Afghanistan Chases Hydropower Imports While Its Own Grid Stays Fragmented

Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), Afghanistan's state electricity utility, announced this week that Tajikistan has agreed to increase electricity exports to the country^[1]. The two utilities met to discuss tariffs, transmission upgrades, and a proposed 500-kilovolt transmission line that would boost capacity. On the surface, this is infrastructure: two neighbors aligning power grids. But it is also a portrait of institutional paralysis.

Afghanistan's chronic electricity shortage, especially acute in summer, is not primarily a resource problem. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan sit atop hydropower surpluses that dwarf their own consumption. The Central Asia, South Asia (CASA-1000) initiative was designed to move 1,300 megawatts of clean hydropower from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan, benefiting all four countries and solving the Afghan supply crunch through transit economics^[9]. The project has been negotiated for over a decade. It remains incomplete.

What Afghanistan cannot easily do is build its own generation or modernize its grid backbone. The Taliban regime has limited technical capacity, no access to international lending, and a grid that was already fractured before 2021. DABS itself operates under Taliban oversight, making it difficult to attract the foreign investment or multilateral financing that hydropower and transmission projects require. The utility instead negotiates purchase agreements bilateral and piecemeal: more power from Tajikistan, better terms with Uzbekistan, borrowed load-shedding schedules in summer. It is a subsistence electricity policy, not a strategy.

The parallel story is what this reveals about energy governance in fragile states. Where institutional capacity is weak and foreign capital scarce, neighboring countries with hydropower assets become gatekeepers. Tajikistan has every incentive to sell more power, it produces surplus, Afghanistan has no alternative, and a higher price floor is possible as desperation grows. Pakistan, which also imports from Tajikistan and should benefit from CASA-1000, is similarly locked into annual renegotiations because the infrastructure remains incomplete. Neither country has the leverage or the domestic revenue base to guarantee long-term off-take.

The alternative is one that international development finance has understood for decades but persistently underfunds: treat regional hydropower transmission as critical regional public infrastructure, fund it through concessional multilateral mechanisms with fixed rates locked in through treaty, and build it once at scale rather than in incremental bilateral agreements. CASA-1000 was designed to do this. Its delay is a choice made by donors, not a physics problem. Until Afghanistan has functioning institutions and capital access, it will remain a supplicant power-buyer, and Tajikistan will remain a supplier with asymmetric leverage.