This week's Fireside Chat featured an exciting presentation from David Shavin of Executive Intelligence Review, on the history you were never told about the plot to develop Afghanistan. Think Afghanistan has always been a lifeless desert that is plagued by corruption and sectarian fighting? Think again.
The Helmand Valley Authority (HVA), modelled on the US's TVA project, was launched in 1952 to develop a key area of Afghanistan's territory. As with the TVA, the HVA project involved a top-down development of the whole region, centered upon electricity, irrigation, and flood control. But it also included improvements in farm equipment and practices, canals that helped reclaim the desert lands. Grain and cotton flourished and they became the core of the nation’s economy. Also, the agricultural developments in the 1950’s pushed Helmand's opium production aside – though that was revived in the 1990’s.
Unfortunately, as the US turned away from it's identity after Kennedy's assassination and Nixon's pulling the plug on the Bretton Woods System, our nation wasn't the only thing that began to go fallow fall apart. Some of the same infrastructure the US helped to construct in the 1950's fell into disrepair and was eventually added to a target list to bomb during our "war on terror" after 2001.
Let's change this ugly turn of events and make Afghanistan a true turning point in history.