Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State, by Nick Cullather

Links to Related Web sites

Arundhati Roy’s essay "The Greater Common Good" drew world attention to the ecological and social consequences of large dam development. The Friends of River Narmada have made this article available online.
http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html

In response to Roy's essay, the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) defines its position on dams and the environment.
http://www.icold-cigb.org/chartean.html

James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State describes the "high modernist" experiments of the mid-twentieth century, the planned cities, rural development schemes, and nation-building projects that often went awry despite good intentions. http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/reviews/books/chris_scott.html

Published by the Asia Society in Asian Update (March 2002), "Afghanistan's Reform Agenda: Four Perspectives," written by Sima Samar, Frederick Starr, Marvin G. Weinbaum, and Mohammed Ehsan Zia, addresses the vision behind the rebuilding process in Afghanistan.
http://www.asiasociety.org/publications/update_afghanreform.html

Maps of Afghanistan are available from the library at the University of Texas.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/afghanistan.html

Taliban leaders styled themselves as "engineers" and Osama Bin Laden owned a heavy construction firm. So were Islamic terrorists resisting modernization or were they part of the project? Take the case of Mohammad Atta, urban planner/suicide pilot. In this excerpt from the forthcoming edition of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Michael Griffin traces Mohammed Atta's transformation from quiet but brilliant graduate student of urban conservation to Al-Qaeda terrorist.
http://www.nthposition.com/politics_griffin_1.html