The Taliban are digging an enormous canal
A mega-project in northern Afghanistan risks raising regional tensions
Channelling Taliban ambitionimage: deputy prime minister for econom
Feb 16th 2023
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Taliban officials have started talking up a new canal under construction in the arid north of Afghanistan. A video recently posted on YouTube shows shiny diggers roaring over sand dunes and workers from different ethnic groups toiling together. The Islamist regime says some 5,500 people are working around the clock on the project, using over 3,300 bits of machinery. Once completed, the Qosh Tepa Canal will divert water from the Amu Darya river for irrigation. The river, once known as the Oxus, rises in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, flows into Uzbekistan and is one of the longest in Central Asia.
The Taliban expects the project to turn 550,000 hectares of desert into much-needed farmland.
Amid much terrible news from
Afghanistan, including the threatened impoverishment of almost its entire population of 40m, the canal is a prominent test of the Taliban’s ability to govern. “Many people doubt we have the capacity to implement this project,” Abdul Rahman Attash, head of the National Development Corporation, has declared. “We will prove Afghanistan can stand up its economy and implement national projects on its own.”