Water is one of the most critical factors for regional security and stability because it is multidimensional. It is an essential resource in ecosystem services & environmental security, yet its importance creates significant possibilities for insecurity—including corruption, environmental crimes, and other illegal activities.  

In my capacity as Senior Advisor on Water to Regional Command Southwest (RCSW) in Afghanistan from 2011-2012, helping to support stability operations (e.g., irrigation, hydropower, and development), I saw firsthand that the Sistan Basin in Afghanistan’s Helmand River watershed is one of these environments.

The region is a case study in how ecological disruption can become an underappreciated factor in creating regional insecurity threats. The hydropolitics of this transboundary river system are tied to a number of components: population growth and consumption patterns, water insecurity, and political exigencies.

Add in the continuing and intensifying effects of climate change, and future water availability in the region is significantly at risk. The Sistan Basin— which includes the Helmand’s inland delta, as well as hamouns (lakes) and wetlands—is now poised on the brink of collapse.

Surveying The Problem

The importance of the Sistan Basin in the region cannot be underestimated. The Helmand River supplies about 80 percent of the waters that drain into the Sistan depression. (See map.)  The river and its tributaries are fed annually by melting snow from the Koh-i Baba Range of central Afghanistan, its headwaters, running a nearly 1,300-kilometer journey to the basin’s inland delta.

As Landsat images illustrate, the size of the Sistan’s hamouns and extent of marsh varies both seasonally and from year to year. Its maximum expansion comes in late spring, following snowmelt and spring precipitation in the mountains.

In some respects, the basin’s current crisis has been more than half a century in the making. Since the 1950s, technical and knowledge deficits in the water sector of Afghanistan have restricted prospects for efficient management and use of water resources. This has led to accusations of corruption and illegal water use between Iran and Afghanistan, while also hindering development in Afghanistan’s southwestern provinces. 

Failure to determine the water balance (the flow of water in and out of a system) and factor in the high demand of irrigation water use is partly to blame for the ecological destruction and disruption of the hamoun wetlands. Increased evaporation caused by hotter temperatures and stronger winds, combined with less than normal precipitation associated with climate change, has further reduced available water in the watershed. This continuing trend makes ecological recovery unlikely.

Indeed, the Sistan’s hamoun ecosystem may already be at the tipping point, creating a looming loss of ecological security. As the basin’s lakes dry and wetlands vanish and its biodiversity decreases, the livelihoods of those who depend on it for activities including fishing, bird hunting, and reed harvesting are threatened.

In the Sistan Basin, as in many other places in the world, when people cannot sustain themselves economically, they adapt or move—if they can. These displaced persons often move to places where other people already live, increasing vulnerability and tension in the communities into which arrive. More pressure builds on the environment. And a vicious cycle ensues.

Controlling the Flow

During the 1950s, the damming of the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan became one of the showcase projects of U.S. foreign aid after World War II. The Kajaki and Dahla dams and their irrigation canals were constructed on the Helmand River, as well as on its main tributary, the Arghandab River, to provide hydroelectric power, increased agricultural productivity through irrigation, and land reclamation.

The millions invested by the United States in Helmand Province in that era transformed the barren desert into a veritable oasis known locally as “Little America.” Work began on a third dam, the Kamal Khan, located in Nimruz Province on the lower reaches of the Helmand River in 1974, but was abandoned after the overthrow of the Afghan government in 1978.  

Dams—and the politics behind them— are just as important in the Sistan Basin today.

In March 2011, the USACE Hydrologic Engineering Center published the Nimroz Province Watershed Assessments to identify potential water resource projects there. “Viable” irrigation dam and hydropower projects needed to demonstrate an adequate water supply to support such use, sediment rates that would not render the project inoperable in early stages, and enough hydraulic head for positive power generation. No viable projects were identified because of shortcomings in all three areas (including the Kamal Khan Dam), and thus investment in the proposed projects was discouraged.

Yet the Afghan government did not give up, and obtained funding (in 2017) for an Afghan-Turkish company to complete the project. Ten years later in March 24, 2021, Afghanistan’s former President Asraf Ghani inaugurated the Kamal Khan Dam.

