Tropic of Chaos (14 page)

These are the political patterns of fourteenth-century Europe, the political forms left by the collapse of Rome and in the wake of the plague.
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They are not the patterns of underdevelopment but rather those of social breakdown and political collapse. They are the institutional and political rubble of a past modernity. And increasingly they define the present.

We see here a strange inversion of Walt W. Rostow's “stage theory” of development and his idea of “economic takeoff.”
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Collapse, like development, is gradual, each stage building sequentially upon the conditions created by the previous stages. Like development, it can become a self-reinforcing process. The slide toward entropy and chaos is like the virtuous cycle of modernization and industrialization imagined by the West's postwar planners—but in violent reverse.

If we read Weber in reverse, we would do well to consult Charles Tilly's classic essay “State Making and War Making As Organized Crime” in the same fashion.
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According to Tilley, “War makes states,” and “banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum.”
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He argues that organized crime–style protection rackets are, in many ways, akin to taxation by legitimate states. War, extortion, and plunder exist on a spectrum, separated by different levels of intensity and legitimacy. The main point of the essay is that as European war making became more expensive in the cost of ships, cannons, and fielding armies, so too did the project of taxation and administration become more developed and thus modern. As Tilley puts it,

If conventional war making produced the modern state, then asymmetrical warfare, social breakdown, intercommunal strife, brigandry, and open-ended counterinsurgency in the age of climate chaos may well be the modern state's undoing. As the means of administration and “extraction” collapse, “bands of armed men” fall away from the state and are released freelance into society to survive by their own devices. Taxation becomes theft as soldiers and police revert back to bribery, extortion, and banditry. Where the state is totally absent, gangs arise to govern slums like proto-city-states.

There may also be technological aspects to the breakdown of modern state power. As the Kenyan case illustrates, there is something particular about the proliferation of small arms: AK-47s, grenade launchers and machine guns. When these “democratic” means of violence are cheap enough, they undermine state power in a manner that is directly inverse to Tilley's argument in which expensive naval ships and cannons demanded (and thus created) elaborate, centralized, modern bureaucracies and taxation regimes.
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If cannons and frigates made the modern nation state, the Kalashnikov and field radio might undo it.

A good year is determined by its spring.

 

 

 

T
HE OLD FARMER opened walnuts and pomegranates in the courtyard of his mud-walled fortress home and explained his troubles. Wazir, the farmer, grows opium poppy and marijuana in a border district of southern Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan. The border, the Durand Line, runs along the ridges of a forbidding, snow-capped mountain range, which feeds the rivers that water Nangarhar's scorching valleys.
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When I visited in early September 2006, the area was in the midst of a very bad drought. As the United Nations had discovered during a survey four years earlier, wells had been running dry for most of the last decade, as Afghanistan suffered “the most severe drought in living memory.”
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Scientists link this desiccation to climate change, particularly rising temperatures in the mountains and a slight decrease in precipitation.

The drought in Nangarhar finally broke in 2010 when the colossal Arabian Ocean Monsoon that flooded some 20 percent of Pakistan brushed along the Durand Line. In Pakistan, the United Nations estimated that almost 2,000 people had died, 14 million needed humanitarian aid, 2.4 million hectares of crops were lost, 1.9 million homes were destroyed or damaged,
and over 7 million people were homeless. Perhaps worse, the floods destroyed 50 years of infrastructure. The economic total for losses was estimated to be $43 billion.
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By 2011 serious malnutrition gripped the flood zone.

In Afghanistan, the edge of the same weather system hit several eastern provinces, including Nangarhar, which was at the very periphery of the monsoon's reach. Typically, August in Nangarhar is bone dry, with precipitation of less than five millimeters for the whole month.
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But that year, the skies opened, and the massive barrage of rain washed away crops, livestock, and twenty-five hundred houses, killing eighty people.

According to the security reports, Nangarhar is not only either parched or flooded but also violent: Twenty-three mostly war-related incidents were listed during the week I made my visit in September 2006. According to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), that week saw kidnapping threats, ongoing counterinsurgency operations, and “reported infiltration of a new group of AGE/Insurgents” made up of “Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis”; two vehicles used by “armed Taliban” were spotted in Sherzad District, and there were several rocket attacks. The ANSO reports portrayed a region beyond government control.

Only the drug trade has kept this region afloat economically, but eradication is a constant, if often distant, threat. Wazir recounted the panic of the local farmers when a poppy-eradication squad came down from Kabul. “The eradication campaign came, but they just took bribes,” said Wazir as we sat in his
dera‚
a shaded outside visiting area, on rope and wooden cots called
charpayi.
“When we heard that they were coming, we went to the district governor and negotiated a price.” Wazir told me that the local commander, named Hasil, was chosen as the farmers' envoy. After taking bribes, for the sake of the cameras the police destroyed some old, dry, spent poppy fields.

