The Park the Villages Ran
Afghanistan gazetted its first national park in April 2009, around six lakes in the central highlands held back by dams the water builds itself, and what made it function was not a boundary but a committee drawn from the fourteen villages inside it. In August 2023 the ministry for the propagation of virtue barred women from entering, removing about half the people the arrangement had been built to serve.
The road west from Bamiyan climbs onto a treeless plateau at about 2,900 m (9,500 ft) and then, with no warning at all, drops into blue. Six lakes sit in a line along a shallow valley in the Hazarajat, each one held back by a wall of pale rock that nobody built. The rock is travertine. Spring water here comes up loaded with dissolved carbon dioxide and calcium bicarbonate, and as the gas comes out of solution at the surface the calcium carbonate drops out with it and sets, layer on layer, into dams that are several metres high, structurally alive, and still growing. They leak, and then they seal themselves. Local tradition assigns them to Ali, which is a better explanation than most visitors arrive with.
The lakes have names — Band-e Haibat, the dam of awe, is the largest, with Zulfiqar, Panir, Pudina, Gholaman and Qambar strung out beyond it — and they have been a place of pilgrimage and picnic for as long as anyone has written about the region. What they did not have, until 2009, was a legal existence. Afghanistan put Band-e-Amir on its UNESCO tentative list in 2004 and then spent five years failing to declare it anything at all, and the reason for the delay is the interesting part of this story.
What a declaration was going to cost
The country had no national parks. It had a hunting reserve tradition and a paper designation from the 1970s that was never implemented, and it had an environment agency, NEPA, created in 2005, and an Environment Law passed in 2007 that finally gave someone the power to gazette protected areas. The obstacle was not the law. It was that fourteen villages sit inside the boundary anyone would draw, farming potatoes on thin soil at nine thousand feet, grazing the plateau, cutting scrub for fuel and taking fish out of the lakes. In most of the world, declaring a national park over people like that has meant moving them, or fencing them out, or leaving the designation on paper while everything continues as before. Afghan officials and the Wildlife Conservation Society staff working with them from 2006 knew exactly which of those outcomes was likely, and spent the years between the tentative listing and the declaration negotiating a way around it.
The committee
What emerged was co-management. When NEPA declared Band-e-Amir a national park in April 2009 — the first the country had ever gazetted — it did so alongside a body called the Band-e-Amir Protected Area Committee, made up of representatives of those fourteen villages. The committee set the rules and the committee enforced them. Fishing with hand grenades and car batteries, which had been ordinary practice and which strips a lake in a season, was banned by the people who had been doing it. Grazing was zoned. Building along the shoreline was restricted. A small ranger force was recruited from the same villages, making them the first park rangers in Afghanistan, and a modest entrance fee was collected locally and spent locally, which is the mechanism that made the whole thing hold: the households bearing the cost of the restrictions were the households receiving the income.
A park is not a line on a map. It is a list of things the people who live inside it have agreed not to do, and it lasts exactly as long as they go on agreeing.
The visitors were Afghan
The other thing worth understanding about Band-e-Amir is who went there. Foreign tourists were a rounding error even in the best years. The park's visitors were overwhelmingly Afghan — families driving up from Kabul for the day or the weekend, wedding parties, students, people from Bamiyan and the surrounding districts — and they came in numbers that the reported counts have never captured reliably enough to quote. Swan-shaped pedalos appeared on Band-e Haibat, which is the detail everyone remembers and also the evidence: nobody imports pedalos for a foreign market that does not exist. This was a domestic park with a domestic economy attached to it, and the boat hire, the tea stalls and the guesthouse beds were the return the villages were being paid.
August 2023
On 26 August 2023, the acting minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, said that women visiting Band-e-Amir were not observing hijab correctly and instructed the security forces to stop them entering the park. The UN mission in the country recorded the instruction and objected to it. It came after a sequence of restrictions that had already closed secondary schools and universities to women, barred them from gyms and public baths, and shut most of the ways they could work.
For the park specifically, the arithmetic is straightforward and it is not sentimental. About half the potential visitors were removed. Families do not travel to a place their wives and daughters cannot enter, so the loss is larger than half. The pedalos, the stalls and the guesthouses lost the trade that justified the restrictions the villages had accepted, and a co-management agreement that pays nothing is a co-management agreement in name. Whether it has held, and how the ranger force and the committee have fared since, is not something anyone outside can currently verify; reports from the area are thin and the figures that circulate are disputed.
What a gazette is worth
The instrument itself survived the change of government in August 2021. The Environment Law of 2007 was not repealed, the declaration was not revoked, and by most accounts the rangers stayed at their posts — which is more than could be said for a great many institutions that year. Afghanistan gazetted a second national park in 2014, in the Wakhan corridor at the far north-east, covering an area many times larger, so on paper the country now protects a serious amount of ground. Paper is not the test. The test at Band-e-Amir was always whether fourteen villages went on finding it worth their while to police a set of rules against themselves, and the answer depended on a flow of Afghan families arriving with money in their pockets. The dams will keep building either way; travertine does not care who is governing. The park is the human arrangement stacked on top of the rock, and that one has to be renewed every season by people who are free to walk away from it.