I'm always struck by how much water changes a landscape. As you helo out over the dunes that surround Leatherneck you can look out at Helmandia's eye-stabbing beige forever when bam! - the color changes to a deep brown, then green, then a crazy quilt of farm plots and courtyards, houses, neatly walled-off fields, traffic on streets - nothing but a .50 cal gun perched in the patch of daylight to disrupt the bucolic tableau. Finally, a deep brown wash and the weedy, muddy Helmand passes through the lozenge, and you lay your eyes on what all the fuss is about.
It was here, in the Central Helmand River Valley, that the U.S. Agency for International Development got its start. It was the 1950s, and the USA was full of post-war (that's WWII for the kids) bluster and bromide. We'd had the Truman doctrine, defeated Communisim (except where we hadn't), the baby boom was in full swing, and golly, it was time to do development. An early target was, yes, Hemand.
One of its ur-foundational investments, the irrigation waterworks were supposed to be the bootstraps by which Afghans would pull themselves up to be modern, prosperous, educated - dammit, American. Rajiv Chandrasekaran has a great (if a bit ungenerous) piece in the Washington Post about development overreach and social engineering in the Helmand River Valley, building Lashkar Gah into a Yankee hamlet of tree-lined streets and sock hops. Much is made today of the hubris of the time, but it's really also almost charmingly naive - that if you just add water, and ta-da! - an ancient-plus-traditional society develops. No clue that thousands of years of nature had taught farmers to be suspicious of the new, that the greater the project the more things go wrong, or that prosperity itself would attract outsiders first to share in it - and by so to tip the millennial balance among the natives - and then to destroy any vestige of success because that success enabled a wholesale dominance of the successful over the ancient.
But that’s water over the dam. The newcomers came and set down roots. Helmandia has a leg up because it's already suffered its unintended consequences. Now folks in Nad Ali identify themselves first by their irrigation coordinates and then by tribe. Now the divisions are much more a matter of who has title to what land; who has rights to how much water. Now the conflicts are between these haves and the "desert people" - many of them fleeing conflict elsewhere (you gotta wonder how bad it must have been there if they come to Helmandia for relief) - who decide this or that patch of unoccupied land looks good to sink a well in and start growing poppy.
Maps of Helmania - political, population, vegetative, topographical - show a featureless plain with the foothills of the Hindu Kush in the north and a stripe running first north to south, then bending east to west. This is the Helmand River, which rises in mountainous Zamindawar, makes a brief stop at the Kajaki Dam, and flows south through Helmand, making a right turn at the "fishhook" to head across Nimroz before crossing the Iranian border and disappearing into the desert - one of the world's only rivers not to drain into some sea somewhere. CHRV is the lungs of the operation; Kajaki is its heart.
Next up: Kajaki.
It was here, in the Central Helmand River Valley, that the U.S. Agency for International Development got its start. It was the 1950s, and the USA was full of post-war (that's WWII for the kids) bluster and bromide. We'd had the Truman doctrine, defeated Communisim (except where we hadn't), the baby boom was in full swing, and golly, it was time to do development. An early target was, yes, Hemand.One of its ur-foundational investments, the irrigation waterworks were supposed to be the bootstraps by which Afghans would pull themselves up to be modern, prosperous, educated - dammit, American. Rajiv Chandrasekaran has a great (if a bit ungenerous) piece in the Washington Post about development overreach and social engineering in the Helmand River Valley, building Lashkar Gah into a Yankee hamlet of tree-lined streets and sock hops. Much is made today of the hubris of the time, but it's really also almost charmingly naive - that if you just add water, and ta-da! - an ancient-plus-traditional society develops. No clue that thousands of years of nature had taught farmers to be suspicious of the new, that the greater the project the more things go wrong, or that prosperity itself would attract outsiders first to share in it - and by so to tip the millennial balance among the natives - and then to destroy any vestige of success because that success enabled a wholesale dominance of the successful over the ancient.
But that’s water over the dam. The newcomers came and set down roots. Helmandia has a leg up because it's already suffered its unintended consequences. Now folks in Nad Ali identify themselves first by their irrigation coordinates and then by tribe. Now the divisions are much more a matter of who has title to what land; who has rights to how much water. Now the conflicts are between these haves and the "desert people" - many of them fleeing conflict elsewhere (you gotta wonder how bad it must have been there if they come to Helmandia for relief) - who decide this or that patch of unoccupied land looks good to sink a well in and start growing poppy.Maps of Helmania - political, population, vegetative, topographical - show a featureless plain with the foothills of the Hindu Kush in the north and a stripe running first north to south, then bending east to west. This is the Helmand River, which rises in mountainous Zamindawar, makes a brief stop at the Kajaki Dam, and flows south through Helmand, making a right turn at the "fishhook" to head across Nimroz before crossing the Iranian border and disappearing into the desert - one of the world's only rivers not to drain into some sea somewhere. CHRV is the lungs of the operation; Kajaki is its heart.
Next up: Kajaki.
This is what I'm talking about. The personalized sense of in-the-moment observation and reflection that puts me with you in someplace I've never experienced. It sounds like Calexico. And I don't know why you're being so chintzy but can't you slap a few more photos on here? The head silhouette in the drop ramp, Crikey! Pardon my Australian.
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