When Alexander Stewart went to war in Afghanistan, his foe was the unstable landscape. Every spring for a thousand years, an artificial reservoir on the Ghazni River has swollen with runoff as snowmelt gushes from the Hindu Kush mountain range. The current dam, the Band-e Sultan Dam, is so massive that "it's something you can imagine the Tennessee Valley Authority might have built," says Stewart, an assistant professor of geology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. But the decades-old concrete edifice wasn't built to last. On 29 March 2005, a section collapsed, sending a torrent downstream that flooded Ghazni city and drowned 14 people. Four years after the disaster, Stewart was in Afghanistan poring over photos and reports for clues to why the Band-e Sultan gave out. Stewart, a glacier morphologist, was one of a dozen "soldier-scientists" assigned by the National Guard Bureau to an elite company, the U.S. Army's 143rd Infantry Detachment, Long-Range Surveillance, for a 1 -year tour of duty. Low-profile platoons like Stewart's, deployed by the military's Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) program, are part of the U.S.-led military coalition's counterinsurgency strategy, which aims to coax Afghans to rely on their government rather than the Taliban.
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