A 13-building waste management complex built in 2014 to house the bases new incinerators seemingly had little effect on the discharges. Until the U.S. exit in the middle of a July night two years ago, a haze of aerosolized garbage would emerge every week from what the American soldiers called the shit pit and mix with the already dust-clogged air in Parwan province, residents told me.

A half-hour drive away from Bagram, southeast of the provincial capital of Charikar, a graveyard of rusting trucks, tanks and helicopter engines used by the Soviet Union lay baking in the summer sun, the vehicles corroding residue leaching into the soil and water. Lining the road below were trucks belonging to scrap dealers, waiting to take the debris on to Pakistan. A few weeks later, it was all gone.

While I had permission letters from the relevant Taliban ministries, I needed the authorization of Obaidullah Aminzada, Parwans new governor, to visit the sprawling base. As a member of the Taliban, Aminzada had been a prisoner at Bagram for four years while it was under the control of the U.S. military. Now, he was effectively in charge of what had been the Pentagons largest military base in Afghanistan.

When the blasts started, we knew it was a Friday, the governor tells me
coolly in his office, surrounded by his assistants, in the heart of Charikar. While he was a detainee, he was kept in darkness but knew from the sound and that smell that the military was conducting controlled detonations of
military equipment and ordnance at Bagram. We knew what day of week it was by the detonations, he laughs, turning to one of his assistants, who nods in agreement.

Aminzada invites me to lunch with the governor of Bagram district. I had been promised access to the sprawling base and Im eager to see inside, post-American control. So I accept the invitation despite my reservations.
The lunch involves me, the only woman, sitting alone in one room for an hour and a half, with the men in another, their rollicking laughter floating
across the courtyard. Finally, we say our goodbyes and head out to the base. We make it to the gates, but no further. The commander, from whom I need permission, was not at the base, I was told the same thing that had happened to me at the bases in Nangarhar and Kandahar.

I watch as the gates to the base open to let a Ford Ranger roll in. Children carrying sacks larger than themselves stuffed with an array of scrap try to sneak in, only to get chased away by a Taliban guard perched atop a rundown Humvee decorated with plastic flowers. Almost all of the waste was still
going to the burn pit

The moment is a far cry from the scene that greeted the bioenvironmental engineer and U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel Kyle Blasch when he arrived at Bagram in the summer of 2011. The commander of the security forces at Bagram had contacted his team about researching the bases burn pit. Blaschs team conducted the only occupational sampling study on U.S. personnel near the militarys burn pits in Afghanistan.

At the peak of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan , Bagram was burning between 2,300 and 4,000 cubic yards of refuse per dayenough to fill 175 to 300 dump trucks. Smoke from the burn pits, mixed with dust and other pollution, choked the guards as they worked 12-hour shifts at the bases checkpoints and 10-yard-high guard tower.

New rules from the DOD had come in prohibiting the burning of specific materials, but it didnt matter, as the researchers found that 81 percent of waste was still going to the burn pit, including prohibited items such as plastic bags, packaging materials, broken construction materials and aerosol cans.

The purpose of the study was to see what the soldiers were actually
breathing. Blaschs team outfitted members of the security forces with
personal sampling monitors. He was able to outfit the study subjects with
four monitors each, which included pumps, filters and breathing tubes. Blasch said they were eager to help.

The results were unequivocal. The levels of airborne pollutants registered by the monitors worn by each soldier exceeded the short-term military exposure guideline level. Those near the burn pit and waste disposal complex exceeded the U.S. EPAs air quality thresholds by a factor of more than 50.

Right now, we have a lot of question marks, said Blasch, who is now associate regional director for the U.S. Geological Surveys Northwest-Pacific Islands.

In 2011, an Army memo stated that the high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram airfield were likely to affect veterans health for
the rest of their lives. The memo noted that the amount of pollutants in Bagrams air far exceeded the levels permitted under U.S. government guidelines. Anwar has worked as a scrap worker outside Bagram airfield for eight years. He has had a rash on his hands for six years and believes it is caused by his work. Credit: Lynzy Billing/Inside Climate News Everyone breathed the same air

The day after I was denied access to Bagram by the Taliban authorities, Noor Mohammad Ahmadi, 41, a village head, leads me down a narrow maze of walkways to his home, just outside the base.

He lives in the village of Gulai Kali, where streams meander through tightly packed homes and the roads that encircle the base. Driving around the perimeter, I count 16 locations where water flowed into or out of the base from small culverts in the high walls. Families use the doors of shipping containers as gates to their compounds and shops. Above them, the white Taliban flag flutters in the wind.

The neighborhood is abuzz with activity. A pair of girls carrying their baby sisters walk alongside a stream, deep in chatter. Men stride across nearby wheat fields, hands clasped behind their backs, as children run past, their heads cocked to the pink sky, eyes locked on their kites above.

In 2011, Ahmadi and 17 other village leaders from the area wrote an application to the Parwan governor, Abdul Basir Salangi, saying that the Bagram base was destroying their drinking water, he tells me.

His ancestors had lived in Gulai Kali for years, but when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, the villagers left. When the new government came in, we came back, so we have been here now for 20 years, he says.

