AFGHANISTAN'S QOSH TEPA CANAL: THE UNCALCULATED WILDCARD IN CENTRAL ASIAN WATER DIPLOMACY

Abstract

Since 2022, the de facto Taliban administration has built the roughly 285-kilometre Qosh Tepa Canal in northern Afghanistan. The canal has a weirless intake on the left bank of the Amu Darya, and it is designed to irrigate about 550,000 hectares across Balkh, Jawzjan, and Faryab provinces. Estimates of its eventual abstraction range from about 15 to 25 percent of the river's annual flow, and the more extreme published figures approach one-third (Ilkhamov, 2023; Kuchins et al., 2024; Overland et al., 2025). The project breaks with the basin's operating logic in three ways. It is unilateral, it is not offset by any reciprocal benefit to downstream states, and it is executed by an actor excluded from every Soviet and post-Soviet allocation regime. This article traces the canal's historical origins, evaluates its engineering vulnerabilities, and assesses the exposure of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It contrasts the canal with the familiar upstream–downstream bargaining between hydropower and irrigation interests. It also examines the legal void created by Afghanistan's non-participation in the 1992 Almaty Agreement and the 1992 Helsinki Convention. I argue that Qosh Tepa converts Central Asian water security from a manageable sub-regional trade-off into an urgent multilateral necessity, and I propose institutional and technical pathways for responding.