So for now, the Afghan government is largely dealing with the impacts of global warming on its own, blaming the floods and slow government aid on foreigners. Some former Taliban commanders see global carbon emissions as a new invisible enemy.
“Just as they invaded our country, they invaded our climate,” Lutfullah Khairkhaw, the Taliban’s deputy minister of higher education, said in his opening speech at this year’s Jalalabad conference. “We must defend our climate, our water, our soil to the same extent that we defend ourselves against invasions.”
With its parched deserts and deforested valleys prone to flooding, Afghanistan is considered by researchers to be one of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of people died, for example, during recent flash floods that authorities blamed on threatening changes in the climate.
Kanni Wignaraja, regional director for Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Development Program, said the prolonged drought in Afghanistan has hardened the soils so much that flash floods are particularly violent here. “The damage is enormous,” she said in an interview.
Before the Taliban took over, international donors estimated that Afghanistan would need more than $20 billion between 2020 and 2030 to respond to climate change. The United Nations is still able to fund some projects in the country, but Wignaraja said the Taliban-led government was correct that “global climate money has dried up.”
Although the Taliban’s beliefs are rooted in centuries-old Pashtun culture and an extreme interpretation of Islam, the government claims that climate change is real, that it is destroying God’s work, and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board. The Taliban have called on imams in Afghanistan’s tens of thousands of mosques to emphasize the need for environmental protection during Friday prayers.
Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day, said Kabul-based imam Farisullah Azhari. “God will ask: How did you earn your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?” he said in an interview.
Modern Science and Ancient Beliefs
Historically, the Taliban’s environmental activism has been unrelated to modern climate science. The Quran encourages Muslims to plant trees, and locals recall how the Taliban cracked down on illegal loggers when the group first came to power in the late 1990s.
At the Taliban-run Afghanistan Academy of Sciences in Kabul, religious scholars are now debating how to reconcile modern science with centuries-old religious beliefs.
“Climate change is real,” said Abdul Hadi Safi, a professor of Islamic studies and management. “But if God doesn’t want something to happen, it won’t happen.”
Safi cited the frequent inaccuracy of his smartphone’s weather app to explain his reasoning. Making it rain even when Google says the sky should be sunny “is God’s way of saying: I’m the boss,” he said.
Some religious scholars at Taliban-run institutes fear that Afghanistan’s prolonged drought and growing number of deadly floods could be, at best, a punishment from God and, at worst, a sign of the apocalypse. Others allege a new chapter in American hegemony: a foreign conspiracy to bring the Taliban-run regime to its knees by exposing it to natural disasters.
The institute’s members agree, however, that foreign powers are responsible for climate change and that it is a religious duty to combat it.
Humvees and night vision goggles
In Chesht-e-Sharif, a remote town in western Afghanistan, the Taliban’s battle against climate change is being fought with American night-vision goggles and two of the Humvees that were seized after the US withdrawal three years ago.
Local police chief Abdul Hay Motmayan and his men were on patrol last month when a small local stream suddenly got out of control. As drenched and injured residents emerged from the floodwaters, Mr. Motmayan set aside his assault rifle and converted his Humvee into a makeshift ambulance. The dimly lit vehicle sped through pitch-black villages. Miraculously, he said, no one died in the flooding that night.
“The Humvee is very strong and cannot be washed away,” said Motmayan, a former Taliban commander. “It can go where others cannot go.”
But few of the more than 800 displaced residents shared his sense of accomplishment. Most of their fields had been destroyed, their livestock drowned and their possessions washed away.
When Washington Post journalists showed up in his town, Motmayan initially mistook them for an international aid team and enthusiastically shook their hands, saying that no other aid had arrived yet. When the first government aid convoy finally arrived on the third day, Motmayan was repeatedly shushed by locals. Skirmishes broke out between Taliban soldiers and locals.
“I’m fed up with life,” one man shouted. Police officers pulled a Post reporter away from the scene.
Motmayan and his men said there was nothing more they could have done. “These people are upset, but we are also sad,” Motmayan said, walking through the ruins of the village.
But when senior disaster response officials arrived in this remote town later that day, they disagreed. “If there had been just a simple flood barrier, this village could have been saved,” said Wakil Ahmad Nayabi, an expert with the disaster directorate, shaking his head. “People don’t believe in climate change, but they need to understand it so they can protect themselves.”
Motmayan, the police chief, acknowledged that he had never heard of climate change.
A lesson on climate change
With foreign funding for major projects on hold, government officials want residents to consider themselves the first line of defense.
“God will not help those who do not act for themselves,” Mohammad Edris Hanif, 32, a regional agriculture director, said during a recent workshop. Surrounded by farmers, he sat on a rug in an orchard in Wardak, a former Taliban stronghold near Kabul.
Farmers listened in silence as they were instructed to keep the grass on the mountains untouched so it could absorb the rain and were warned not to move rocks that form natural barriers against floods.
During a break, one of the officials apologized to a reporter for farmers’ inability to understand climate change, despite the government’s best efforts. Standing nearby, resident Abdul Ahad Hemat, 53, begged to differ. He said he may not always understand what educated people in cities say about climate change, but now he can see the effects of shifting seasonal weather patterns on his own fields.
He agreed with the government that it is his religious responsibility as a Muslim to survive the disaster and endure hardship. But most of the government’s advice on how to adapt has so far proved useless.
How, he asked, was he supposed to build a dam alone?
Mirwais Mohammadi and Lutfullah Qasimyar contributed to this report.
