By Chris Rickleton
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
April 5, 2023

When the Taliban returned to power in 2021 in a lightning military insurrection that toppled Afghanistan’s internationally recognized government, the country immediately fell into diplomatic isolation.

Two of Kabul’s neighbors to the north, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, chose a different route, putting the hard-line group’s fractious history with the former Soviet Central Asian republics aside and prioritizing engagement over criticism and pressure.

But a giant canal project in Afghanistan now taking shape that the Taliban is pursuing at a rapid pace is giving the two water-stressed countries doubts about whether strategic patience with the Islamic fundamentalist group will yield rewards.

“If you look at other projects that have involved Afghanistan and Central Asia somehow, there has often been a win-win element,” Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh, told RFE/RL.

But the Qosh Tepa Irrigation Canal, which will divert large volumes of water from the dwindling transboundary Amu Darya River, is a very different case.

“This is very much zero sum, because water is a finite good and there don’t seem to be any benefits for Afghanistan’s neighbors here,” said Murtazashvili, adding that she expects the Central Asian countries to pursue “a lot of quiet diplomacy” on the project that will add to the pressures faced by outsized agricultural sectors already battling climate change and historical mismanagement.

But “the Taliban will be probing to see how far it can go,” Murtazashvili said, something she suggested its downstream neighbors will have to get used to.

“If the first Taliban [regime that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001] was weighed down by insurgency and in some ways never really behaved like a state, Taliban 2.0 seems to really like the idea of projecting state power,” Murtazashvili said.

Old Project With New Momentum

The stated dimensions of the irrigation canal that workers started digging last spring are enough to understand why the downstream countries have concerns.

With a length of 285 kilometers and a width of some 100 meters, experts believe it could draw a significant portion of the Amu Darya’s flow while irrigating 550,000 hectares of land.

An Afghan civil servant with knowledge of the project told RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service that work on the second of three stages of the project that began in the spring of 2022 is expected to begin in the coming months, with more than 100 kilometers already dug and visible from space.

The plan to irrigate land in northern Afghanistan is not new.

Farid Azim, an official at the National Development Company overseeing its construction, pointed out last year that Afghanistan’s first president, Mohammad Daud Khan, had a similar vision in the 1970s.

The project was most recently pursued by the U.S.-backed administration of President Ashraf Ghani — which the Taliban overthrew less than two years ago.

A press release issued by the United States Agency for International Development from 2018 marking the launch of a Washington-funded feasibility study for Qosh Tepa described a 200 kilometer-long canal serving a “cultivated catchment area of 500,000 hectares.”

“Developing Afghanistan’s agriculture sector provides great potential for employment and economic growth,” then-U.S. Ambassador John R. Bass said in the release.

But the project was not a pressing concern for neighbors, primarily because political infighting and chronic instability in northern Afghanistan had made it impractical.

Bismellah Alizada, a researcher at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told RFE/RL that warlord Rashid Dostum, who was the Afghan first vice president from 2014 to 2020, was among the influential politicians with concerns about the project.

One of those concerns was that it would be used to benefit and resettle members of the politically dominant Pashtun group to which President Ashraf Ghani belonged, Alizada said.

Dostum — an ethnic Uzbek — long enjoyed strong ties to the regime in Uzbekistan and was even reported to have fled there when the Taliban captured Mazar-e Sharif, overwhelming forces jointly under his command before the group advanced on Kabul.

Members of Dostum’s exiled Junbish-e Milli party have reiterated these concerns more recently, but the reality is that the Taliban has no opponents capable of preventing it from forging ahead with giant public works projects, Alizada said.

More obvious obstacles are technical capacity and cash, with billions of dollars in funds belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank frozen after the Taliban takeover. That would make it hard for the cash-strapped Taliban to finance a project whose first phase cost nearly $100 million, according to reports.

But Graeme Smith, a senior consultant for the International Crisis Group’s Asia Program, said the Taliban has a strong political will to finish off projects begun by the former government with Qosh Tepa the biggest that the group has revived so far.

