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American Morning
A Look at Afghanistan's Geography
Aired October 19, 2001 - 10:25 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: With word of U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan, we want to try to get a better sense of the lay of land there and some of the possible hide-outs for Afghan troops.
Miles O'Brien has been taking a closer look at that -- Miles.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Daryn. We're up here in the map room, a couple of floors above you.
I'm standing now in Russia, just north of Kazakstan. And beside me is Professor Jack Shroder, University of Nebraska, Omaha; a geologist, a geographer and generally an expert on the region. He spent many years in the '70s in particular traveling in and around Afghanistan putting together an atlas of Afghanistan.
And we're going to start with some real fundamental issues here, Professor Shroder, and how that ultimately plays into the strategy involved at the Pentagon: the flow of water. This is obviously a very arid region we're talking about here. Why don't you give us a sense of what's going on beneath the surface.
JACK SHRODER, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA: OK, walking in through Kazakstan, the Syr Darya River here that you can see because the border is white, and the Amu Darya River coming from Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a completely dry country. It depends entirely on rain and snowfall. These rivers all on the north side of Afghanistan all flow into the Aral Sea and various other depressions, which are all basins of interior drainage, so the water doesn't get out. The only place the water gets out to the sea is the Kabul River. It goes into the Indus River and down to the ocean.
The other place -- basin of interior drainage is down here in Southwestern Afghanistan. And the reason that this is important is because Afghanistan is so dry that the people have to dig shafts down to the water that's underground to get at the water to enable them to bring it to the surface and irrigate.
O'BRIEN: And this is something that's been going on for hundreds, perhaps ...
SHRODER: Alexander the Great first described this a long time ago.
O'BRIEN: And the term is Karez, correct? SHRODER: Karez, yes.
O'BRIEN: We have a little diagram. Let's take a look at it quickly to give people a sense of what we're talking about here. They're built into the side of a mountain. You're looking at a cross- section, if you will, of the side of a mountain. The blue area is the water table, which we're having well telestrated there. Give us a sense of how these shafts work and how the whole system works to help irrigate a field.
SHRODER: OK, well the uppermost shaft is called the mother well, the deepest one. And they dig down, straight down into the earth to find the water. Once they've found the water, then they've got to bring it out at some other place lower down. And they let the water come out very gently. But of course in the process of digging out, they run out of air and they don't have any light down there. So they dig other shafts.
And so they have a whole succession of shafts. Those shafts which, up on the surface, will have a doughnut of dirt around it, so they're very obvious in the satellite imagery -- and they're almost all mapped, so we know where they are and what they look like. It's easy to find them.
O'BRIEN: All right, let's go to the next graphic, and we'll show you the purpose is water -- there's also a few alcoves along the way. And the Soviets discovered this, much to their chagrin, during their occupation of Afghanistan.
SHRODER: The Afghans are very industrious diggers of the earth. And they dig -- during the war with the Soviet Union in the '80s they dug side chambers off there. And there are presumably lots and lots of those that still exist. And they can, of course, dig others as well.
O'BRIEN: All right, as we get to our close-up map here of Afghanistan, let's talk about spotting these donuts, as you describe them, and how that might help the Pentagon identify targets. I mean, just because you see a donut, you don't know necessarily know what's going on there. But they certainly could be used by al Qaeda.
SHRODER: Right. The donuts where -- the Karez irrigation is all around this area, up through Kandahar, into Herat and then over into the northern part of the area. That's where most of them are. There are literally thousands of them in this big "U" shape around Afghanistan like that. There are isolated places where Karez irrigation takes place in the middle of the country. But, of course, the -- Osama is probably in this area here, and his henchmen. And this is an area of many thousand Karez.
O'BRIEN: So just the bottom line here is there is a tremendous infrastructure of tunnels that have existed long before Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda came to power or to function. And this is something that certainly a terrorist organization could avail themself of.
SHRODER: Absolutely.
O'BRIEN: What does that mean, ultimately, when we're talking about special forces on the ground? This requires some training. Certainly there were (sic) tunnel warfare in Vietnam. It does require a special kind of training.
SHRODER: Well, the so-called tunnel rats of Vietnam -- some people like to go underground and they can handle it easily, other people don't like it at all. The Afghans who build these are a special breed, and they're -- they pass it on from father to son. They've been doing it for thousands of years. They're real good tunnel rats.
O'BRIEN: All right, Professor Jack Shroder, University of Nebraska, Omaha, a geologist and an expert on the region. A person, probably as much as anybody in the West, has traveled these hills and has a good sense of the lay of the land. We really appreciate your insights.
SHRODER: Thank you.
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