Even in war, Mehrab Ahmadzai waits for rain.
The 48-year-old farmer is from Surkhrod district, in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province near the border with Pakistan. When the latest hostilities between the two nations arrived in late February, the district was among those caught in the cross-fire. Yet, when Ahmadzai looks to the sky, the prayer he offers up is for water.
His wheat is rain fed. It takes what little money he has to sow. It is meant to feed his family of nine. And now, like his sense of hope, it is beginning to give way.
Seven rivers run through this region – the Kabul, Kunar, Logar, Maidan, Panjshir, Gorband and Alishing. But for farmers like Ahmadzai, that abundance means nothing. In the absence of canals and functioning irrigation channels, the water never reaches their fields.
“This is what decades of war left us with,” he says.
Afghanistan has lived through over four decades of armed conflict. It is also one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change. These realities inextricably feed into each other. The violence has not only scarred the country politically and economically, but it has also crippled its ability to use and manage its own water. Irrigation systems have decayed, watershed planning has stalled, and rural infrastructure has been left to collapse.
Abdul Wali Modaqiq, the former deputy director general of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, told Dialogue Earth that an almost incessant state of conflict has crippled the country’s ability to develop a mechanism to develop its watershed. “Projects approved by previous governments for rehabilitation of irrigation infrastructure could not be initiated due to persistent security threats in rural Afghanistan,” he said.
That long attrition is now colliding with acute climate stress. Afghanistan is highly exposed to drought. Nearly 10 million people were projected to be “acutely food insecure” in the country in the latter half of 2025, and one-third of them were located in areas severely affected by drought, found a 2025 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Droughts are only compounding in Afghanistan. Last year’s was “significantly more severe and widespread than those of 2018 and 2021,” stated the report, with “greater crop stress, deeper vegetation decline and wider geographic impact.” The report also noted “widespread rainfed crop failure and alarming ground water depletion.”
The newest instalment of hostilities with Pakistan only sharpens these food and livelihood insecurities. Afghanistan shares about 90% of its water resources with neighbouring countries, yet it has just one bilateral water treaty, with Iran, and none with Pakistan. The Kabul River, which flows from Afghanistan into Pakistan, sustains millions of people on both sides of the border.
For farmers in rural Afghanistan, the crisis is an intimate part of their every-day. Some are abandoning water-intensive crops such as wheat, rice and maize in favour of beans, barley, sorghum and tomatoes. “Many have turned to the poppy crop out of desperation, despite the ban by the Taliban on its cultivation,” says Abdul Wahid Amiri, another farmer from the district.
But Afghan farmers are no longer dealing with one bad season, or one failed policy. They are trying to endure under the weight of drought, conflict, climate change and incessant uncertainty. Amiri himself, tortured by repeated crop failures, rising costs and depleting rainfall, stopped cultivation altogether. Like many others in the region, he has moved to the city in search of work.
Back on his farm, Ahmadzai says, slowly and thoughtfully: “Low-water crops can survive scarcity, not extremity.”
Drying up
With each passing year, the water runs lower.
Afghanistan’s rivers have been under growing strain for decades, as ecological degradation collides with increasingly erratic climate conditions, says Dr Fazlullah Akhtar, a water resources expert based in Bonn, Germany. Current projections, according to Akhtar, point to both lower peak-river flows and a shift in when water is available. “Our modelling shows that maximum monthly streamflow could decline by up to about 40% by 2050, while snowmelt is likely to occur earlier in spring,” he says.
The Kabul River Basin, which supports the livelihoods of 25 million people across nine provinces straddling the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, has already been weakening. Its average discharge declined by 4.6% between 1950 and 2018.
This decline has consequences beyond Afghanistan. Combined with the latest tensions between the two countries, it could intensify water stress downstream in Pakistan. A member of the Indus River System Authority, who asked that their identity be protected, said around 20% of Indus inflows during the early Kharif season come from Afghanistan. “Unilateral hydropower projects in Afghanistan could cut those flows by around 16%, affecting cropping, water storage and energy generation in downstream Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab in Pakistan,” they said.
In other words, a river already under environmental pressure could become another source of “hydro-political tension.”
Experts say one of the few sustainable paths to adaptation lies in cooperation between the two countries. “Harnessing this water through cooperation would benefit the entire region,” said Modaqiq. Better management, he argued, could also help reforest catchment areas, slow rising temperatures, ease glacial melt and reduce silt in rivers.
