Tropic of Chaos (16 page)

Drought and flooding lead to increased poverty. Poverty fuels the sense of grievance and desperation among the people and creates ranks of unemployed unmarried young men. Destitute farm hands—unable to afford a bride price or to purchase land or even find work—drift into the ranks of the Taliban and become fodder for US drones, the war's human fuel.

As Ahmed Rashid has explained, “The United States and NATO have failed to understand that the Taliban belong to neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan, but are a lumpen population, the product of refugee camps, militarized madrassas, and the lack of opportunities in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They have neither been true citizens of either country nor experienced traditional Pashtun tribal society. The longer the war goes on, the more deeply rooted and widespread the Taliban and their transnational milieu will become.”
³³

We might add, the longer climate change goes on with its causes unmitigated, and with no adaptation to its effects, the more pervasive this
rootless, millenarian Taliban milieu will become. In this regard, the poppy economy and its armed defense are local adaptation mechanisms.

“Three years ago we didn't grow much poppy,” said my host, a local farmer and former mujahideen fighter. “Now everyone grows it, even the police chief. Tomorrow I will get you some.”

How does the poppy trade function within and fit into the war? In 2004 I traveled to Wardak, a province an hour outside Kabul. The guerrillas have since retaken Wardak, but it was then still in government hands. Wardak looks like New Mexico: green valleys with scattered poplars and clusters of adobe-style walled compounds,
qalas
, set back from the road. Looming above it all are huge, barren mountains and blue skies. I went to Wardak with photographer Teru Kuwayama and a man we'll call Mustafa, who introduced us to his family, or at least his male relatives. (As Pashtun custom dictates, the women were kept hidden from the eyes of strange men.) We sat in a carpet-lined, second-story sitting room, or
betek
. This room, in which we ate and slept, stood safely away from the family quarters. Our hosts were burly men with beards, many of whom had fought with the mujahideen warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during the 1980s and 1990s. One of them had just come back from Iran, where he worked in an ice-cream cone factory. He was about to marry a woman he hadn't seen since she was twelve and he a few years older. The whole family was getting ready for the big day, so our weekend road trip turned into a party, with lots of eating, tea drinking, cigarette smoking, laughing and high-stakes, all-night gambling.

One of the men explained that a severe drought, then in its sixth year, had destroyed Wardak's more traditional crops, like grapes, apples, and wheat. The drought-resistant poppy was all they had left. “Everyone around here grows poppy,” said a farmer called Nazir, whose relatives jokingly called him “Mr. Al Qaeda” because of his Taliban-style beard and skullcap.

The poppy boom was not unique to Wardak. All across Afghanistan the crop had made a comeback, in large part due to the drought. UN researchers believe that 1.7 million of Afghanistan's 28.5 million inhabitants
are directly involved in poppy cultivation, with many more working in processing, trafficking, money lending and laundering, and other associated activities. Warlords tax farmers and traffickers alike, and thanks to Hamid Karzai's policy of appeasement, many now hold official positions, further facilitating their exploitation of the drug economy.

But the Taliban benefit as well. First of all, they tax the drug trade, just as they tax all trade. Second, they do not destroy poppy crops. In areas loyal to the Taliban, farmers do not have to worry about eradication or the abuse and bribery that go with it.

In Wardak, as the night went on, with dinner, then tea, then cards and more photos, the men became increasingly comfortable and explained the details of the poppy industry. “Poppy is cheap to plant. You can find seeds in any bazaar,” Mahid, a veteran who lost a leg when he stepped on a landmine in the 1990s, told me. In Wardak, poppy has two seasons; in hotter and colder climates, only one season is possible. The first crop, planted in March and harvested in June and July, is always the better one. Of the three flower colors—red, white, and purple—white is the best.

