Contractors making big money for bad work: Watchdog’s report on Afghanistan
By William Fisher
NEW YORK, May 4: Contractors in Afghanistan are making big money for bad work, says a new report from CorpWatch written by an Afghan-American journalist who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction.
“The Bush administration touts the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan as a success story,” the report says, but the reconstruction has been bungled by many of the same politically connected corporations which are doing similar work in Iraq,” and receiving “massive open-ended contracts” without competitive bidding or with limited competition.
“These companies are minting millions, and leaving behind a people increasingly frustrated and angry with the results,” the report says. Foreign contractors make as much as 1,000 dollars a day, while the Afghans they employ make 5 dollars per day,” the report charges.
EXAMPLES: “A highway that begins crumbling before it is finished. A school with a collapsed roof. A clinic with faulty plumbing. A farmers’ cooperative that farmers can’t use. Afghan police and military that, after training, are incapable of providing the most basic security.” Nawa says such examples abound in the country. “Near Kabul City in the village of Qalai Qazi, Afghanistan, stands a new, bright-yellow health clinic built by American contractor, The Louis Berger Group. The clinic was meant to function as a sterling example of American engineering, and to serve as a model for 81 clinics Berger was hired to build — in addition to roads, dams, schools and other infrastructure — in exchange for the 665 million dollars in American aid money the company has so far received in federal contracts,” she says.
“The problem is, this ‘model’ clinic was falling apart: The ceiling had rotted away in patches; the plumbing, when it worked, leaked and shuddered; the chimney, made of flimsy metal, threatened to set the roof on fire; the sinks had no running water; and the place smelled of sewage,” the report says.
The US-led reconstruction effort has directed substantial resources toward eradicating illicit poppy growing. It awarded a contract worth 120 million dollars over four years to train opium growers in the cultivation of alternative crops.
One part of the programme “instructed farmers in Parwan to grow more vegetables, and promised to find buyers for them both within the country and beyond. The farmers, who normally planted beans and lentils, grew green vegetables as encouraged. But instead of profiting, they lost money. Vegetables flooded the market and drove the price down,” the report says.
In another part of the same programme, the report says, it was determined that Afghan farmers, who make up about 80 per cent of the working population, needed canals and irrigation systems and the means to get their product to domestic markets more efficiently, to minimise crop loss, and to re-establish their access to the international market.
The contractor’s solution was to build irrigation canals. But the report points out that poppy needs very little water or fertiliser to thrive. The result, the report says, is that opium poppy growers used the water in the canals to grow even more poppy crops. –Dawn/IPS News Service
