In the great Helmand River Valley of southern Afghanistan, stands a rockfill dam, bearing testimony to USAID’s continued commitment to the country for more than half a century. In 1953, USAID contracted Morrison Knudsen, one of American heavy construction contractors that built the Hoover Dam, to construct this dam. Standing 100 metres (320 feet) in height, spanning 270 metres (887 feet) in length, and having a present storage capacity of 1.2-billion cubic metres (27,550 acre-feet) of water, the Kajakai Dam creates the largest multi-purpose reservoir in the country. For decades, water discharging from Kajakai has traversed some 300 miles of downstream irrigation canals, which stretch across parched formidable landscape, feeding 140,000 hectares of farmland with water.