When the Soviet government o;cially incorporated the region
into its empire in 1917, it began transforming the rivers into a web
of irrigation canals that brought cotton production to the area on a
massive scale. Such large quantities of water were diverted that the
Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest inland sea, began to disappear, leaving salt and dust storms in its place. When Moscow’s
rule ended in 1991, five new Central Asian nations appeared:
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. They are burdened with plunging economies, artificial borders, and a growing environmental crisis.
Despite the divisions that have emerged since the Soviet
Union collapsed, the two rivers that run through the countries
still bind them inextricably. Two thousand five hundred kilo-
meters long, the Amu Darya is formed from the thousands of
glacial mountain streams that feed the Panj and Vakhsh rivers
in Tajikistan. It begins a longer, slower, flatter course between
deserts downstream, where Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
and Turkmenistan come together. Stopped up at man-made
dams and reservoirs along the way, it fractures into a maze of
irrigation canals so that the river itself now vanishes well before
reaching the Aral Sea.