We sent two applications to the governor. One was about our property; the Americans took our lands and expanded the base here. And the second was about our water problem, he says. The base had stopped the Panjshir River from reaching their fields for agriculture, he says. They were also dumping lavatory water into our waterways and fields.

He pulls out a stack of carefully organized papers in plastic sleeves. I have all the letters.

Streams from the Panjshir River enter the base from the north and depart from it in the south and east. The airfield was diverting the water, he says. Nine hundred families are living here in Gulai Kali village, and they were without water.

The governor promised to talk to the military and send a team to examine the water. Two weeks later, a team made up of the districts representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water, a representative from the Ministry of Public Health, an Afghan translator and two international military people
from the base came to the villages and took samples from the wells, Ahmadi says.

After this, the governor called a big meeting at his office with the international military people, a representative from each village, an Afghan commander named Safiullah Safi and the team who took the samples, he says. They told us the water is clean and there were no problems with it, but they did not show us any results in documents or reports.

The governor instructed the airfield personnel to dig a well 100 yards deep for the villagers, but it never happened, he says.

Three men from the village join us in Ahmadis home. One man, Ajab Gul, says
he has respiratory problems and has had multiple surgeries to remove
recurrent kidney stones. In our area, we do not have clean water, he says. Maybe this is the cause.

Everyone is sick here, Mohammad Salim, a farmer, speaks up. When the international community came to Afghanistan, my problems started. He says he has had issues with his lungs for the past 17 years. The base was burning waste at least three times a week, he says, and the winds would blow it over his village and the lands he farms, about 50 yards from the base.

When we saw the smoke, we took our children inside the home and still had to cover our mouths and noses because of the bad smell, Salim adds. It was a big problem for us.

Salim traveled to see a doctor in Pakistan three times between 2012 and 2019.

The doctors took my blood, did a lot of tests and gave me medicine, but I am still not well. If there is any smoke, I cant breathe again, and I cannot control my coughing. My eyes cry when I cough. Im coughing a mucus that
stings my throat.

Lots of farmers from this area are sick, Salim says. They call it Bagram
Lung. Just knock on any door and you will find it. The Americans who were on the base are sick, but so are we. Everyone breathed the same air. Over the years, the international aid workers, journalists and diplomats stationed in Kabul came up with their own name, Kabul cough, to describe the chronic hacking, bronchitis and sinus infections. The symptoms were particularly persistent in the winter months, when the smog from coal and oil burning heaters enveloped the Kabul basin.

While the cause of Salims problem has not been determined, his description of Bagram Lung brought to mind tests performed in the U.S. on soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.

While they all tested normal on conventional pulmonary function, a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center performed surgical lung biopsies on more than 50 and found that nearly all of them had constrictive bronchiolitis, a narrowing of the smallest and deepest airways in the lungsan irreversible and chronic condition. Other medical studies have found a host of other toxic substances, including partially combusted jet fuel , in the lungs of veterans serving near burn pits.

Then there was the sewage dumping. In Gulai Kali, everyone says the water is as dirty as the sky. Every day, American contractors from the base were bringing seven to 10 tankers carrying the lavatory water and dumping it in
the canals [and we still] cannot even wash there, says Salim, the farmer.

I have kidney and bladder problems and I feel very weak, says Zia ul Haq, a villager sitting next to Salim. For days at a time, he was too tired to
stand, he says.

He has lived next to Bagram for the past 15 years and has been unwell for seven of them. I worked inside the base for two years in the big refrigerator where food and energy drinks were stored, he says. I have a big pain in my kidneys and I cannot control my bladder. The doctor told me I have not been drinking clean water, but we are using water from our well.

Every other house outside Bagrams walls has a water pump well because the river no longer flows to the village.

The people dont drink the canal water now; its too dirty, he says.

The people in Gulai Kali heard explosions, loud and frequent, coming from the base in June 2021, not realizing that the Americans were getting ready to depart once and for all and were destroying ordnance, weapons and military vehicles so the Taliban couldnt make use of them.

Even Zainul Abiden Abid, head of NEPA, was kept away. Our staff were not allowed inside the base that month, but we could see the clouds of smoke rising, he told me.

As the Americans in Kabul frantically packed up in late August 2021, an
Afghan worker at the U.S. Embassy took a video of a burn pit being used by embassy staffers right in the heart of Kabul. We were told to take everything out of the office and go to this designated area and throw everything in
there where it was set alight, he told me. On the top of the burn pit was a picture of John Sopkothe American inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Using EPA-approved sampling equipment provided by the U.S.-based Eurofins Environment Testing, the journalist Kern Hendricks and an Afghan scientist specializing in water sampling collected water, soil and blood samples from villages around the Jalalabad, Bagram and Kandahar airfields where the journalist Lynzy Billing conducted interviews and obtained medical records from residents.

The sampling equipment traveled from the United States to Afghanistan via
the United Kingdom and Turkey. The coolers containing the samples are now on their way back to Eurofins Environment Testing in the U.S. for lab analysis, via Pakistan.

We plan to test these samples for the presence of PFAS, which were present
in materials used by the U.S. military and do not naturally occur in the environment.

The post Americas war in Afghanistan devastated the countrys environment in ways that may never be cleaned up appeared first on Popular Science .
Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.popsci.com/environment/war-afghanistan-environment/


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Science News (1337:1/100)