For now however, most remain sceptical that any such river agreement is close. “Afghanistan, once again, closed the window for cooperation over such outstanding issues that had opened with the withdrawal of the NATO troops, and the current setup in Kabul,” the Indus River System Authority official said.
When adaptation fails
On the Afghan side of the border, even when water ought to be within reach, scarcity persists.
In Nangarhar and Laghman provinces, farmers face severe shortages even where tributaries run nearby. The problem is not simply the absence of water, but the inability to use what is there. Irrigation canals are choked with silt, distribution networks have fallen into disrepair, and water that should reach fields is lost along the way. “The decayed irrigation canals and distribution networks have been in a state of absolute disrepair, preventing farmers from fully harnessing the available water in our rivers that flow past our country,” said a senior official at the Directorate of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock in Kabul. The official requested anonymity, not wishing to be seen commenting on the issue during wartime.
“Infrastructure requires maintenance, and maintenance demands funding, stability and a peaceful environment to function. For the past four decades, these essentials were largely absent: no consistent central or provincial authority, widespread migration, bombing, little to no investment, and virtually no industry. All of these factors had severely devastated the agricultural sector,” the official said.
According to a 2017 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the four decades of war left irrigation systems “in varying states of disrepair” in Afghanistan, with the irrigated area in the country falling by almost 70% and crop productivity falling by more than 50%.
For farmers, that disrepair is everywhere. Silt is not only clogging channels but spilling into farmland itself, degrading the land. “The amount of silt has increased significantly over the past couple of years, filling our farms and channels beyond rehabilitation,” said Khan Afzal, a 65-year-old farmer from Surkhrod district. The silt, he said, is infertile, dries quickly, hardens the surface, traps heat and scorches crops when temperatures rise.
The floods of 2024 made things worse. Irrigation systems were damaged across 28 provinces, with around 5,410 km of canals affected. “The government lacks the machinery, funds and capacity to restore irrigation infrastructure, so communities come together to rehabilitate it through self-help,” said Wazir Gul, 51, who returned two years ago from Pakistan to his native Hesarak district in Nangarhar.
That repair work is punishingly manual. Locals dig out and patch canals themselves. Without machinery, Gul said, they reinforce embankments with sandbags and restore channels by hand. And even where farmers adapt, the weather keeps shifting beneath them. Droughts have reduced wheat production by 4% on irrigated land and by 24% in rain-fed areas, driven largely by water shortages and pest outbreaks.
Then there are intensifying frost waves. “In recent years, increasingly harsh frost waves have become frequent, taking a heavy toll on humans, livestock and crops alike,” Modaqiq said. Farmers say the low-water crops they switched to in order to survive drought often fail in these cold snaps. “Last year, the potato crop on my six acres of land, which replaced wheat, was damaged severely due to a frost spell,” said Asad Momand, from Dara-e-Nur district in Nangarhar.
Intertwined economies
Rising temperatures, recurring droughts and hot winds are shrinking and retreating Afghanistan’s glaciers, further tightening water scarcity, said an official with the Directorate of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, who also requested anonymity. That pressure, according to Dr Akhtar, means that farmers in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are likely to have less water during the critical May-July growing period, where irrigation matters most. Later in the season, more intense rainfall could bring flash floods, damaging crops, canals and farmland.
But the crisis is not just environmental. The latest tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan have deepened food insecurity, disrupting agricultural imports such as fertiliser and flour, and exports such as dried fruits. “The halt in cross-border trade has also triggered unemployment in border towns, where thousands rely on daily commerce for their livelihoods,” one of the officials quoted above said.
Pakistan and Afghanistan’s trade has seen a shift in recent years, with Pakistan’s exports to Afghanistan declining and imports from Afghanistan gradually increasing, according to a November 2025 report from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics seen by Dialogue Earth. The report stated that when the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s exports to Afghanistan stood at USD 1 billion and its imports at USD 612 million. In the following two years, exports declined to USD 977 million while imports rose to USD 887 million.
As political tensions and death tolls in the conflict mount, many farmers along the Durand Line are being forced to do the once unthinkable: stop cultivation, or even sell off their livestock.
One of those farmers was Ahmadzai. In January, he sold nine of his 13 animals, including his only cow, partly because there was not enough fodder to keep them alive. And partly because his family needed food. It was never this bad before. Once, the small plot he cultivated yielded enough wheat to feed his family of nine for a year. “It wasn’t abundance, but it was security,” he said.
That security is now a distant dream.