Page 2 of 2 The Afghan reconstruction boondoggle
By Ann Jones
system for "preselecting" certain private contractors, then inviting only those
preselected companies to apply for contracts the agency wants to issue.
Often, in fact, only one of the preselected contractors puts in for the job and
then - if you need a hint as to what's really going on - just happens to award
subcontracts to some of the others. It's remarkable, too, how many former USAID
officials have passed through the famed revolving door in Washington to become
highly paid consultants to private contractors - and vice versa. By January
2006, the Bush administration had co-opted USAID
altogether. The once independent aid agency launched by President Kennedy in
1961 became a subsidiary of the State Department and a partner of the Pentagon.
Oh, and keep in mind one more thing: While the private contractors may be in it
for the duration, most employees and technical experts in Afghanistan stay on
the job only six months to a year because it's considered such a "hardship
post". As a result, projects tend not to last long and to be remarkably
unrelated to those that came before or will come after. Contractors collect the
big bucks whether or not the aid they contracted to deliver benefits Afghans,
or even reaches them.
These arrangements help explain why Afghanistan remains such a shambles.
The Afghan scam
It's not that American aid has done nothing. Check out the USAID website and
you'll find a summary of what is claimed for it (under the glorious heading of
"Afghanistan Reborn"). It will inform you that USAID has completed literally
thousands of projects in that country. The USAID loves numbers, but don't be
deceived by them. A thousand short-term USAID projects can't hold a candle to
one long, careful, patient program run, year after year, by a bunch of Afghans
led by a single Swede.
If there has been any progress in Afghanistan, especially in and around Kabul,
it's largely been because two-thirds of the reconstruction aid to Afghanistan
comes from other (mostly European) countries that do a better job, and partly
because the country's druglords spend big on palatial homes and services in the
capital. But the one-third of international aid that is supposed to come from
the US, and that might make a critical difference when added to the work of
others, eternally falls into the wrong pockets.
What would Afghans have done differently, if they'd been in charge? They'd have
built much smaller schools, and a lot more of them, in places more convenient
to children than to foreign construction crews. Afghans would have hired
Afghans to do the building. Louis Berger Group had the contract to build more
than 1,000 schools at a cost of $274,000 per school. Already way behind
schedule in 2005, they had finished only a small fraction of them when roofs
began to collapse under the snows of winter.
Believe me, given that same $274,000, Afghans would have built 15 or 20 schools
with good roofs. The same math can be applied to medical clinics. Afghans would
also have chosen to repair irrigation systems and wells, to restore ruined
orchards, vineyards, and fields. Amazingly enough, USAID initially had no
agricultural programs in a country where rural subsistence farmers are 85% of
the population. Now, after seven years, the agency finally claims to have
"improved" irrigation on "nearly 15%" of arable land. And you can be sure that
Afghans wouldn't have chosen - again - the Louis Berger Group to rebuild the
389-mile long Kabul/Kandahar highway with foreign labor at a cost of $1 million
per mile.
As things now stand, Afghans, as well as Afghan-Americans who go back to help
their homeland, have to play by American rules. Recently an Afghan-American
contractor who competed for reconstruction contracts told me that the American
military is getting in on the aid scam. To apply for a contract, Afghan
applicants now have to fill out a form (in English!) that may run to 50 pages.
My informant, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, commented that
it's next to impossible to figure out "what they look for". He won a contract
only when he took a hint and hired an American "expert" - a retired military
officer - to fill out the form. The expert claimed the "standard fee" for his
service: 25% of the value of the contract.
Another Afghan-American informed me that he was proud to have worked with an
American construction company building schools with USAID funds. Taken on as a
translator, he persuaded the company not only to hire Afghan laborers, but also
to raise their pay gradually from $1.00 per day to $10.00 per day. "They could
feed their families," he said, "and it was all cost over-run, so cost didn't
matter. The boss was already billing the government $10.00 to $15.00 an hour
for labor, so he could afford to pay $10.00 a day and still make a profit." My
informant didn't question the corruption in such over-billing. After all,
Afghans often tack on something extra for themselves, and they don't call it
corruption either. But on this scale it adds up to millions going into the
assumedly deep pockets of one American privateer.
Yet a third Afghan-American, a businessman who has worked on American projects
in his homeland, insisted that when Bush pledged $10.4 billion in aid, Karzai
should have offered him a deal: "Give me $2 billion in cash, I'll kick back the
rest to you, and you can take your army and go home."
"If Karzai had put the cash in an Afghan bank," the businessman added, "and
spent it himself on what people really need, both Afghanistan and Karzai would
be in much better shape today". Yes, he was half-joking, but he wasn't wrong.
Don't think of such stories, and thousands of others like them, as merely tales
of the everyday theft or waste of a few hundred million dollars - a form of
well-organized, routine graft that leaves the corruption of Karzai's government
in the shade and will undoubtedly continue unremarked upon in the Obama years.
Those multi-millions that will continue to be poured down the Afghan drain
really represent promises made to a people whose country and culture we have
devastated more than once. They are promises made by our government, paid for
by our taxpayers, and repeatedly broken.
These stories, which you'll seldom hear about, are every bit as important as
the debates about military strength and tactics and strategy in Afghanistan
that dominate public discourse today. Those promises, made in our name, were
once said to be why we fight; now - broken - they remind us that we've already
lost.
Ann Jones wrote at length about the failure of American aid in Kabul
in Winter (Metropolitan Books), a book about American meddling in Afghanistan as
well as her experience as a humanitarian aid worker there from 2002 to 2006.
For more information, visit herwebsite.
For a concise report on many of the defects in international aid mentioned here,
check outReal Aid(pdf
file), a report issued in 2005 by the South African NGO Action Aid.
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