Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from a Center for the National Interest report entitled “Afghanistan’s Qoshtepa Canal and Water Security in Central Asia,” with some edits made for style and clarity. The full publication can be accessed here. 

The Qoshtepa Canal, currently under construction in Afghanistan on the Amu Darya River, will dramatically affect the availability of water for irrigation and drinking in one of the world’s most water-scarce regions—Central Asia. In addition to their already existing water challenges, the Amu Darya River basin and Central Asia are experiencing a far more rapid rate of climate change than the global average.

The interim authorities of Afghanistan face major financial, technical, and diplomatic challenges to complete the canal in an efficient, sustainable, and peaceful manner. The region cannot afford for this canal to be as poorly designed and constructed as Soviet canals on the Amu Darya, which, decades after their construction, continue to impinge on regional water security. The Soviet historical legacy also excludes Afghanistan from essential water-sharing agreements.

Six months after regaining control of Afghanistan, in March 2022, the interim authorities of Afghanistan reinitiated the Qoshtepa Canal project on the Amu Darya River, also known as the “Nile of Central Asia.” Initial plans for the canal to be built with Soviet assistance date back to the 1970s. This did not happen. In 2018, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) commissioned a feasibility study for the project, and the Ghani government built the first seven kilometers of the canal before being thrown out of power in August 2021 by the Taliban, a group now referred to in official parlance as the “interim authorities of Afghanistan.”

The canal is by far the largest development project undertaken in the history of Afghanistan, and it is intended to demonstrate—to Afghanistan and the world—the interim authorities’ ability to manage a large infrastructure project that will reduce poverty, increase arable agricultural land, and enhance food security. The planned canal is 287 kilometers long and 8.5 meters deep, with an average width of 100 meters (The canal’s width starts at 152 meters and gradually decreases to sixty-four meters at the end. Thus, the average width can be said to be roughly 100 meters). It is expected to open more than 1.2 million acres of farmland and create about 200,000 new jobs. Construction of the main canal, involving up to 5,000 workers and 4,000 earth movers and trucks, is progressing rapidly and has entered its second phase. Most reports speak of a six-year timetable for canal creation. Still, the overall project, including all the branch, secondary, tertiary, and distributive canals and water regulatory/distributary structures required for actual irrigation, will take significantly longer to complete fully.

In many ways, the Qoshtepa Canal represents for Afghanistan’s de facto authorities a bold new vision for a peaceful, verdant, prosperous, and self-sufficient country. Of course, the Taliban were not the first to explore this project, but they have enthusiastically embraced it. The canal represents part of the Taliban’s political effort to build support from the population. They have launched a major public relations campaign about the canal, which is encapsulated in a twenty-seven-minute video produced in early 2024 after the first phase of the project concluded. The background of the video shows dozens of excavators and trucks, just a fraction of the 3,500 such earth-moving vehicles engaged in the project, digging and moving dirt in fast motion, seemingly to demonstrate that this is a vast and modern infrastructure project for the benefit of the entire country. Breathtaking shots emphasize the majestic vastness of the canal and its transformation of the landscape.

Taliban chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid summarized the significance of the canal in an interview with Nikkei Asia in December 2023:

The construction of the Qoshtepa Canal is taking place at a time when Afghanistan is facing numerous economic challenges as the country wakes up from four decades of war, with unemployment rates at their peak...In such times, this project represents a great source of hope for all our countrymen.

The Geographical Context

The Amu Darya River originates from the Hindu Kush and Wakhan regions in the Pamir Highlands of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The Amu Darya basin is one of four significant basins in Afghanistan (the others being the Helmand/Hari-Rud, the Panj, and the Kabul). Its tributary, the Panj, is shared with Tajikistan, and the basin itself is located downstream in the vicinity of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Before the near-disappearance of the Aral Sea over the last sixty years, the Amu Darya waters flowed into the Aral Sea, where the river came to an end. Now, that flow is barely a trickle when it reaches the old Aral Sea territory.

The Qoshtepa Canal project is located in a very strategically important region in three northern provinces of Afghanistan: Balkh Province, where it starts, and Jawzjan and Faryab Provinces, where the Amu Darya River marks the border of Afghanistan with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These three provinces, whose combined population is 3.33 million (out of the country’s total population of nearly 43 million), are home to significant minority ethnic groups, including Tajiks, Uzbeks, Sunni Hazara, and others. They have presented governance challenges for many different governments in Kabul. In the late 1990s, this was the base of much of the Northern Alliance, which supported the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in bringing down the Taliban government in 2001. Northern Afghanistan, especially the area a bit north of the first intake point of the planned canal route on the very porous Afghan-Tajik border, has served as a haven for Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) and other transboundary terrorist groups.

The National and Regional Significance

The project has a long history dating back at least to the 1970s. Still, it was paused in 1978, after the Soviet Union supported a coup to overthrow President Mohammad Daoud Khan of the Republic of Afghanistan and before the Soviets fully invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. The Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s led to the collapse of the country’s governance, which contributed to the degradation of land and water resources. Only half of arable land is now cultivated each year due to water shortages, and 11 percent of the country has no access to water. This current reality is in stark contrast to the Afghanistan of the 1970s when the country was not only food-sufficient but also one of the world’s largest exporters of dried fruits and nuts.

Afghanistan had not been tapping the waters of the Amu Darya significantly from the 1970s onward. But the Soviet Central Asian republics were exploiting scarce water resources in such an unsustainable manner so as to create one of the greatest environmental catastrophes of our time: the drying up of the Aral Sea that once straddled the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Soviet Union’s shortsighted policies—that is, the intensive cultivation of cotton that still consumes 92 percent of the extracted water of the Amu Darya, the construction of large-scale irrigation canals in the arid part of Central Asia that began in the 1930s, and a decades-long concealment of the Aral Sea disaster by authorities—turned the world’s fourth largest inland sea into a barren desert and made its full restoration virtually impossible. This is not the kind of experience that anyone would wish to see replicated with the Qoshtepa Canal.

Like earlier canal projects, the Qoshtepa Canal will have a significant impact on the Amu Darya flow. According to the 2019 USAID feasibility study for the project, the Qoshtepa Canal was to irrigate 1.2 million acres of land annually, and up to 13.02 billion cubic meters (bcm) of water would have to be extracted from the Amu Darya. However, only 49 percent of the total land available in the surrounding area is estimated to be arable; hence, the actual annual water extraction would be around 6.37 bcm. But analyzing these numbers, and excluding nonarable lands such as saline and sand dune-dominated lands, it appears that the Qoshtepa Canal might divert 8–17 percent of water from the Amu Darya, which is lower than the earlier and most quoted estimate of 20 percent. There is clearly an urgent need for more research on how the canal could affect the water flow of the Amu Darya in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Although the canal will potentially reduce poverty and improve food security in Afghanistan, it raises serious concerns for downstream Central Asian neighbors like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The canal would divert Amu Darya water away from these states—water they have relied on for decades to grow water-intensive cotton, fruits, vegetables, and grass for livestock. These downstream states already suffer from significant water shortages; for example, there have reportedly been some days when no tap water was available in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (as well as Afghanistan) suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change that are making Central Asia drier and hotter. Hence, the quest for water security and food security in the region will only get more intense in the near future.