U.S. development initiatives in Afghanistan are riddled with overly ambitious projects that lack the necessary labor for implementation and sustainability, according to a report detailing infrastructure efforts there.
“In many ways the [U.S. assistance] program was larger than could be effectively administered by either the U.S. or Afghan governments,” the report said. “U.S. expectations of the time required to achieve effective project results in Afghanistan were generally unrealistic. Construction was far too often in advance of plans for institutional adaptation in the use of the facilities and the training of personnel for their effective operation.”
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While that assessment may sound like the latest missive from the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, it isn’t. The critique, recently highlighted by the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent nonprofit research organization, was published in 1988 for the United States Agency for International Development under the title, “Retrospective Review of U.S. Assistance to Afghanistan: 1950-1979.”
Some experts now ask whether the U.S. has failed to learn from the past and is therefore doomed to repeat it.
“I don’t think that the U.S. government has learned from the mistakes of the past,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior program associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center in Washington. He noted that while USAID can claim successes in promoting girls’ education and expanding a mobile phone network, the big-ticket items tend to fall short.
“These big-ticket, high-profile projects don’t always work out as planned,” he said. “It’s basically built, looks great, but it’s not operational.”
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That’s certainly the case with two major projects, including one that the U.S. began during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. USAID recently abandoned plans to pump $266 million into repairing the Kajaki Dam in Helmand province by installing turbines designed to provide electricity. The U.S. began construction of the dam in the early 1950s, and now the responsibility for further improvements has been handed off to an Afghan power company, at a cost of $70 million.
Last month, a $60 million hospital funded by the U.S. and designed to be the biggest in the country still hadn’t opened, despite its targeted completion for 2009.
The sustainability of other initiatives is also in doubt.
Thomas Ruttig, co-director and co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, noted how bigger projects draw more attention from the Taliban, both during and after construction.