“If the governor had not accepted the bribe, we were ready to fight. If a farmer loses his poppy he can't even have tea and sugar. He will borrow money from a rich person and lose his land.” Wazir said that emergency loans carry 100 percent interest rates.

Climatic stress, an initial catalyst for Afghan instability, is now fueling violence. This is what the catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence and climate change looks like in Afghanistan: eroded soil, limited water,
greedy police, foreign troops, popular anger, and an insurgency that protects poppy crops from eradication.

In 2008 the British government issued a report describing what climate change will do to Afghanistan: “The most likely adverse impacts . . . are drought related, including associated dynamics of desertification and land degradation. Drought is likely to be regarded as the norm by 2030, rather than as a temporary or cyclical event. . . . Floods due to untimely rainfall and a general increase in temperature are of secondary importance. However, their impacts may be amplified due to more rapid spring snow melt as a result of higher temperatures, combined with the downstream effects of land degradation, loss of vegetative cover and land mismanagement.”
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Read the history of the war in Afghanistan closely, and a climate angle emerges. Central Asia is suffering water shocks—droughts and floods—that fit the pattern of anthropogenic global warming. Two-thirds of Afghans work in agriculture; yet, much of the country is desert, and its irrigation system is badly dilapidated. The extreme weather of climate change causes misery, which causes violence, which leads to more misery, and so on. At first glance, the most important cause of war in Afghanistan is the US presence there: the United States and its NATO allies are in Afghanistan to hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda and/or to build an Afghan state that will deny sanctuary to international terrorists. The Taliban, on the other hand, are fighting to eject the infidel invaders.

But there was war in Afghanistan before the United States intervened overtly and even before America's first covert intervention under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. There was war before the Soviet intervention of December 1979. In many ways the earliest origins of the current conflict are the 1973 coup d'état of Lieutenant General Mohammed Daud Khan against King Mohammed Zahir Shah. And within the story of Daud's coup lurks an element of hidden climate causality.

Yes, religious fanaticism, ethnic hatreds, and imperial ambitions are the larger moving pieces, but climate change also fuels the conflict in Afghanistan.
First, the violence began as the result of a drought forty years ago. Second, climate stress creates poverty and desperation, which now feeds the insurgency against NATO occupation. Third, climate change causes interstate rivalries, which play out as covert operations inside Afghanistan. Finally, and very importantly, opium poppy is drought resistant to an extent alternative crops are not, and NATO attacks poppy while the Taliban defends it. Let us begin the story with the drought and the coup that deposed King Zahir Shah.

In 1969 the rains in many parts of Afghanistan failed completely. During the next two years, they failed again. Then came a very severe winter; to survive, many farmers were forced to eat their seeds and slaughter their bullocks, leaving them little to plant and few animals to pull plows. As a result, the 1972 wheat crop was inadequate, and by April famine swept northern and central Afghanistan. According to Raja Anwar, it was “the most terrible famine in Afghan history.”
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Ghor Province, in the remote interior of the country, was hardest hit. A thousand years ago the place was heavily forested, but its hills also held mineral deposits, so Ghor's trees were felled and burned to smelt the local ore. Then, the denuded region became the heart of medieval Afghanistan's cattle industry, but the cows, goats, and sheep destroyed the land. Now, Ghor almost looks like the moon—totally barren. Only along the rivers and streambeds is farming possible. For most people, small sage bushes gathered during the summer on faraway hills are the single source of fuel.
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The first journalist to break the story of the 1972 famine was Abdul Haq Waleh, editor of a local newspaper called
Caravan.
He traveled to Chakhcharan, the small dusty capital of Ghor, and found a terrifying scene: corpses littered the street; survivors could not dig graves fast enough to keep hungry dogs at bay; scores of children had been abandoned by parents who could no longer feed them or orphaned by parents who had starved.

The next journalist to visit was James Sterba of the
New York Times.
At first Sterba's editors on the foreign desk refused to run his story because it didn't contain enough statistics. How many people had died? He tried to explain
that Afghanistan was not a land of statistics; no one even knew the population of Afghanistan; guesses varied by 5 million in either direction. Finally, Sterba sent back three rolls of film that he had shot in Ghor. The horror was undeniable, and the
Times
ran Sterba's story about the abandoned children of the famine. Here is an excerpt: “The boy's spindly body sank slowly to the dusty gravel road. He lowered his head to the pebbles, resting his sunken cheek on his hand. His dry, cracked lips did not close. He tried to cover his feet, but the torn, dirt encrusted rags he wore were not long enough. He placed an empty tin can, his only possession, near his stomach. And then he started to cry.”
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While thousands starved to death in the mountains, little was said or done about the problem in Kabul. As one report put it, “What killed the people stricken by the drought, in the view of Afghan and foreign observers, was not only lack of food in their regions but also governmental indifference, and greed and official corruption.”
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