Page 2 of 2 Afghanistan runs on well-oiled wheels
By Pratap Chatterjee
The initial 220 kilovolt power line from Uzbekistan - a $35 million project -
follows the same path as Zahid Walid's diesel trucks over the Hindu Kush. The
comparison, however, ends there. True, the Indian engineers who constructed it
had to survive the brutal snows in the Salang pass, but their work is now done.
On the other hand, the truckers continue to take the treacherous daily drive
through the tunnel that connects northern Afghanistan to the south, bringing
Turkmen diesel to Kabul at 22 cents a kilowatt hour. Meanwhile, the Uzbek
electricity, traveling effortlessly through KEC's transmission lines, costs the
Afghan taxpayer a mere six cents a kilowatt hour.
To add insult to injury, much of the diesel is meant for the USAID power plant
at Tarakhil, which has become a symbol of the sort of massive and widespread
reconstruction waste and abuse that has
gone on in this country for years. The plant, built by Black & Veatch, is
now projected to cost $300 million, three times the price of similar plants in
neighboring Pakistan.
In addition, it will only be capable of supplying one-third of the power the
Uzbek powerline can deliver far less expensively. Nor will the Uzbek line be
the only source of cheap electricity. KEC's engineers have broken ground on a
second power line - this one from Tajikistan - that will supply 300 megawatts
of electricity to Kabul, three times what the Tarakhil plant will produce at a
bargain basement construction cost of $28 million.
"At full capacity, we burn 600,000 liters a day," Jack Currie, the Scottish
manager of the Tarakhil plant told me as I toured it in late October. "And just
how much will that cost the Afghan taxpayer?" I asked. "Well," replied Currie,
"you can assume a dollar a liter of diesel." I quickly calculated and arrived
at an annual total of $219 million per year, not including the plant's
maintenance costs (estimated at another $60 million a year). Currie looked
astonished when I mentioned the figure.
I took these numbers to Mohammed Khan, a member of the Afghan parliament and
chair of its energy committee. "Will you approve the funds for this diesel
power plant?" I asked. The soft-spoken Khan, a trained electrical engineer who
worked for many years in the Kabul Electricity Department, answered simply:
"No. Not unless we have an emergency."
So why build a power plant that, in terms of kilowatt hours made available,
costs 26 times as much as the Indian-built powerline? Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi,
Afghan's former finance minister, recalls the process. The idea, he says,
originally came from then-US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Neumann, who
dreamed it up in April 2007 shortly before he left the country. He apparently
envisioned it as a strategic alternative to the Uzbek powerline. After all, at
that time the repressive Uzbek regime had denied Washington the use of what was
seen as a key military base in Central Asia, Karshi-Khanabad, and so
functionally kicked US troops out of the country. Naturally, then, it was also
seen as an unreliable political partner for the US-backed regime of Karzai.
Following up, USAID officials told the Karzai government that they could build
a diesel plant in Kabul in just over two years for $120 million. It would, the
ambassador indicated, be functional just in time for the 2009 elections,
allowing Karzai to claim that he had provided power to the electricity-starved
capital. The Afghan president readily agreed to the plan, instructing anxious
officials at the Ministry of Finance to approve the scheme in early 2007. He
even agreed to put $20 million of Afghan funds into the project - after being
assured that the US would pay for the rest.
Over the next two years, while Indian engineers raced the Americans to provide
power to Kabul (ultimately winning handily), the Ministry of Energy and Water
was having a hard time keeping the lights on during Kabul's harsh winters. And
while the city waited for these promised sources of power to come on line, the
new political-business elite, with its specially set up companies like Zahid
Walid, was winning government-issued contracts to supply diesel to the old
Kabul power plant - and making money hand over fist.
Zahid Walid was hardly the only politically well-connected business to clean
up: Ghazanfar, a company from Mazar-i-Sharif, also won $17 million in
diesel-supply contracts in the winter of 2006-2007, and then an astonishing $78
million in new contracts for 2008, early 2009. Not surprisingly, Ghazanfar
turns out to be run by a family that is very close to President Karzai. (One
sister, Hosn Banu Ghazanfar, is the women's minister and a brother is a member
of parliament.)
In March 2009, the Ghazanfars opened a new bank in the capital, plastering the
city with giant billboard advertisements featuring a cascade of gold coins.
Less than six months later, the bank wrote out a $2 million interest-free loan
to Karzai for his election campaign, paying back the favors his government had
done for them over the previous three years.
Afghanistan as a patronage machine
This week, Mohammed Qasim Fahim will be sworn in as the next vice president of
the new government of Afghanistan. Under an agreement with USAID, this new
government is required to spend Afghan money to buy yet more diesel for the
Tarakhil power plant, which in turn will put money exclusively and directly
into the vice president's brother's pocket.
Hamid Jalil, the aid coordinator for the Ministry of Finance, points out that
wasting money on unnecessary projects like Tarakhil has helped to hobble
Afghanistan's progress in the past eight years. "The donor projects undermine
the legitimacy of the government and do not allow us to build capacity," he
says, adding in the weary tone you often hear in Kabul today, "corruption is
everywhere in post-conflict countries like ours".
A former Afghan finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, summed up the whole profitably
corrupt system that has run Afghanistan into a cul-de-sac this way.
"It's not crazy, it's absurd," he says. "Crazy is when you don't know what
you're doing. Absurd is when you don't provide a sense of ownership and a sense
of sustainability."
(Dr Ali Safi contributed research and reporting for this article. A video story
by Chatterjee related to this one can be seen at Britain's Channel 4
News.)
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