foreign minister, to discuss security cooperation. In a meeting with Wang, the Chinese public security minister, Hungary’s interior minister, Sandor Pinter, echoed Chinese official rhetoric by emphasizing “the guarantee of security and stability” as a prerequisite for good relations. At least in part, this reflects Orban’s concern that Hungary’s engagement with the United States empowers a liberal opposition that could challenge his regime. Although Budapest’s partnerships with Beijing and Washington overlap on certain issues, such as counterterrorism, Hungary generally has different reasons for maintaining each relationship and different expectations of what each security patron will provide.
Orban may be more brazen than most world leaders in flaunting Hungary’s dual security ties, but his is hardly the only country that is drawing attention and resources from both China and the United States. Vietnam is, too. Last September, while U.S. President Joe Biden was in Hanoi, the United States and Vietnam announced that they would upgrade their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that includes close collaboration between U.S. and Vietnamese defense institutions.
Hanoi and Washington have been steadily stepping up their security cooperation over the past decade in direct response to the security threat that China poses in Vietnam’s neighborhood. Driven by Vietnam’s disputes with China over territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea, U.S.-Vietnamese defense cooperation has developed most robustly in the maritime domain. Vietnam has become a frequent port of call in recent years for U.S. aircraft carriers operating in the region.
Three months after Biden’s visit to Hanoi, it was Xi’s turn. In December, Xi made his way to the Vietnamese capital to reinforce Beijing’s own comprehensive strategic partnership with Hanoi. This time, however, the conversation focused on bolstering communist rule in both countries. Xi declared that, together, Beijing and Hanoi would “spare no effort to prevent, defuse, and contain all kinds of political and security risks,” referring not only to national security threats but also to threats to the two countries’ Communist Parties and leadership.
To address these risks, Beijing pledged to assist Hanoi with practical internal security measures, including intelligence sharing by China’s Ministry of State Security and enhanced police cooperation. The two countries agreed to joint efforts to prevent domestic instability, separatism, and “color revolution”—a term that evokes China and Vietnam’s mutual fear of foreign interference and opposition activity that could topple the ruling party and bring about democratization. In a way, Vietnam’s two security partnerships are set up to balance each other: Hanoi seeks U.S. assistance to counter an external security threat from China, and it seeks Chinese assistance to counter a threat to regime security it attributes, at least in part, to U.S. efforts to promote democracy.
Other countries also see upsides in receiving security assistance from two competing powers. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has courted Chinese support for its internal security organs, sometimes at the expense of U.S. military assistance. Djibouti has agreed to host bases for both the U.S. and Chinese militaries. Singapore has positioned itself as a security partner and valued intermediary for Washington and Beijing. Papua New Guinea recently signed security agreements with the United States and Australia but is nonetheless considering additional assistance from Beijing. The types of support each country gets from China and the United States vary, allowing them to pick and choose among great-power security offerings and settle on those that best suit their perceptions of the threats they face.
THE NEW SECURITY COMPETITION
The conventional wisdom is that countries do not want to choose between the United States and China because the United States provides security, China provides economic prosperity, and no country wants to give up one for the other. But there is no such clear tradeoff today. In the past several years, China has boosted its outreach to prospective security partners, and many foreign governments have accepted or are actively considering Beijing’s overtures, especially on matters of internal security. If these countries already have security relationships with the United States, they are usually not throwing out those commitments as they consolidate ties with China. Rather, their security relationships with Beijing and Washington are evolving in tandem as they address different concerns.
During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow provided both internal and external security assistance to their client states, and few if any countries maintained security relationships with both superpowers. In the Cold War’s later years, the United States cut back its (often unsuccessful) efforts to shore up regimes that were, in many cases, repressive dictatorships. Although Washington has not entirely withdrawn from providing internal security assistance in the decades since, it nonetheless left a gap that a rising China has gradually moved to fill.
Beijing portrays Washington’s current externally focused approach as inadequate for addressing the domestic and nontraditional security challenges that many countries face today. It offers alternative solutions under the banner of its Global Security Initiative as a way to make up for the shortfall.
In countries troubled by weak governance, Chinese security assistance may solve legitimate problems—improvements to public order and enforcement of the rule of law often benefit citizens as well as rulers. But that same aid can also enable repression and entrench nondemocratic rule. China’s police training programs, for example, might teach local law enforcement useful tactics, but they also disseminate an expansive view of political policing that can normalize and encourage repression. Similarly, a Chinese “safe city” project might contribute to urban crime control and public safety but can also provide tools to track dissidents and subdue political opposition.
As Washington and Beijing increasingly work with the same partners, their interests may clash.
Authoritarian leaders, in particular, tend to fear that U.S. regional security assistance comes with unwelcome side effects. In their view, a partnership with the United States can be a conduit for promoting human rights and political liberties, which could make their rule less secure. Leaders in countries such as Vietnam try to offset that threat by turning to China for assistance with domestic security and political control. For its part, Beijing empathizes with Hanoi’s regime security concerns and uses this opening to advance bilateral cooperation. Indirectly, U.S. defense cooperation with autocratic countries may encourage those countries to pursue deeper internal security cooperation with China and open new avenues for Chinese influence.
U.S. and Chinese security cooperation initiatives can interact in other ways that intensify rivalry between the two countries. Strategists who argue that economic interdependence between the United States and China will make their rivalry less conflictual than the Cold War are overlooking the fundamental difference between today’s overlapping security relationships and the security blocs of the twentieth century. As Washington and Beijing increasingly provide security goods to the same partners, their interests may clash at the local level.
This overlapping presence can raise the risk of miscalculation. U.S. defense officials may be confident in their relationship with interlocutors in Hanoi, for instance, because Vietnamese defense officials may genuinely prioritize a regional security strategy to counter China’s territorial encroachment in the South China Sea. But other parts of the government in Hanoi—such as the prime minister, whose background is in domestic intelligence and security—are working closely with Beijing to ensure the survival of Vietnam’s communist regime. Washington could, as a result, overestimate its leverage: when push comes to shove, Vietnamese leaders may not choose the partner that helps them protect remote islands over the one that helps them avoid being overthrown or killed by domestic opposition.
This uneven, uncertain, and potentially volatile mix of competition and complementarity in U.S. and Chinese security partnerships presents a challenge for American policymakers. Where countries are using Chinese national security concepts, tactics, and technologies to suppress human rights and tighten authoritarian control, Washington cannot and should not compete to advance the same goals.
Where Beijing is helping countries tackle legitimate security problems—such as high levels of violent crime—Washington should develop and offer alternative solutions that address these problems without enabling democratic erosion or increasing opportunities for repression. If these countries choose to continue receiving internal security assistance from China, as some probably will, the United States and its partners should work with them to establish safeguards, such as oversight bodies, to protect democracy and human rights.
First, however, the United States should do a country-by-country review to identify the countries that fall into each category. Each country will have its own set of security requirements, and each will require an individualized solution. Washington and its partners need a better understanding of how China’s security provisions meet individual countries’ demands before they can offer appropriate alternatives.
Ultimately, the United States must decide where and how to compete—and craft its partnerships in ways that both stabilize international security and protect democracy and human rights. Washington will need to get much more comfortable navigating these complex and overlapping security relationships, because this form of global competition is here to stay.
SHEENA CHESTNUT GREITENS is a Visiting Associate Professor at the U.S. Army War College’s China Landpower Studies Center, an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
ISAAC KARDON is a Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Afghanistan: Playing Both Sides of the U.S.-Chinese Rivalry
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
