The Helmand river and its valley

At a glance

• The Helmand is the longest river in Afghanistan, about 1,300 kilometres. It rises in the Hindu Kush about 40 kilometres west of Kabul and ends in the Hamun marshes of Sistan, on the Iranian border. [7]

• The Avesta names it Haētumant. [8] The Ghaznavids built Lashkari Bazar on its left bank, beside the old city of Bost. [9, 11]

• Afghan governments built canals from 1910 and hired the American firm Morrison-Knudsen in 1946. The Kajaki dam was finished in 1954, and much of the new land turned out to be salty. [10, 12]

• Helmand has been the leading opium province in recent years, and one of the main battlegrounds of the war after 2001. [4, 15]

• A treaty of 13 March 1973 fixes what Iran may take: an average of 22 cubic metres a second, plus 4 as goodwill. [1]

From the Koh-e Baba to the Hamun

Mountstuart Elphinstone, the British envoy who met Durrani chiefs in 1809, wrote that the river rises twenty or thirty miles west of Kabul, runs through mountains for more than two hundred miles and then enters a desert that reaches to the lake of Sistan. He put its whole length at about four hundred miles and said the land within half a mile of the banks was fertile and mostly well farmed. [2] Modern measurement gives about 1,300 kilometres, or 800 miles. [7]

Five tributaries join it: the Kajrud, the Arghandab, the Terin, the Arghastan and the Tarnak. The river drains about 100,000 square miles, the whole south-west of Afghanistan. Near Zaranj it turns north and forms the border with Iran for 55 kilometres. In the Dasht-e Margo it splits into two channels, the Sistan River and the Sikhsar or Parian, and both end in the Hamun, the great fresh-water lake of the plateau. [7]

The flow is uneven. The median year carries about 2,200 million cubic metres. Between May and October the "wind of 120 days" blows from the north-west and evaporates the Hamun into three separate lakes. The Gazetteer of Afghanistan said Sistan and the "warm tract" of the lower valley depended on the Helmand almost as Egypt depends on the Nile. [7] In 2001, after years of drought and withdrawals, the river failed to reach Sistan at all. [7]

The Arghandab is the largest tributary. It joins the Helmand at Bost, and the two rivers meet in the triangle where the ruined city stands. [9, 11] The Kandahar oasis lives on the Arghandab (Kandahar: an oasis city and its long history); the wider drainage is in The Pashtun lands: mountains, rivers and passes.

Haētumant in the Avesta

The oldest name is Avestan. The river is the Haētumant, celebrated in Yasht 19, verses 66 to 69, with the rivers that run into it, and described in the first chapter of the Videvdat, where the land of the Haētumant takes up twice as much space as any other country on the list except Airyana Vaēǰah. [8] Yasht 19 gives the most detailed description of one territory anywhere in the Avesta. [8] The Kavi dynasty reigned "there where is Lake Kąsaoya", where the Helmand ends, and the three future saviours are to be born from that lake. [8] In the Pahlavi books the river is the Hētūmand, and the Tārīkh-i Sistān lists it as Rud-e Hirmand. [8] Hirmand or Hermand is the form Persian still uses, and al-Masudi also called the river Nahr Bost, the river of Bost. [9]

Bost, Lashkari Bazar and the Ghaznavids

At the meeting of the two rivers stood a fortified city that classical writers knew under several names and Muslim geographers called Bost. It guarded the caravan road from eastern Iran up the Helmand, which divided there into a branch to Kandahar and a branch to India. [11] Its Pashto spelling is بُست (Bost). [11] Arab armies reached it soon after their first appearance at Zaranj in 651 to 652, but for about two centuries the local rulers of Zamindawar and Zabulistan, the Zunbils, kept them from going farther up the river. [9]

Sebuktigin, the founder of the Ghaznavid line, extended his rule down the river from Ghazna to Bost and Sistan between 977 and 997. [9] The first Ghaznavids seem to have laid out a complex of barracks and palaces on the left bank at Lashkari Bazar, just north of Bost. [9] The Ghurid ruler Ala al-Din Husain sacked Ghazna in 1149 and soon afterwards Bost, which became a Ghurid and later a Khwarazmshah residence. [11]

