a house divided, 1933–73or topography. From the outset the Helmand Valley Irrigation Scheme (hvis)
hit problems. mka had to build new roads to carry the heavy equipment,
construct accommodation for thousands of workers and import everything
it needed from spanners to cement. The logistics were a nightmare, for all
goods had to be shipped to Karachi, offloaded onto trains, transferred to
Quetta, offloaded again, and trucked across the Afghan frontier.
The size of the proposed reclamation area was vast and the environ-
ment daunting. The Helmand river in its lower course runs through two
inhospitable deserts, the Dasht-i Margo and the Registan, where summer
temperatures exceeded 50°c (122ºf). In the spring the notor ious Bad-i
Yak Sad-o Bist Roz, the Wind of 120 Days, blows at more than 100 km/h,
whipping up sandstorms that clog irrigation ditches and strip off the
thin top soil. The Helmand and Arghandab, the two rivers designated for
major irrigation works, had huge variations in seasonal flow and volume.
During the spring snow melt they were raging torrents that swept away
control and diversion structures and canal banks, back scoured the beds of
irrigation canals and deposited huge volumes of silt all down the network.
Flooding and dramatic changes in the rivers’ course were a regular occur-
rence. Yet by late summer, when crops needed water to mature, river levels
could drop to a trickle, making it impossible to deliver water into the
primary canals without weirs or water pumps. To add to the challenges
facing mka, by the 1940s most of the Helmand basin and Sistan was still
uncharted territory.
The local population had no experience or understanding of the
permanent, concrete and steel structures that mka planned to introduce
to control water flow and volume. Farmers had long ago adapted to the
annual cycle of peaks and troughs, patiently repairing banks and control
structures with compacted mud, stone and bricks: in Toynbee’s words, ‘in
Afghanistan... Man’s way of getting Nature to meet his needs has been to
humour her, not to hit her over the head’. 23 Farmers inundated their fields
during controlled rotations of water releases overseen by locally elected
water bailiffs, or mirabs, and in accordance with arcane, unwritten rules.
The mirabs were paid in kind by community stakeholders while disputes
over water rights were settled by the mirabs and community councils, not
by government officials, for the government did not legally own the water,
let alone have any say in its management, once it left the main river.
mka’s scheme, on the other hand, was an attempt to beat nature into
submission in the same manner as mki had done with the Colorado river.
mka’s plan was also multifaceted for it included not only the construc-
tion of in-canal concrete and steel structures, but control gates, storage