“With their very limited resources, the Taliban have prioritized [Qosh Tepa],” said Smith, expressing skepticism that the Islamic fundamentalist group would pay attention to its neighbors’ concerns.

“The Taliban is a nationalist movement intensely focused on their domestic constituencies,” Smith said.

“I think it’s fair to assume they will continue governing with a strong focus on issues inside the country and less regard for concerns outside,” he told RFE/RL.

Games Of Leverage

Taciturn Turkmenistan has so far said nothing about the canal project.

But a Turkmenistan-based hydrologist speaking in March to RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service on condition of anonymity called the project “not a problem, but a disaster.”

RFE/RL correspondents in the closed authoritarian country reported this year about severe water shortages in Turkmenistan’s Soviet-built Karakum Canal, which is four times the length of the one the Taliban is seeking to complete.

The World Resources Institute in 2019 ranked Turkmenistan as one of 17 countries in the world with “extremely high” water stress. Uzbekistan and Afghanistan were placed in the next highest category. Central Asia as a whole depends on rivers that rise in mountains, where many glacier stocks are being depleted by climate change.

Tashkent, whose own Moscow-imposed, cotton-growing legacy is one of the chief causes of the Amu Darya’s demise, has been more proactive on Qosh Tepa.

According to the Taliban’s deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the topic was among those broached by Uzbek presidential envoy and former Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov when he was in Kabul last month for talks on economic cooperation.

Komilov was cited by Baradar’s office as saying that Uzbekistan was “ready to work with the Islamic emirate (the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan) through technical teams in order to maximize the benefits of the Qosh Tepa canal project.”

Uzbekistan provided no comment to that effect in its release on the talks, but President Shavkat Mirziyoev — in a national address in December — flagged Qosh Tepa as a concern as he touched on the problem of desertification.

“At the moment, we consider it necessary to conduct practical talks on the construction of a new canal in the Amu Darya basin with the interim government of neighboring Afghanistan and the international community based on international standards and taking into account the interests of all countries in the region,” he said.

“We believe that this approach will be supported by our neighbors.”

Mirziyoev’s preference for dialogue over threats on transboundary water use has been welcomed by the neighborhood since predecessor Islam Karimov passed away in 2016.

This appears to have worked with upstream Kyrgyzstan, where successful border negotiations saw Uzbekistan granted de facto control of a strategic reservoir located inside Kyrgyz territory, albeit not without a rash of political discontent in Kyrgyzstan.

And although authoritarian Karimov virulently opposed the construction of giant hydroelectric dams in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Mirziyoev has given both his blessing, with Tashkent even attaching itself to Kyrgyzstan’s Kambar-Ata-1 project as a partner — a move that will give it a hand in upstream management.

Qosh Tepa, however, is becoming a source of public anxiety in Uzbekistan.

“With the volume of the Amu Darya water [already] decreasing, Afghans will take a quarter of its water through this canal,” complained Uzbek academic and outspoken government critic Khidirnazar Allakulov in an interview with RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service.

“Instead of solving the problem, the Uzbek government takes the Taliban to Samarkand, dressing them and presenting them with gifts. The government bows to Afghanistan….. Not only the current generation, but also future [Uzbek] generations can be endangered by the water problem,” Allakulov said.

Regular exchanges between the Turkmen and Uzbek governments and the Taliban predated the fall of the Ghani government, and Turkmenistan was among the first countries in the world to accept a Taliban-appointed ambassador.

But in line with the international community as a whole, neither has recognized the new regime in Kabul.

This only complicates what Alizada calls the “legal lacuna” between Afghanistan and its former communist neighbors, since Kabul had not previously signed treaties with them on transboundary management.

And while Afghanistan is keen for more trade opportunities and relies on its northern neighbors for supplies of electricity for several provinces, there are other areas of these bilateral relations where the Taliban feels it has real leverage, Alizada argued.

“For the Central Asian countries, I think the number one concern is hard security, especially with the region’s history with transnational extremist groups. The Taliban will continue to use assurances on security in negotiations with these countries going forward.”

Copyright (c) 2023. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.