AFGHANISTAN: A report on rebuilding work by a US-based NGO details huge levels of infrastructural waste, double standards in employment, and a decline in security, writes Michael Jansen.
Corp Watch, a San Francisco-based non-governmental agency monitoring the activities of multinational firms, has issued a report which claims that the US reconstruction effort in Afghanistan is afflicted with the same deficiencies and corruption that plagues similar endeavours in Iraq.
The 35-page report, entitled Afghanistan, Inc, was compiled by Fariba Nawa, a US citizen of Afghan origin who spent several months travelling around Afghanistan.
She describes how US companies involved in the rebuilding campaign have failed to deliver in all sectors and that a large proportion of the $3.5 billion (€2.7 billion) allocated by USAID for democracy education, health, infrastructure, agriculture, and economic development has been misspent, wasted, or disappeared in corruption.
Washington claims that 7.4 million Afghans have better health care, 100,000 teachers have been trained, 50 million text books have been printed, five million children are in school (compared with 900,000 in 2001), and the Kabul-Kandahar highway has been completed.
But Nawa tells of woefully substandard clinics built by the New Jersey-based Louis Berger Group where ceilings are rotting, plumbing leaks and there is no running water.
Schools constructed by this firm also lack basic amenities. Although the highway was built within the projected timeframe, the surface is already crumbling due to heavy lorry traffic and extremes in weather. This project, hurried to benefit foreign occupying forces, cost $256 million, or $640,000 a kilometre.
Nawa focuses on the Berger Group, which has close connections with the Bush administration - as does Halliburton, the leading contractor in Iraq - because it received a large proportion of project awards.
She points out that several US contractors involved in reconstruction, and US security firms, have made deals with local warlords that have strengthened them at a time when the central government has been trying to bring them under control.
US attempts to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppies have also failed dismally.
Production in 2004 was valued at $2.8 billion, higher than under the Taliban.
Double standards in employment also exist in Afghanistan. Although Afghan law holds that on any given project 50 per cent of labourers must be Afghans, they receive about 10 per cent of pay rates accorded to foreign workers.
For instance, on a road project contracted by a Turkish firm, Turkish employees received $1,000 a month plus housing and benefits while Afghans doing the same work earned $90 and had few or no benefits.
The most dramatic project failure Nawa describes is the collapse of a new wing at Kabul's best hospital while under construction by the Chinese National Plant Import and Export Corporation which, she said, was given the contract because of the firm's intimate connection with the Chinese ambassador in Kabul.
One of the major failings of USAID, the World Bank, and other organisations involved in reconstruction in Afghanistan is their refusal to consult with the government and local experts. In contrast, Japanese companies took advice from the authorities and produced good results for less money. A well-appointed school cost Japan $90,000-$100,000 while a poorly built equivalent constructed by the Berger Group cost $274,000.
At least one quarter of US expenditure on projects was absorbed by high-cost security firms tied to the Bush administration. These are the same firms that dominate the protection scene in Iraq: DynCorp, Blackwater, and Global Risk Security. While their operatives charge $1,000 a day, the author points out that security is worse than during the period of Taliban rule. She writes: "More than 1,500 people were killed in the escalating violence in 2005 alone, the largest number in a single year since the fall of the Taliban." The death rate among Iraqis is now 1,000 a month more than during the final year of the Baathist regime. Domestic security forces in both countries are afflicted by poor training, insufficient arms, and sectarian and ethnic divisions.
Nawa writes: "International and national aid agencies - including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and USAID - that distribute aid money to developing countries have, in effect, designed a system that is efficient in funnelling money back to the wealthy donor countries, without providing sustainable development in poor states."