"Afghanistan’s rulers, cut off from foreign assistance, are tackling climate change on their own while debating whether it is God’s doing or a foreign plot."
"KABUL — When Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers headed to the country’s first “international climate change conference” earlier this year in the eastern city of Jalalabad, few foreign guests turned up.
Afghanistan remains a global pariah in large part because of the Taliban’s restrictions on female education, and that isolation has deprived the country of foreign funding for urgently needed measures to adapt to climate change.
So, for now, the Afghan government is largely confronting the impacts of global warming on its own and putting the blame for floods and sluggish governmental aid on foreigners. Some former Taliban commanders view global carbon emissions as a new invisible enemy.
“Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,” Lutfullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister, said in his opening speech at the Jalalabad conference. “We must defend our climate, our water, our soil to the same extent we defend ourselves against invasions.”"
Rick Noack reports for the Washington Post July 12, 2024.
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