The brick arch among the ruins is what remains of a large mosque built under the Ghurids or possibly the Khwarazmshahs. [11] The Mongols devastated Sistan in 1221, and Nadir Shah had the city walls pulled down in 1738, the same year he took Kandahar from the Ghilzai. [11] After that the cultivated land around Bost went back to steppe. [11]

The Durrani tribes of the valley

After Nadir Shah and the Sadozai kings of the 1740s, the Helmand basin was largely held by members of the Durrani family ruling from Kabul or Kandahar. [9] The tribes are described in The Durrani confederation, and the allotment of land after 1738 in Ahmad Shah and the founding of the Durrani state.

Elphinstone, writing in 1815, described the river country this way. Zamindawar, on the right bank, was rich, and the Alizai who lived there were mostly farmers, about fifteen thousand families by his count. The Alikozai, about ten thousand families, lived across the river. The Ishaqzai lived between Zamindawar and the desert, half on farming and half on herding. The Nurzai were as numerous as the Barakzai but scattered through the western hills and the southern desert, almost all of them shepherds. [2]

The present map is close to that one, with additions. A profile of the province by the US Naval Postgraduate School, which is a foreign source and gives no date for its figures, puts the Barakzai at 32 per cent of the population, the Noorzai at 16, the Alokzai at 9 and the Ishaqzai at 5.2. It places the Barakzai in the east, in Nahr-e Saraj, Lashkargah and Nawa-i Barakzai, and the Alizai in the north, in Baghran, Musa Qala, Naw Zad and Kajaki, in two branches, the Jalozai and the Hasanzai. The Ishaqzai are strongest in the north-east, in Musa Qala, Sangin and Nawzad. It says they were once called Sagzai, "vegetable people", as a slur. [3]

Antonio Giustozzi and Noor Ullah of the London School of Economics call the Alizai the main tribe of Helmand, and add that the new canal districts of Nad Ali and Nawa were settled by farmers of mixed tribal background, while tribal networks stayed much stronger in the north. [5]

The valley project

Afghan governments tried to bring the Helmand to more land long before the Americans arrived. Work on canals began around 1910, and in 1937 the government hired Japanese engineers to extend the Boghra Canal. The war sent the Japanese and German staff home, and the government restarted the project in 1946 with the American firm Morrison-Knudsen. [12]

The costs grew. At times the Helmand works took up to 20 per cent of the state budget, and Afghanistan, which had built up foreign exchange during the war years, turned to the Export-Import Bank in Washington. The bank lent $21 million in 1949 and $18 million in 1953 at 3.5 per cent, but only after the government created the Helmand Valley Authority in 1952 to run the scheme. [12] Two earth dams followed: Kajaki, finished in 1954 on the Helmand about 45 miles above Girishk, and the smaller Arghandab dam 30 miles north of Kandahar. The Boghra and Shamalan canals carried the water down to the desert. [12]

American architects laid out Lashkargah for the project in 1946 on a terrace on the left bank. The mosque stands at the edge of the built-up area, and no house has the walled garden of an Afghan town. [11] The bazaar of 655 shops in 1973 had no caravanserai and no shop for turbans, and the villagers around kept using the older bazaars of Khalach and Lashkargah-e Bazar. [11] Pashtuns predominated among the upper classes, and Tajiks from Herat among the traders. [11]

The first settlers came from the nomads. The Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research organisation in Kabul, records that Nad Ali was the first area to receive settled nomads, in 1951, and that the government's aim was to settle Pashtun Kuchi who in its view had caused trouble to successive governments, as when they took part in the overthrow of Amanullah in 1929. [4] The canal gradually turned desert into farmland, but waterlogging and salt ruined much of the land, and the Kuchi found it hard to change from herding to farming. By the middle 1960s Nad Ali was a farming district with basic schools and clinics. [4] Villages the Interior Ministry built near Nad-e Ali for Pashtun, Uzbek and Baluch nomads were largely abandoned by 1960, Khazeni writes after Dupree, because the soil was unfit. [10] The province of Helmand itself was made out of the project, with Lashkargah as its capital, in 1964. [4]