“After you plant and water the poppy, it sprouts in fifteen days,” Mr. Al Qaeda explained. “Then you must weed the crop and keep weeding until the plants are bigger than the weeds. In three months, they blossom. Seed pouches emerge and grow in the blossom, and then the flower falls away, and the seed pouch continues to grow. Then we scratch the seedcase with a
ghoza
[a small, homemade trowel with a serrated edge of six teeth. From the wounds, sticky white milk emerges]. You scrape the poppy in the morning and then collect the sap in the evening, when it is more sticky and brown. A little from each flower and then you have a ball, and that dries and is the opium,” Mr. Al Qaeda said, grinning.

In most parts of Afghanistan, a farmer can milk each seed case up to seven times. Eventually, it is tapped out and left to dry, before being harvested for the next planting. The seeds are also used to make edible oil and are sometimes boiled into a tea that mothers use to drug their infants during the long hours of work.

To illustrate the economic influence of poppy, the one-legged Mahid starts talking about land measurements. The unit here is a
jerib,
about half
an acre. The men in Wardak say that from one
jerib
farmers can usually get twenty-eight kilograms of opium, which they can sell for up to $5,000. Alternatively, one
jerib
of wheat might earn a farmer $100, or it might not bring in any money at all, depending on weather and prices.

In some areas, smugglers make loans that are repaid in opium. The system in Wardak seems to be more streamlined: farmers borrow from shopkeepers and repay them in cash when they've been paid by the smugglers. “In the last three years, many farms have got out of debt because of poppy. No other crop compares to it. And with the drought, we only have 10 percent of our apples and wheat. These crops use so much water compared to poppy. And the wheat is almost worthless,” Mr. Al Qaeda said before turning back to the cards.

“We have many former Taliban and mujahideen commanders here who are getting angry at America because of what is happening in Palestine and Iraq and because the economy here is no good,” Mr. Al Qaeda remarked. “Cutting down poppy will only make them more angry.”

Sadly, the dialectical connections between climate change, war, and environmental degradation become mutually reinforcing. The Worldwatch Institute's Michael Renner summarized it well: “Three decades of armed conflict have displaced a large portion of the population, impeded access to farmland because of landmines, and destroyed many irrigation systems or rendered their maintenance impossible. Add recurring droughts and floods and the population's desperate coping strategies, and the net result has been a severe degradation of Afghanistan's natural environment and its water and farming infrastructure. Massive deforestation and heavy pressure on grazing lands has led to erosion and reduced flood resistance.”
³⁴

The official rhetoric of poppy eradication is ridiculously ambitious when compared with facts on the ground. Among the five pillars of the strategy are “judicial reform” and “alternative livelihoods.” None of that exists here. The only NGO in this district digs wells, but Wazir said that the corrupt drilling team charges a fee for what should be aid.

As the sun started to slide down in the sky, we headed out. Halfway to Jalalabad, five armed men emerged from behind rocks. One aimed a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, at our truck, while another stepped into the road, his AK-47 leveled at the windshield. The lead gunman approached and asked, “Is that police truck still down in the village?”

By freak luck we had passed a Frontier Police pickup truck going the opposite direction. Thinking fast, one of my Afghan colleagues answered, “Yes, and they will be following us in a few minutes.” The gunman paused for one very long second, then allowed us to pass. We assumed these men were local thieves, or possibly Taliban, who lay in wait for us but choked at the last minute due to the random passing of the Frontier Police. Weeks later, my translator, Naqeeb, spoke with Wazir again and confirmed that these armed men were local thugs, desperate for money. Their plan had been to kidnap us and sell us to their Taliban contacts. In the face of drought, floods, and failed crops, we would have been an economic windfall.

People have suffered and have had such a hard time that it was
impossible to go on like this. . . . Land tax has been increased.
Prices for electricity and heating have gone up. . . . Young
people do not have jobs. They just wander in the streets. We
hardly give them an education.

 

 

 

S
PRING WAS ON the way in Kyrgyzstan, the green buds and pale blossoms just pressing forth, the sky a beautiful overcast grey. Soft rain caressed the capital, Bishkek, leaving the wide Soviet-era plazas clean and fresh. Occasional birdsong carried through the moist air and across the city's empty streets.

