I wrote this after getting back from Northern Afghanistan in 2001. It is an incredible country, like no where else I had ever been. I felt like I had traveled deep into the past, that I could see what buildings looked like in Babylon, what agriculture was like in ancient Egypt.
After a brutal dust storm, I had a different notion: that Afghanistan was not a vision of the past but rather a harbinger of the future, if we befall an ecological disaster.
While cleaning up after a dust storm, you have a frightening thought.
The day before had been warm and pleasant. But as you were getting ready for bed (actually bed is a misnomer, you sleep on the ground in a sleeping bag in a room with four other journalists), you heard the wind pick up, you saw the cloud of dust. You had been told of the thousand-day wind. You know the damage it can do. You secure your gear, close the doors, and shut the windows.
Throughout the night you hear the pounding of the sand. It sounds like a rainstorm, like a hurricane. In the morning, the storm over, you reach for your glasses. Something is wrong, the world is still out of focus. You realize that your lenses are caked with dust even though you are inside a battened down house. You look outside. The top of the shack has been blown off. Your satellite dish, rated for 100mph winds, has been knocked off its axis. Two inches of fine powder cover every surface. The sky is yellow.
The Afghan soldiers you share the house with aren't particularly concerned. These dust storms are a common occurrence. They just stay inside until it ends.
500 years ago, this part of Afghanistan had been forested. To smelt iron, people chopped down trees for firewood. They chopped down a lot of trees. Deforestation led to the erosion of topsoil, leaving only this fine dust you are always breathing.
Without topsoil, agriculture became precarious. Resources became scarce. When resources become scarce, be they food, or water, or women, people fight over them. Maybe, you think, the problem with Afghanistan, this ancient civilization, this trade route between Rome and China, this intellectual center where algebra was invented 800 years ago, isn't political or cultural, but ecological.
Now some people say that we are destroying the earth in a similar way that Afghanis destroyed their forests 500 years ago. If that is true, then perhaps, perhaps, you were wrong when you thought Afghanistan was a vision of the past, that in Afghanistan you could see how people lived thousands of years ago.
Perhaps, if the environmentalists are right, if we are overpopulating the earth and destroying the resources we need to survive, if we are sliding towards an environmental apocalypse, if we are turning our planet into an arid wasteland, then perhaps someday the whole world will be like Afghanistan. Perhaps then, (pray it isn't so) Afghanistan is a vision of our future.