Afghan writers did not take the results on trust. Siddieq Noorzoy, drawing on the Afghan historian Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghubar, writes in Encyclopaedia Iranica that the scheme had been hoped to bring high growth and closer ties to the United States, but soon ran into salt, rising costs, doubts about Morrison-Knudsen's surveys, and charges of mismanagement and possible corruption. The Afghan Parliament asked for an inquiry and for four ministers to be called to answer. [12]

Soviet war and the Akhundzadas

The project lasted until the Soviet invasion of 1979 (The Saur revolution, the Soviet war and the refugees). [4] In Helmand the fighting among Afghans was as bitter as the fighting with the Soviet army. Giustozzi and Noor Ullah describe Mullah Mohammad Nasim Akhundzada, an Alizai from Musa Qala who became a leading commander in Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi's party, Harakat-e Inqilab-e Islami. They write that he is still remembered for many battles against the Soviets and the Kabul government, though they think his success against the Soviet army was probably exaggerated. They also report that he was notorious for killing prisoners and fought other jihadi groups, above all Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e Islami. [5]

The fighting between Nasim and Abdul Rahman Khan, an older Alizai family of khans, peaked in autumn 1987 in Kajaki. It was so violent, they report, that local people welcomed Soviet troops as peacemakers when they arrived. [5] Nasim also worked to spread opium. Poppies were an old crop in northern Helmand, he moved them south, and he issued a fatwa in 1981 making the crop lawful. Giustozzi and Noor Ullah set out two accounts. One says he forced farmers to plant poppies and killed those who refused. Others found no trace of forced planting and put the spread down to the market. [5]

Nasim offered the American embassy in Pakistan a ban on poppy in return for two million dollars of aid, carried it out, and was assassinated soon afterwards, allegedly by Hizb-e Islami, which was losing income. [5] The Taliban (Civil war and the Taliban emirate) held Helmand from 1995 to 2001 and conscripted young men in Nad Ali through the mirab. One elder told the Afghanistan Analysts Network he did not sleep the night after the mirab told him he was summoned, and was saved only by a letter from his nephew, a commander in Kandahar. [4] The Taliban also repaired the Kajaki power station and ran a line to Kandahar, until the American-led coalition bombed the station in October 2001. [12]

Poppy

Helmand grows more opium than any other province. In 2017 poppy covered a historic high of 144,018 hectares in Helmand, and in 2018 the province held 52 per cent of the national total, with Nad Ali the top district at 21,396 of about 263,000 hectares. [4] Poppy grows in all four seasons in the warm southern districts, and workers come from Ghazni, Zabul, Wardak, Paktia and Paktika for the harvest. [4] The Helmand Food Zone programme of 2008 gave wheat seed and fertiliser against a pledge not to grow poppy; it cut the crop for a time, though the researcher David Mansfield credits high wheat prices and low opium prices for much of the fall. [4] From about 2013 tube wells and solar panels let farmers plant the desert north of the Boghra, the Dashti Simi ("desert area"). [4] For many families poppy is the main income and eradication hurts them, so they are glad the Taliban oppose it, the network writes; rivalry over the crop also split the district's elites. [4, 19]

The war after 2001

After the Taliban fell (The Afghan Republic and the war, 2001 to 2021), men from the jihad years took the offices. The Afghanistan Analysts Network names Sher Mohammad Akhundzada as governor, Abdul Rahman Jan as police chief, Dad Muhammad Khan at the National Directorate of Security and Mualem Mir Wali as commander of the 93rd Division. [4] Abdul Rahman Jan is said to have taken about 20,000 jeribs (4,000 hectares) of government land and settled his clan on it to grow poppy. [4] Informants gave American forces the names of rivals as Taliban or al-Qaeda, for money or to turn the Americans on them. [4] Britain's team arrived early in 2006 and asked that Sher Mohammad go. The network records that nine tons of opium had been found in his compound in 2005, and writes: "Yet, Helmand was already lost." Its view is that the abuses of 2001 to 2006 cost the government its standing among much of the population and opened the way for the Taliban's return. [4]

