afghanistanJune 1941 an American diplomatic mission from Tehran visited Kabul and
responded positively to requests for teachers, engineers and other technical
experts to replace German nationals. In June the following year the State
Department opened a Legation in Kabul and appointed Cornelius Engert,
a Dutch-born American who was a specialist in the Middle East, as its first
ambassador. Engert quickly won the gratitude of the Afghan government
by arranging for the shipment to the usa of a large consignment of karakul
and wool that had been held up in Karachi by the war.
In April 1946 Zabuli approached the State Department about the
pos sibility of a loan of $100 million ‘to finance a ten year programme of
public works and to raise the standard of living’, though the government
planned to spend most of the money on rearming its military. 20 The loan
was not forthcoming, but the following year Shah Mahmud Khan paid
the first official visit of an Afghan premier to the usa and again requested
financial assistance. Later in the same year Zabuli and Na‘im held further
discussions with State Department officials and requested military aid ‘to
maintain internal security’ and to ‘make a positive contribution in the
event there is war with the Soviets’. 21
The first American civil engineering project in Afghanistan, however,
was implemented by a private company. During the reign of Amir
Habib Allah Khan, the governor of Kandahar dreamed of reclaiming the
‘Arachosian Corridor’ in the lower Helmand, which prior to the ravages of
the Mongols in the thirteenth century had been one of the most productive
agricultural areas in the region. To achieve this end, the governor ordered
the construction of a new intake on the Helmand river below Girishk,
known as the Bogra Canal, which was designed to provide irrigation to the
Musa Qal‘a and Qal‘a-yi Bost region. 22 In the 1930s German and Japanese
engineers took over the Bogra scheme, but it was still incomplete by the
outbreak of the Second World War. Zabuli was keen to revive the Helmand
Valley plan, partly to increase cash cropping, but he also planned to use the
new land to resettle Pushtun nomads. Since Afghanistan lacked the expert-
ise and heavy equipment for such a major project, Zabuli turned to the
California-based Morrison-Knudsen Inc. (mki), one of the ‘Six Companies’
that had built the Hoover Dam. Despite mki having no experience of work-
ing in underdeveloped countries, the company agreed to take on the task
and set up a subsidiary, Morrison-Knudsen Afghanistan (mka).
Neither Zabuli nor any Afghan minister understood the complexity of a
scheme that even in a developed country would have presented major chal-
lenges. mka did not undertake a feasibility or impact survey before signing
the contract and they had virtually no knowledge of the region’s hydrology