BLOG
April 3rd, 2026
Via Havli substack, commentary on how Central Asian countries are able to use their position as power exporters for leverage as Taliban-run Afghanistan presses ahead with an ambitious canal project.
After all, Uzbekistan’s water resources minister would have every reason to feel unsettled.
The most recent bulletin produced by the Interstate Water Management Coordination Commission (IWMCC), a five-nation Soviet?era holdover that rations the resources of Central Asia’s Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, makes for troubling reading.
As of February, the southern river, the Amu Darya, was flowing at only 67 percent of the norm. The Syr Darya was carrying 87 percent of its expected volume.
Meanwhile, the Tuyamuyun reservoir, a huge water storage facility on the lower Amu Darya, on the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, held around 4.3 billion cubic metres of water as of February 10, down from almost 5 billion cubic metres a year earlier. That is some 12 percent below what planners had projected for that point in the season.
With the irrigation season approaching, lower flows and depleted reserves will constrain water available for agriculture in the months ahead.
The figures for the Amu Darya are measured at a gauging point far downstream, at Kerki in Turkmenistan, meaning they reflect what is actually arriving in the lower reaches of the river after it has travelled past Afghanistan.
That is a crucial detail, because lurking upstream is a project that may reshape the river’s future more dramatically than seasonal variations and more quickly than climate change: Afghanistan’s Qosh-Tepa canal.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid offered a status update on works in September. Phase two of the 285-kilometre channel, which is designed to draw 20.5 billion cubic metres of water annually from the Amu Darya, would be completed within five months, he said.
Things appear to be behind schedule, but not by far. In another progress report issued in March, officials in Kabul insisted the second phase of the Qosh-Tepa was 98 percent complete.
All this sounds potentially catastrophic for downstream countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but speaking in an interview late last month, Khamroyev, the Uzbek water resources minister, was sanguine.