Afthanistan Uniquely Vulnerable To Climate Collapse; Taliban Try To Reconcile Science With Islamic Fundamentalism

[hatrack]

KABUL — When Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers headed to the country’s first “international climate change conference” earlier this year in the eastern city of Jalalabad, few foreign guests turned up. Afghanistan remains a global pariah in large part because of the Taliban restrictions on female education, and that isolation has deprived the country of foreign funding for urgently needed measures to adapt to climate change.

So, for now, the Afghan government is largely confronting the impacts of global warming on its own and putting the blame for floods and sluggish governmental aid on foreigners. Some former Taliban commanders view global carbon emissions as a new invisible enemy. “Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,” Lutfullah Khairkhaw, the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister, said in his opening speech at the Jalalabad conference this year. “We must defend our climate, our water, our soil to the same extent we defend ourselves against invasions.”

With parched deserts and deforested, flood-prone valleys, Afghanistan is deemed by researchers to be among the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of people died, for instance, during recent flash floods that officials blamed on ominous changes in the climate. Kanni Wignaraja, the regional director for Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Development Program, said prolonged drought in Afghanistan has so hardened soils that flash floods are particularly violent here. “The damage is huge,” she said in an interview.

EDIT

During a break, one of the officials apologized to a reporter for the farmers’ inability to understand climate change, despite the government’s best efforts. Standing nearby, 53-year-old villager Abdul Ahad Hemat begged to differ. He said he may not always understand what educated people in the cities say about climate change but he now can see the effects of changes in seasonal climate patterns on his own fields. He agreed with the government that it’s his religious responsibility as a Muslim to survive disaster and resist hardship. But most of the government’s DIY advice on how to adapt had so far proven useless. How, he asked, is he supposed to build a dam on his own?

EDIT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/12/afghanistan-taliban-climate-change/

[BComplex]

1. So goes the Taliban, so goes Christian Nationalists. If we let them take our country,

the same ignorance of governance will prevail here.