But the calm was the product of crisis and fear. Soon the wide plazas filled with thousands of demonstrators. As the
Guardian
reported, “Protesters said they had been driven onto the streets by recent steep price hikes to communal services such as water and electricity. The hikes had been the last straw in a country already wrestling with huge unemployment and widespread poverty.”
²
The
New York Times
also noted that crowds were “incensed over rising utility prices and a government they considered repressive and corrupt.”
³
A week before the mayhem began in early April 2010, the government had announced a plan to boost utility prices by 20 percent.
⁴

Why had it done this? Because the country is almost totally dependant on hydroelectric power and income from electricity exports, and that same prolonged Central Asian drought that was punishing Afghanistan and Pakistan had crippled Kyrgyzstan's power plants, thus its whole economy. In this regard, Kyrgyzstan encapsulates in the extreme how climate change can trigger violence. This chapter explores how that crisis occurred and why.

The crowds protesting price hikes soon turned into mobs and armed gangs and they attacked government buildings. Gunshots and stun grenades echoed in the streets. Canisters of teargas bounced across the plazas. Flames surged from the windows of government offices. First one building, then another, and then another were gutted by fire. Protesters grabbed and viciously beat the interior minister and took control of the security headquarters and state television. The police started shooting live rounds. Protesters shot back. The police advanced and retreated. The mobs ran away, then ran back. The wounded and dead were carried off in cars: sixty people were killed and hundreds more wounded. Soon Bishkek's main commercial district was burning, and a frenzy of unchecked looting was underway.

By early May 2010, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev—the pro-Western, free market “reformer” of the Tulip Revolution—had fled south to his hometown, Osh. The opposition had assumed power, and the new president, Ms. Roza Otunbayeva, promised to reduce utility tariffs and provide more aid to the poor. But there was no law and order. Neighborhoods erected barricades; militia formed. Amidst the looting, ethnic violence began—Kyrgyz against Uzbek and some of the opposite. The economic suffering of the people and their resentment of the kleptocrat overclass were quickly mutating into ethnic hatred. The murder and rape of ethnic cleansing drove many thousands of terrified Uzbeks to flight toward the border—but Uzbekistan was sealed closed.
⁵
President Otunbayeva called for Russian military intervention. The Kremlin declined.
⁶
As the rampaging
slowly subsided, Kyrgyzstan seemed on the verge of bloody ethnic fragmentation.

On June 10, the violence flared again, this time in the southern city of Osh. A minor fight between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in a casino quickly escalated into pogroms. This time, Kyrgyz elements of the state security forces were involved in hunting down Uzbeks. Historically, the southern towns had been home to sedentary Uzbek traders and farmers, while the mostly nomadic or seminomadic Kyrgyz moved with their herds. But forced collectivization in the 1930s ended that pattern as ethnic Kyrgyz settled in the valleys among the ethnic Uzbeks. Competition for water and land emerged. As a Human Rights Watch report explained, “The problems became more acute as the population grew. Grievances over land and water distribution increasingly took on an ethnic dimension during the perestroika and glasnost era in the mid-to-late 1980s, as ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities became stronger.”
⁷
Southern Kyrgyzstan saw interethnic rioting in the 1990s during the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 1990, Kyrgyzstan's Uzbek minority tried to gain autonomy and join neighboring Uzbekistan; the intercommunal violence that followed took 1,000 lives. In 2010, more than 350 died and thousands were left homeless.
⁸

The sudden spasms of violence reflected, at first glance, a rebellion against a corrupt, self-dealing president and the reignition of allegedly age-old ethnic conflict. But there is an environmental issue at the heart of the trouble. It was, in fact, the catastrophic convergence playing out as ethnic rampaging. In Kyrgyzstan, neoliberal economic shock therapy, imposed after the Soviet Union's implosion, and the political-military blowback of Cold War proxy fights meet the incipient crisis of climate change.