Only six months later, by August 6, 2021, the Taliban had taken took control of Zaranj, Nimruz’s capital city, and the dam itself,  effectively controlling the amount of water flowing downstream to Zaranj, as well as to the Sistan and Baluchestan region of Iran, and to the Sistan Basin. As author David Mansfield observed,  “by taking Zaranj, [the] Taliban also control a major source of water to Sistan Baluchistan with the intakes from the Helmand river sitting just south of the city. With Kamal Khan Dam complete, it’s easy to stop the flow of water to Iran.”

The Taliban see the dam as viable. According to press releases issued on January 28 2022, the Kamal Khan Dam “is now full for the first time since its inauguration in March 2021, bringing new opportunities for irrigation. The dam is capable of storing 52 million cubic metres of water, irrigating more than 180,000 hectares of land and generating 9MW of electricity.”

As of April 2022, there are conflicting reports on whether water will be held to ransom or shared with Iran according to the terms of The Afghan-Iranian Helmand River-Water Treaty of 1973. Yet the ability of the Taliban government to do either will depend in part on water availability in a system, which is more often than not operating at a deficit.

Why might it not work? High evaporation rates and lack of experienced irrigation management workers mean large areas of agricultural land in the region have become salinized and unsuitable for farming. Lack of monitoring and maintenance has caused canals and reservoirs to fill with sediment. Water and sediment trapped behind the dams have affected the delta, causing hamouns and their adjacent wetlands to shrink, especially in drier years when a greater proportion of the annual discharge is held upstream. Less water also means less vegetation holding the soil. Wind-blown dust movement across deltaic agricultural lands has increased since the dams were completed.

Budgeting for Availability 

The Helmand River is a renewable resource, but it is also vulnerable to overuse and seasonal exhaustion. Decreasing precipitation and increasing temperatures exacerbate water stress. Indications are that temperatures in the watershed are expected to be exceptionally hotter in future, and precipitation deficits are expected to continue. This will result in high atmospheric evaporative demands, complicating an already vexing situation.

Present circumstances of geography, accessibility and insecurity in southwestern Afghanistan and southeastern Iran make it difficult to perform measurements related to water. But water cannot be managed if it cannot be—or is not—measured. Water cannot be managed without an accurate water budget. And the amount of available water is not known unless the water budget, as well as water use (i.e., capture and diversion), are taken into account.

Increasing access to water and improving its usage in the region was a key priority during the time of my own deployment with the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Helmand Province.

Water has a determinative impact on agriculture and livestock, population management, energy, public works—as well as on the drug trade. Humanitarian assistance projects, efforts to improve economic activity and employment have a water component.  

Funds such as Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) dollars were available for investment and improvements, but implementation designs and budgets failed to include long term watershed-level management. This gap resulted in no coordinated watershed monitoring or evaluation.

From 2010-2012, money poured into RCSW to fund development work. Yet, there was little oversight, quality control, or evaluation when it came to water projects–whether large-scale efforts at the Kajaki Dam or small-scale village-level efforts to win hearts and minds. By the end of my tour, it was apparent that power (whether hydropower, socio-economic, or political) was not for sharing or compromise.

Half Full Or Half Empty?

Politics and governance in the region may change, but the problems that have left the Sistan Basin on the edge of disaster persist regardless of who is in charge.

Afghanistan cannot proceed to build new dams, restore old dams, and take an increasingly greater fraction of shared groundwater and surface water resources from the Helmand River without serious environmental and geopolitical consequences. Meaningful discussion and negotiation require a comprehensive understanding of how these projects will affect overall water in-stream flow and availability. Diplomatic and development efforts need to pair policy and governance practitioners with scientists to guarantee correct interpretation and inclusion of water circumstances.

Water stress, and the failure of government to adequately address it, can contribute to social disruption and political instability. Water-sharing agreements between (river-sharing) states must navigate questions of access to water, sovereignty, development, and national identity. This is paramount to building integrity, which is key to integrated water resource management success.