IEEE Spectrum October, 2011 - 35

Source: uSAID

bryan Christie Design

tion in Afghanistan, and it has, according to these observers
and even its own internal documents, made major missteps in
every significant electrical construction project it has undertaken in the country.
"USAID has grossly underperformed in electrical reconstruction," says Charles Tiefer, an attorney and contracting expert
who serves on the Commission on Wartime Contracting, a panel
appointed by the U.S. Congress to analyze why so much money
was misspent in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"What you've got is an agency that has become a contractmanagement agency, and they're not even very good at that,"
adds Dov S. Zakheim, another Wartime Contracting commissioner. "They threw money at contracting with less-thangreat results."
The Wartime Contracting commission released its final,
248-page report at the end of August. It concluded that
between $31 billion and $60 billion of the approximately
$206 billion spent on contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan was
wasted, because of badly conceived projects, poor planning and
oversight, and criminal behavior, such as fraud and corruption.
(The $206 billion figure includes contracts for logistics and security, in addition to reconstruction.) The report also says that
"money lost as a result of the inability to sustain projects could
easily exceed the contract waste and fraud already incurred."
Regardless, USAID is plowing ahead. The agency recently
embarked on a long-planned $1.2 billion project to give
Afghanistan a modern national electrical grid. With U.S. and
other NATO forces starting their drawdown from Afghanistan,
the grid would be a superb legacy. But not much in the agency's
record in Afghanistan suggests that the project will be completed competently and efficiently.
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USAID's struggles prompt questions about what, exactly, diplomatic and military officials can take away from the Afghan
reconstruction experience. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the coalition tested new and sometimes radical strategies in counterinsurgency, and through it all reconstruction was a cornerstone.
A half dozen or more development agencies used scores of contractors and subcontractors to perform electrical and other work
in Afghanistan and in Iraq, too. As the U.S. government itself has
disclosed in thousands of pages of reports and analyses, far too
little was achieved for the more than $100 billion spent reconstructing the two countries-even after taking into account the
inevitable failures and frustrations of war-zone construction.
So, did reconstruction make a difference in the counterinsurgency? Was it worth the money and lives it cost?

e arrive at the Kandahar city substation, which is called
Breshna Kot. There's a collection of diesel generators here,
but none of them are running. I'm told that the utility has
not been able to negotiate a contract for diesel fuel at acceptable
terms. Apparently, the utility simply can't afford to pay what
the suppliers charge for fuel. That's not much of a surprise; the
Afghan national utility, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS),
is stunningly unprofitable. It charges about 6 to 10 Afghanis
(about 12 to 20 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour, a third of what it
would need simply to break even, NATO engineers tell me. And
that's if most customers were actually paying for their electricity.
Which they're not. At the moment, the World Bank and the U.S.
government are covering the diesel fuel costs, which run well
into the tens of millions of dollars a year.
Breshna Kot is what our MRAP crew is referring to as "semisecure," so we have arrived in four MRAPs instead of three.
OcTObEr 2011 * IEEE SpEcTrum * NA

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2011