Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State

Abstract

In May 1960, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee left Kandahar and drove ninety miles on freshly paved roads to Lashkar Gah, a modern planned city known locally as the New York of Afghanistan. At the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers, close against the ancient ruins of Qala Bist, Lashkar Gah's eight thousand residents lived in suburban-style tract homes surrounded by broad lawns. The city boasted an alabaster mosque, one of the country's best hospitals, Afghanistan's only coeducational high school, and the headquarters of the Helmand Valley Authority, a multipurpose dam project funded by the United States. This unexpected proliferation of modernity led Toynbee to reflect on the warning of Sophocles: “the craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams.” In the area around Kandahar, traditional Afghanistan had vanished. “The domain of the Helmand Valley Authority,” he reported, “has become a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. … The new world they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River's expense is to be an America-in-Asia.”1