Karaghuzhlah, Afghanistan—The problem, Abdul Majid will tell you as he leans his stooped, wasted frame against the trunk of a dying apricot tree in his brother’s yard, is not the Taliban. It’s true, the Taliban have been advancing for months through the ancient cob villages of Balkh province. And yes, they did send their scouts at least twice since June to this very village, whose dehydrated orchards reach out of the alkaline plains like some dusty phantasm, and fired rockets once at a checkpoint near the boy’s high school.

Abdul Majid, silver-bearded and stately in his pewter turban, has seen it all before. “The Soviets came, then the Taliban came, then the Junbish”—an ethnic militia that helped expel the Taliban in 2001—“came.” With the slightest brush of a knobbly farmer’s hand he dismisses the most recent litany of invasions and fratricides that have washed over his 50 acres of grain, almonds, and apricots. The misfortune that worries him lacks the cable-news appeal of America’s war against terror. But for the 20 million rural Afghans, it is far more dramatic: “There is no water,” he says. “We can’t grow anything.”

CEASELESS WAR has made it difficult to study the effects of climate change in Afghanistan. For decades, barely any meteorological data has been recorded; much of the country is too dangerous to carry out continuous research. But studies that rely on empirical observations and data collected in neighboring Central Asian countries and Pakistan show that cyclical droughts have been scorching Afghanistan with increasing frequency since the early 1960s. Spring rainfall, which nourishes most of the country’s cultivated land, has been steadily decreasing by 2.7 millimeters per month. Drought in Afghanistan “is likely to be regarded as the norm by 2030, rather than a temporary or cyclical event,” forecast a 2009 report written by the Stockholm Environment Institute.

To put it a different way: In the 1960s and early 1970s, the water that drained from the Hindu Kush’s vertiginous peaks into the turquoise Balkh River in Bamyan and, at the caverns of the Alborz Gorge, streamed into manmade canals that irrigate the loess desert of Balkh province, measured an average of 1,540 million cubic meters per year. By the end of this year, only about 640 million cubic meters of water will have rumbled past the gorge to the bone-dry fields of Bactria—including Abdul Masjid’s. Other people’s fields will get no water at all. They will pulverize into an ocher shroud that hot desert wind will pick up and hang between the land and the sky. Nearly a third of all Afghans, estimates the UN’s World Food Programme, won’t have enough to eat this fall.

(The ramifications of a continuous drought by 2030 are harder to gauge. In the last nineteen years, Afghanistan fought back a Soviet invasion, toppled a Communist government, shuddered under a civil war, survived the Taliban, and is now enduring a U.S.-led occupation and a vicious insurgency. Who, in this repeatedly and ceaselessly brutalized crucible of imperial ambitions, can guess what will happen nineteen years from now? Who can guess what will happen tomorrow? When I bring it up, people just laugh.)