Musa Qala is the plainest case of what local people wanted. After a summer of heavy fighting, about 120 British soldiers left the town on 17 October 2006. NATO's spokesman said the withdrawal followed a "sustained period of calm" after a deal reached in late September, under which the elders agreed to drive out the Taliban in exchange for an end to NATO operations. [14] The governor's spokesman told RFE/RL: "It was the tribal elders alone who came and made the suggestion." A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yusuf, said his fighters would attack the British again if they came back. [14] The Taliban overran the district in 2007 after airstrikes on their leaders and held it for nearly ten months. [3]

In February 2010, Operation Moshtarak, "together", sent about 15,000 Afghan and NATO troops against roughly 1,000 fighters at Marjah, a town of about 80,000 to 100,000 people and a smuggling hub. [15–17] On 14 February two NATO rockets aimed at Taliban fighters missed by 300 metres and hit a house. Twelve people died, ten of them members of one family, according to President Hamid Karzai's statement. General Stanley McChrystal apologised and suspended the rocket system. [16, 17] NATO confirmed 15 civilian deaths in the first days; Afghan rights groups counted at least 19. [15]

Rahman Shah, a young farmer who fled to Lashkargah with nearly 10,000 others, told Radio Free Afghanistan what he heard from relatives who stayed: the roads were mined, food was running out, and civilians could not bury their dead or help their wounded. [15] A farmer who spoke to British troops on 15 February said: "We want to see you, as you are claiming, bring stability to our region. We are happy [at the offensive], but we expect you not to harm us or pain and humiliate us." [16]

The network cites Mansfield for the cost, more than US$648 million in Helmand in 2009 to 2011 and over 20,000 US Marines, and says it did not have the hoped-for effect: the Taliban returned after 2014. [4] In Sangin the Ishaqzai had been shut out of the post-2001 order by the strongman Amir Dado, local people told the reporter Rahmatullah Amiri, and the Malmand area of Sangin, mostly Ishaqzai, was one the Taliban never lost. [18] A farmer told Mansfield during the 2017 fighting in Nad Ali: "There is no difference to me between the Taleban and the government. But if we have just one of them in the area it is better; if we have both, there is fighting." [4]

The 1973 treaty and the water dispute

The dispute is older than the dams. After the British arbiter Goldsmid awarded Sistan to Persia and the right bank to Afghanistan in 1872, the Afghan commissioners had argued that Sistan passed to Ahmad Shah on Nadir Shah's death in 1747, while Persian officials pointed to the Shahnameh heroes of Sistan. [10] When the river changed its bed in the 1880s and 1890s, each side accused the other of diverting the water. In 1904 McMahon, another British arbiter, gave Persia one third of the water arriving at Bandar-e Kamal. [10]

The treaty of 1973 replaced that settlement. The prime ministers, Mohammad Moussa Shafiq and Amir Abbas Hoveyda, signed it in Kabul on 13 March 1973, in Pashto, Dari and English texts. [1] Article II limits Afghanistan's delivery in a normal water year to an average of 22 cubic metres a second, as in the 1951 report of the Helmand River Delta Commission, with a further 4 given "as an expression of goodwill and brotherly relations". A normal year is one in which 5,661 million cubic metres pass the gauge at Dehrawud above the Kajaki reservoir. [1] Article V says Afghanistan keeps "all rights to the balance of the water" and may "make such use or disposition of the water as it chooses", while Iran will make no claim beyond the treaty's amounts. [1]

Four months later the monarchy was overthrown, on 17 July 1973, and Noorzoy writes that strong opposition from Afghan nationalists threw the treaty's status in doubt. [12] The International Water Law Project says the treaty has no end date, and does not cover groundwater. In 2001 Iran complained that Afghanistan was holding back water from Kajaki in breach of Article V, which the project reads as treating the treaty as in force. [6] Khazeni notes that during the drought of the late 1990s the Taliban dammed the Helmand in central Afghanistan, drying the Hamun and emptying villages in Sistan. [10]

Today the quarrel is over new dams. Said Hashmat Sadat and Nasrat Sayed, writing for the Lowy Institute in 2020, describe the Kamal Khan dam on the lower Helmand as near completion. Iran says restricting the flow dries the Hamun wetlands. Afghan officials call Iran's claims baseless and say the dams serve water security in line with the treaty. [13]