Drought compounds troubles for Afghans

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan -- A popular Afghan ballad sings of Arghandab's orchards, a cool, quiet retreat that "I can't forget even if I try."

This spring Afghans will have to try hard to remember the green of Arghandab, amid the caked and cracked earth, the empty streams, the lifeless trees.

Rain briefly spattered the dust in southern Afghanistan last week, but the sun soon returned, the wind blew all the harder, and winter drew to its close, the fourth annual "wet" season with scant precipitation here at the epicenter of the most extensive drought in the world.

Some rain and snow may have helped other regions, but in the south less than a half-inch of rain fell in the "rainy" month of February, reported U.N. agronomist Mohammad Morad in nearby Kandahar. "It's very bad," he said.

"Half of them have left already," district chief Haji Naik Nazar said of Arghandab's people.

"The ones still here have mostly abandoned their farms. They're trying to work as day laborers or cleaners or drivers or selling small things."

Dust bowl

Most of the orchards -- Arghandab's apples and peaches and pomegranates -- "are dead," he said.

In this Afghan dust bowl, desperation forms a line each morning in the district office courtyard, as people arrive from villages as far as five miles away, by foot, by donkey, pushing wheelbarrows, to pump water from the only well in the area that still has any.

Shallow household wells, of the bucket variety, went dry long ago. The Afghan Red Crescent Society and other aid organizations are working to install deeper pump wells, one to every village, but the program -- at $500 a pump -- takes time. "Many villages are still without hand pumps," said Abdul Latif of Kandahar's Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross.

Scenes similar to those in Arghandab are playing out in villages across Afghanistan, in the worst drought to parch this luckless land in a half-century, a natural disaster that greatly complicates efforts to restore normal economic life after 23 years of war.

Depending on aid

Millions of Afghans displaced by fighting and the collapse of agriculture depend on international food aid to survive.

But the impact of the drought, affecting 60 million people in six southern and central Asian nations, reaches far beyond day-to-day needs.