Reading this story about climate impacts in rural Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but compare to the stories coming our of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Fundamentalist religion having a tough time adjusting to a climate changed world.
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.
Before the Taliban takeover, 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-run government is correct when it says that “global money for climate has dried up.”
While Taliban beliefs are rooted in centuries-old Pashtun culture and an extreme interpretation of Islam, the government affirms that climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board. The Taliban has asked imams in Afghanistan’s tens of thousands of mosques to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection.
Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day, said Kabul-based imam Farisullah Azhari. “God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?” he said in an interview.
Historically, the Taliban’s environmental activism was unrelated to modern climate science. The Quran encourages Muslims to plant trees, and locals recall how the Taliban flogged illegal loggers when the group was first in power in the late 1990s.
At the Taliban-run Afghanistan Science Academy in Kabul, religious scholars are debating how to reconcile modern science with centuries-old religious beliefs.
“Climate change is real,” said Abdul Hadi Safi, 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 prolonged drought and the growing number of deadly floods in Afghanistan may at best be God’s punishment and at worst a sign of the apocalypse. Others allege a new chapter in American hegemony: a foreign plot to bring the Taliban regime to its knees by exposing it to natural disasters.
Members of the institute agree, however, that foreign powers are responsible for climate change and that it’s a religious duty to fight it.
In Chesht-e-Sharif, a remote town in western Afghanistan, the Taliban’s battle against climate change is fought with American night-vision goggles and two of the Humvees that were seized after the U.S. withdrawal three years ago.
Local police chief Abdul Hay Motmayan and his men happened to be on patrol last month when a small local stream suddenly swelled out of control. As soaked and injured villagers emerged from the flood, Motmayan put aside his assault rifle and turned the Humvee into a makeshift ambulance. The dimly lit vehicle sped through pitch-black villages. Miraculously, he said, nobody died in the flood that evening.
“The Humvee is very strong, and it can’t be washed away,” Motmayan, a former Taliban commander, said. “It can go where others cannot go.”
But few of the more than 800 displaced villagers shared his sense of accomplishment. Most of their fields were destroyed, their livestock drowned, and possessions washed away.
When Washington Post journalists appeared in his town, Motmayan initially mistook them for an international aid team and enthusiastically shook their hands, saying no other assistance had yet arrived. By the time the first government aid convoy finally arrived on day three, Motmayan was repeatedly shouted down by locals. Skirmishes between Taliban soldiers and locals broke out.
“I’m fed up with life,” yelled one man. Police officers steered a Post reporter away from the scene.
Motmayan and his men said there is nothing more they could have done. “These people are upset, but we’re sad, too,” said Motmayan, walking around the village’s ruins.
But when senior disaster response officials arrived in this remote town later in the day, they disagreed. “If there had been just one simple flood barrier, this village could have been saved,” said Wakil Ahmad Nayabi, a disaster directorate expert, shaking his head. “People don’t believe in climate change, but they need to understand it to be able to protect themselves.”
Motmayan, the police chief, acknowledged he had never heard of climate change.
Ain’t it funny how religious people don’t conclude that Allah is unhappy with what they are doing, instead of conveniently blaming natural disasters on some other group they want to oppress?