Damming Afghanistan:
Modernization in a Buffer State

Nick Cullather

For suggestions on how to use this article in the United States history survey course, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web site supplement at <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching>.
In May 1960, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee left Kandahar and drove ninety miles on freshly paved roads to Lashkar Gah, a modern planned city known locally as the New York of Afghanistan. At the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers, close against the ancient ruins of Qala Bist, Lashkar Gah's eight thousand residents lived in suburban-style tract homes surrounded by broad lawns. The city boasted an alabaster mosque, one of the country's best hospitals, Afghanistan's only coeducational high school, and the headquarters of the Helmand Valley Authority, a multipurpose dam project funded by the United States. This unexpected proliferation of modernity led Toynbee to reflect on the warning of Sophocles: "the craft of his engines surpasseth his dreams." In the area around Kandahar, traditional Afghanistan had vanished. "The domain of the Helmand Valley Authority," he reported, "has become a piece of America inserted into the Afghan landscape. . . . The new world they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River's expense is to be an America-in-Asia."1	1
Toynbee's image sits uneasily with the visuals of the recent war. In the granite battlescapes captured by the cameras of the Al-Jazeera network in the days after September 11, 2001, Afghanistan appeared as perhaps the one spot on earth unmarked by the influence of American culture. When correspondents referred to Afghanistan's history it was to the Soviet invasion of the 1980s or the earlier "great game" that ended with the British Empire's departure from South Asia in 1947. There was a silence about the three decades in between. During that time, Afghanistan was aptly called an "economic Korea," divided between the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south.2 In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States made southern Afghanistan a showcase of nation building with a dazzling project to "reclaim" and modernize a swath of territory comprising roughly half the country. The Helmand venture is worth remembering today as a precedent for renewed efforts to rebuild Afghanistan, but it was also part of a larger project—alternately called development, nation building, or modernization—that deployed science and expertise to reconstruct the entire postcolonial world.	2
When President Harry S. Truman announced Point IV, a "bold new program . . . for the improvement . . . of underdeveloped areas," in January 1949, the global response was startling. Truman "hit the jackpot of the world's political emotions," Fortune noted. National delegations lined up to receive assistance that a few years earlier would have been seen as a colonial intrusion. Development inserted into international relations a new problematic and a new concept of time, asserting that all nations followed a common historical path and that those in the lead had a moral duty to those who followed. "We must frankly recognize," a State Department official observed in 1953, "that the hands of the clock of history are set at different hours in different parts of the world." Leaders of newly independent states, such as Mohammad Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, accepted these terms, merging their own governmental mandates into the stream of nations moving toward modernity. Development was not simply the best but the only course. "There is only one-way traffic in Time," Nehru observed.3	3
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