We then flew to Kirklareli, a remote village where the bank had helped finance irrigation canals.
He led a squad of Marines in Marjah, a farm village crisscrossed by irrigation canals.
WSJ: When the Fighting Stops: Troops Coming Home from Afghanistan
But there simply isn't enough water - the irrigation canals have not been repaired, the canals remain dry.
BBC: NEWS | South Asia | Afghan village mirrors national plight
Decades of war have ruined the country's irrigation canals, and Afghanistan has been plagued by drought over the past few years.
At the local level, water-user associations responsible for the management and maintenance of irrigation canals have been set up with foreign help.
The former will generate electricity from the runoff of the 25, 000 miles of irrigation canals mostly set up by the British in this agriculture belt.
That alone will free 20% of the budget, which can be rechanneled to farm-to-market roads, dams, irrigation canals, post-harvest facilities, and research and development.
The outlook for the winter wheat crop is also poor, with India's main reservoirs, a source for irrigation canals, one-third below their seasonal average.
Water sweeping off the mountains also causes floods, which destroy irrigation canals and can even sweep away the mud huts in which most rural Afghans live.
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Roads, bridges, electricity and irrigation canals have been ripped away.
Countries are issuing, or at least preparing, a long list of promises to help finance research into new seeds, build irrigation canals and spread fertiliser use among small farmers (seeds, irrigation and fertilisers were the main components of the first green revolution in the 1960s).
But it takes 3, 000 miles of irrigation and drainage canals, 34, 000 miles of tiled drains, and 1.8m gallons per acre to make the ground produce.
It is crisscrossed with canals and irrigation ditches built by U.S. foreign aid in the 1950s.
In 1912 pioneers diverted the Murrumbidgee's waters into canals to create one of the biggest irrigation projects in Australia, the world's second-driest continent after Antarctica.
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