Last week, the AP reported that the Taliban’s “top environment official” wants to be included in the upcoming environmental talks in Brazil later this year—yes, the same “climate” conference for which they razed tens of thousands of acres of formerly-protected Amazonian forest to build a new highway, because obviously the pseudo-elites are above traveling less-than-perfect roadways, even if that means destroying one of the best (and free) carbon-capture systems in the world.
The Taliban has essentially been excluded from participation shortly after they came back into power in 2021, after Joe Biden haphazardly yanked out American forces: in 2023, the Taliban banned women from working with the UN, as well as other organizations. The UN responded by pausing/delaying/suspending certain planned projects, but now, head of the National Environmental Protection Agency, Matiul Haq Khalis, is calling for the UN to come around:
‘Afghanistan is severely affected by climate change,’ Khalis told a conference in Kabul. ‘Drought, water shortages, declining arable land, flash floods, and threats to food security are having a profound impact on people’s lives and the economy.
‘Although Afghanistan’s contribution to global climate change is almost nonexistent, it suffers greatly from its consequences. As a victim of climate change, Afghanistan has the right to be present at global platforms, especially at COP30, to voice the damages it has endured.’
First off, I’m struck by the absurdity that the Taliban has a climate diplomat—don’t they have bigger problems to worry about than natural weather patterns? Maybe a deeply-engrained culture of raping little boys under the practice of bacha bāzī? Though the practice still occurs all over Afghanistan (it’s proven hard to eradicate largely because of the tribal nature of its people as well as the general topography of the land), the (conservative-estimated) numbers from one province suggests that around half the men have maintained young boys as sex slaves:
Though the prevalence is difficult to discern due to limited data available, it has been suggested that approximately 50% of men in Kandahar had some iteration of sexual intercourse with men or boys at some point in their lives.
(This website features a haunting image of a teen boy, now aged-out of being a bacha, “quivering in a quiet rage” in a back corner of a restaurant—this is his life now. A leftist would say he’s perfectly fit for importation into a Western society.)
What about the opium use, which has been a major issue?
All that aside though, Khalis is resurrecting the “magic soil” theory. Afghanistan’s problems with “water shortages” and a decline in farmable land isn’t because the land is adequate (in this case because of the weather), but because the culture of the people living there sucks. If you can bring prosperity, order, and function out of the arid and desolate landscape of Arizona, or the blizzardy tundras of Siberia, you can create those things anywhere, but especially in a place like Afghanistan. (What do you notice about the people who settled what is now Phoenix, or those who built Novosibirsk from the snow up?)
Also, Afghanistan is sitting on around $1 trillion in minerals, which remain untapped, because there is no infrastructure to get them from ground to market. Now, the nation’s GDP is right around $17.15 billion—the value of the resources under their feet is roughly 58 times greater than the entire GDP. They could be extravagantly wealthy, but they’re…them.
This isn’t a soil/climate problem—it’s a people problem. For context, in 1959, the American Association on Mental Deficiency set 85 as the IQ threshold for mentally retarded (it was later lowered to accommodate certain demographics). The average IQ in Afghanistan? Somewhere in the mid-70s to low-80s—low enough that sex with the whole barnyard is routine for many of the men.
What will it take to finally eradicate the “magic soil” theory from the narrative? At what point can we all just accept that prosperity has nothing to do with the dirt beneath our feet, but the culture of the people standing on it?
