The article as it appeared in the print journal (2.27 MB; PDF format): <http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ejah/teaching/archive/2002_09/article.pdf>
...A TVA for the Hindu Kush
...A dam-building project would vastly expand and intensify the authority that could be exercised by the central government at Kabul. Remaking and regulating the physical environment of an entire region would, for the first time, translate Afghanistan into the legible inventories of material and human resources in the manner of modern states. In 1946, using its karakul revenue, the Afghan government hired the largest American heavy engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen, Inc., of Boise, Idaho, to build a dam. Morrison Knudsen, builder of the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and later the launch complex at Cape Canaveral, specialized in symbols of the future. The firm operated all over the world, boring tunnels through the Andes in Peru, laying airfields in Turkey. Its engineers, who called themselves Emkayans, would be drawing up specifications for a complex of dams in the gorges of the Yangtze River in 1949 when Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army drove them out.28 The firm set up shop in an old Moghul palace outside Kandahar and began surveying the Helmand Valley.
The Helmand and Arghandab rivers constitute Afghanistan's largest river system, draining a watershed covering half the country. Originating in the Hindu Kush a few miles from Kabul, the Helmand travels through upland dells thick with orchards and vineyards before merging with the Arghandab twenty-five miles from Kandahar, turning west across the arid plain of Registan and emptying into the Sistan marshes of Iran. The valley was reputedly the site of a vast irrigation works destroyed by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. The entire area is dry, catching two to three inches of rain a year. Consequently, river flows fluctuate unpredictably within a wide range, varying from 2,000 to 60,000 cubic feet per second.29 Before beginning, Morrison Knudsen had to create an infrastructure of roads and bridges to allow the movement of equipment. Typically, they would also conduct extensive studies on soils and drainage, but the company and the Afghan government convinced themselves that in this case it was not necessary, that "even a 20 percent margin of error . . . could not detract from the project's intrinsic value."30
The promise of dams is that they are a renewable resource, furnishing power and water indefinitely and with little effort once the project is complete, but dam projects are subject to ecological constraints that are often more severe outside of the temperate zone. Siltation, which now threatens many New Deal-era dams, advances more quickly in arid and tropical climates. Canal irrigation involves a special set of hazards. Arundhati Roy, the voice of India's antidam movement, explains that "perennial irrigation does to soil roughly what anabolic steroids do to the human body," stimulating ordinary earth to produce multiple crops in the first years while slowly rendering the soil infertile.31 Large reservoirs raise the water table in the surrounding area, a problem worsened by extensive irrigation. Waterlogging itself can destroy harvests, but it produces more permanent damage, too. In waterlogged soils, capillary action pulls soluble salts and alkalies to the surface, leading to desertification. Early reports warned that the Helmand Valley was vulnerable, that it had gravelly subsoils and salt deposits. The Emkayans knew Middle Eastern rivers were often unsuited to extensive irrigation schemes. But these apprehensions' "impact was minimized by one or both parties."32 From the start, the Helmand project was primarily about national prestige and only secondarily about the social benefits of increasing agricultural productivity.
Signs of trouble appeared almost immediately. Even when only half completed, the first dam, a small diversion dam at the mouth of the Boghra canal, raised the water table to within a few inches of the surface of the ground. A snowy crust of salt could be seen in areas around the reservoir. In 1949, the engineers and the government faced a decision. Tearing down the dam would have resulted in a loss of face for the monarchy and Morrison Knudsen, but from an engineering standpoint the project could no longer be justified. The necessary reconsideration never took place, however, because it was at this moment that the unlucky Boghra works was enfolded into the global project of development.
Truman's Point IV address reconfigured the relationship between the United States and newly independent nations. The confrontation between colonizer and colonized, rich and poor, was with a rhetorical gesture replaced by a world order in which all nations were either developed or developing. The president explicitly linked development to American strategic and economic objectives. Poverty was a threat not just to the poor but to their richer neighbors, he argued, and alleviating misery would assure a general prosperity, lessening the chances of war.33 But the "triumphant action" of development superseded the merely ideological conflict of the Cold War: Communism and capitalism were competing carriers bound for the same destination. Development justified interventions on a grand scale and made obedience to foreign technicians the duty of every responsible government. Afghanistan -- solvent, untouched by the recent war, and able to hire technicians when it needed them -- suddenly became "underdeveloped" and, owing to its position bordering the Soviet Union, the likely recipient of substantial assistance. Point IV's technical aid could take many forms - -clinics, schools, new livestock breeds, assays for minerals and petroleum -- but the uncompleted Boghra works was an invitation to something grander, a reproduction of an American developmental triumph.
When Truman thought of aid, he thought of dams, specifically of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the complex of dams on the Tennessee River that transformed the economy of the upper South. "A TVA in the Yangtze Valley and the Danube," he proposed to the TVA's director, David Lilienthal; "These things can be done and don't let anybody tell you different. When they happen, when millions and millions of people are no longer hungry and pushed and harassed, then the causes of war will be less by that much." Truman's internationalization of the TVA repositioned the New Deal for a McCarthyite age. Dams were the American alternative to Communist land reform, Arthur M. Schlesinger argued in The Vital Center. Instead of a "crude redistribution" of land, American engineers could create "wonderlands of vegetation and power" from the desert. The TVA was "a weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for the support of the peoples of Asia."34
The TVA had totemic significance for American liberals, but in the diplomatic setting it had the additional function of redefining political conflict as a technical problem. Britain's solution to Afghanistan's tribal wars had been to script feuds of blood, honor, and faith within the linear logic of boundary commissions, containing conflict within two-dimensional space. The United States set aside the maps and replotted tribal enmities on hydrologic charts. Resolution became a matter of apportioning cubic yards of water and kilowatt-hours of energy. Assurances of inevitable progress further displaced conflict into the future; if all sides could be convinced that resource flows would increase, problems would vanish, in bureaucratic parlance, downstream. Over the next two decades the United States would propose river authority schemes as solutions to the most intractable international conflicts: Palestine ("Water for Peace") and the Kashmir dispute. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson famously suggested a Mekong River Authority as an alternative to the Vietnam War.35
Afghanistan applied for and received a $12 million Export-Import Bank loan for the Helmand Valley in 1950, the first of over $80 million over the next fifteen years. Afghanistan's loan request contained a line for soil surveys, but the bank refused it as an unnecessary expense. Point IV supplied technical support.36 In 1952, the national government created the Helmand Valley Authority -- later the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) -- removing 1,800 square miles of river valley from local control and placing it under the jurisdiction of expert commissions in Kabul. The monarchy poured money into the project; a fifth of the central government's total expenditures went into HAVA in the 1950s and early 1960s. From 1946 on, the salaries of Morrison Knudsen's advisers and technicians absorbed an amount equivalent to Afghanistan's total exports. Without adequate mechanisms for tax collection, the royal treasury passed costs on to agricultural producers through inflation and the diversion of export revenue, offsetting any gains irrigation produced.37 Although it pulled in millions in international funding, HAVA soaked up the small reserves of individual farmers and may well have reduced the total national investment in agriculture....
Nick Cullather is associate professor of history at Indiana University....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ejah/teaching/archive/2002_09/>.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>