Dana Visalli: Afghanistan, Ecology and the End of War!r

The United States has spent over $600 billion dollars on its Afghan war effort, but most of the money has gone to military infrastructure and sophisticated weaponry. Little of it has gone to the education of Afghan youth, or to addressing the degradation of Afghan land. The children I am working with, had never heard the word ecology. They can only conjecture at the species of animals and plants, that might co-habit their nation, guessing at camels, elephants and lions, all of which are wrong. One student suggested the word snake. When I asked her if she knew what a snake was, she said that she thought it was some kind of bug. This is one small indicator of the level of ignorance, that humanity faces about the physical world that we inhabit, and ecological basis of life on earth. Traveling around Afghanistan, one impression that dominates, is the absence of vegetation, and the abundance of rocks. It has been estimated that 50% of the country was swathed in forests 2000 years ago, but today tree cover is reduced to 0.25% of the land. The loss is driven by an ancient and growing human population and its attendant herds of domestic sheep, goats, cows and pigs. The removal of a large portion of the biomass from the landscape, means far less moisture is transpired into the atmosphere, reducing precipitation. Thus, human impacts have initiated a negative feedback loop, that has reduced the productive capacity of the Afghanistan's ecosystems. The ecological deterioration has reached crisis proportions, as the human population has grown from 10 million to 35 million in the past 50 years, and is projected to reach 82 million by 2050. The impoverishment of the land has lead to the deepening impoverishment of the Afghan people, with one quarter of the total population, many of them children, living on less than a dollar a day. The American response to this basic lack of ecological insight, has been a military one, an attempt to eradicate poverty and environmental degradation, with a massive influx of bullets and bombs. Our irrational behavior in Afghanistan reflects a pattern that extends well back into history. It is a little known fact, for example, that the genesis of the Korean War was the US military occupation of the country, two days after Korea declared its independence. Korea's issues at the time, were social and environmental. The US response was to drop 600,000 tons of napalm on North Korea, more than we dropped during the entire Vietnam War!