Spinning
America's Forgotten War
By William Fisher
08 May, 2006
Countercurrents.org
“Contractors in Afghanistan
are making big money for bad work.”
This is the conclusion reached
in 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 claims that reconstruction has been “bungled”
by “many of the same politically connected corporations which
are doing similar work in Iraq”, receiving “massive open-ended
contracts” without competitive bidding or with limited competition.
“These companies are
pocketing millions, and leaving behind a people increasingly frustrated
and angry with the results,” the report says. Foreign contractors
“make as much as $1,000 a day, while the Afghans they employ make
$5 per day,” the report charges.
Examples cited in the report
by author Fariba Nawa:
“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.”
Ms. Nawa says such examples
abound in the country.
She writes, “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 in American aid money the company has so far received
in federal contracts.
“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 U.S.-led reconstruction
effort has directed substantial resources toward eradicating illicit
poppy growing. It awarded a contract worth $120 million over four years
to train opium growers in cultivation of alternative crops.
One part of the program “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
program, the report says, it was determined that Afghan farmers, who
make up about 80 percent of the working population, needed canals and
irrigation systems and the means to get their product to domestic markets
more efficiently, to minimize crop loss, and to reestablish their access
to the international market.
The contractor’s solution
was to build irrigation canals. But the reports points out that poppies
need very little water or fertilizers to thrive. The result, the report
says, was that opium poppy growers used the water in the canals to grow
even more poppies.
The report says the U.S.
hired a number of public relations companies to put a positive face
on the reconstruction effort. One of them is the Washington, D.C.-based
Rendon Group, which the report says has “close ties to the Bush
Administration.” The Pentagon has awarded Rendon more than $56
million in contracts since September 11, 2001, “as part of a coordinated
effort to disseminate positive press about America and its military
in the developing world.”
The contracts call for “tracking
foreign reporters” and “pushing (and sometimes paying) news
outlets worldwide to run articles and segments favorable to United States
interests.”
The report says Rendon was
also granted a contract in 2004 to train staff at President Karzai’s
office in the art of public relations, and “later received another
hefty grant of $3.9 million from the Pentagon to develop a counter-narcotics
campaign with the Afghan interior ministry -- despite objections from
Karzai and the State Department.”
The report charges that the
contracting system used by international donors is broken. It says,
“USAID gives contracts to American companies (and the World Bank
and IMF give contracts to companies from their donor countries) who
take huge chunks off the top and hire layers and layers of subcontractors
who take their cuts, leaving only enough for sub-par construction. Quality
assurance is minimal; contractors know well they can swoop in, put a
new coat of paint on a rickety building, and submit their bill, with
rarely a question asked. The result is collapsing hospitals, clinics,
and schools, rutted and dangerous new highways, a “modernized”
agricultural system that has actually left some farmers worse off than
before, and emboldened militias and warlords who are more able to unleash
violence on the people of Afghanistan.”
Afghans, the report says,
“are losing their faith in the development experts whose job is
to reconstruct and rebuild their country...What the people see is a
handful of foreign companies setting priorities for reconstruction that
make the companies wealthy, yet are sometimes absurdly contrary to what
is necessary.”
Meanwhile, the report says,
“the security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate,
directly threatening ongoing reconstruction. Some of the fighting is
simply the result of deep frustration and distrust among Afghans who
no longer believe the international community is looking out for their
best interests.”
The “deliberate use
of warlords and militias in reconstruction efforts has only lent them
more credibility and power, further undermining the elected government
and fueling a Taliban-led insurgency that continues to gain power.”
The basic infrastructure
in the country, the report concludes, “is in shambles; the drug
trade is booming. This result should be seen as a major setback to the
‘War on Terror.’ To Afghans, who after decades of war, believed
they would finally catch a break, it’s a heartbreak.”
Professor Beau Grosscup of
California State University at Chico agrees. He told us, “This
report confirms that Afghanistan has been ‘Enron-ized’ by
the Bush Administration. As with the demise of Enron, the future of
Afghanistan is one in which the ‘get rich quick’ class at
the top will escape with their bounty, while the poor who were encouraged
to invest heavily in ‘reconstruction’ and promised prosperity
will be left to live in the rubble.”
If the U.S. media were doing
its job, we would know a lot more than we now know about the state of
affairs in Afghanistan. But most of American journalism has been so
focused on Iraq that it has devoted scant attention to Afghanistan.
And that suits the U.S. government,
which is not doing nearly as well as it would like us to believe.