Four Years Later, Much Of U.S. Aid In Afghanistan Has Little Impact

SHOWKHEI, Afghanistan — Most mornings, boys from this village walk to a mud-brick school constructed two years ago, compliments of U.S. taxpayers. But the building is already in disrepair, its walls crumbling and its roof pitted by termites chewing into untreated wooden beams.

Village elders in Showkhei, some 20 miles from the main U.S. military base at Bagram, were unanimous in the summer of 2003 when soldiers arrived and asked what they needed: a bigger school for their children. The soldiers sent a construction firm called Ahmad Jamil Construction to Showkhei to double the size of the existing school from five rooms to 10.

But no one from the military came back to inspect the quality of materials or the company's work, villagers said. The next time they saw the soldiers was weeks later at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. U.S. officials took pictures of the new building and then left, said school principal Said Rakhman.

Two years and $20,000 later, the locally made mud bricks crumble to the touch, and termites have infested the roof beams, leaving villagers with the morbid pastime of guessing when the ceiling will fall.

"Do they just care about photographs?" asked Rakhman. "My children have to stay in this building, their children don't."

Use of inferior construction materials is just one of myriad complaints lodged by auditors and aid workers who are critical of U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.

Four years after American forces invaded Afghanistan to purge the Taliban, the United States has spent more than $1.62 billion to reconstruct this war-ravaged Central Asian country.

Some vital and visible results of the U.S. intervention are evident. After 25 years of open warfare, millions of Afghans have returned home, voters have elected a government and many women are back at work.

But a report published in July by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited bureaucratic squabbles, poor planning and a lack of coordination and oversight in the spending of U.S. reconstruction money in Afghanistan. The effect is that building and public works projects by the State Department and the Pentagon have had little impact on improving the country's long-term reconstruction, the GAO said.

For Afghans this is cause for despair. In a country ranked among the world's worst in terms of poverty, literacy and infant mortality, the slow reconstruction endangers short- and long-term stability.

No one expected Afghanistan to transform its bomb-scarred, medieval landscape into a modern nation overnight. But analysts, aid workers and many Afghans are questioning how effectively the millions of U.S. dollars meant to improve the country have been spent so far.

"You say time equals money. In this case it's true. We Afghans don't have the luxury of time," said Mohammed Sidiq Patman, the deputy Minster of Education. "I know that America has a desire to help, but [the U.S. government isn't] doing things in the best way."

The government of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai, still heavily dependant on international assistance, is being further undermined by more frequent and deadly attacks by the Taliban and insurgents. The continued presence of warlords means the authority of the central government doesn't stretch much beyond the confines of the capital, Kabul.

Despite pledges by President Bush to stay the course, the United States is reportedly planning to pull out 20 percent of its 18,000 troops next year.

Quayum Karzai, a brother of the president who was just elected to parliament, said withdrawing even 50 U.S. troops would send a signal to ordinary Afghans and extremists alike that "the commitment isn't there."

In the effort to deliver roads, schools, clinics, irrigation canals and other public works, U.S. agencies fell short of most of their own targets and misrepresented their progress to decision makers in Washington, according to the GAO, an investigative arm of Congress whose July report covered reconstruction results through May 2005.

For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has pointed to the repair and construction of miles of irrigation ditches and canals as a reflection of booming Afghan farms. But the GAO found that the contractor responsible for overseeing these projects, Chemonics international Inc., did not fully collect or report information on their progress. More importantly, U.S. efforts weren't steered with the aim of helping Afghans produce specific crops or getting those crops to market.

While a Kabul to Kandahar highway is nearing completion, cutting travel time from three days to six hours, relatively little attention has been paid to fixing or building smaller roadways, so moving crops — or people, money or even the Afghan army — around the country remains difficult.

"People told us I hear there's a clinic but I can't get to it," said Morgan Courtney, a researcher for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan, Washington-based policy group. She conducted an independent survey earlier this year of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The clinic may only be a mile or two away, but "they say the roads are so bad that if we carry our family on a cart, we'll dump it on the way there because its way too bumpy for us."

The handful of health clinics built last year weren't placed where trained doctors are because contractors didn't consult with local officials or the Ministry of Health, which wanted to ensure that they were being put in places of need, the GAO reported.

Peggy O'Ban, a spokeswoman for USAID, said the agency agrees with the GAO's assertions and notes that a comprehensive strategy for reconstruction in Afghanistan, lacking until this past summer, is now in place.

"It would've been a lot easier to import people [workers] from abroad but — depending on project and level of skill — what you're trying to do is train people," she said. "But if the imperative is to get everything done as quickly as possible, that creates a challenge."

Improving primary education, by building schools, revamping inadequate curricula and training teachers, is a goal embraced by all international agencies working in Afghanistan. Yet some of the U.S. government's most abysmal reconstruction results came in education.

Since 2002, 3,500 schools have been refurbished or built from scratch. For all Afghan children to study in covered buildings instead of tents or open-air schools, however, another 2,000 schools will need to be built, according to the Ministry of Education.

The U.S. government has funded a relatively small number of these needed school projects.

USAID had projected that it would refurbish or build 286 schools by the end of 2004, but its contractors had only completed eight by that deadline and refurbished about 77 others, with a coat of paint sometimes counting as a refinished school, the GAO reported.

As of Sept. 1 of this year, according to USAID, its contractors had completed 314 school projects since reconstruction began after the U.S.-led invasion.

USAID officials say such lackluster performance was largely a result of being initially too optimistic about Afghanistan's political and security climate. They said they set targets that were too high given how unstable the country became months later. Many areas of the Texas-sized country are still considered too unsafe for humanitarian workers.

Deteriorating security played a major role in slowing or shelving plans in at least six of the country's provinces, mainly along the Pakistani border, officials said. They blamed a lack of contractors willing to work in risky areas for allocating only $6 million of its $49 million budget for schools and clinics in fiscal year 2003.

Eighty-one aid workers were killed last year, the GAO reported, and attacks by the Taliban and its sympathizers left more than 1,200 dead — including U.S. and NATO soldiers, Afghan military and civilians and foreign workers, in the six months leading up to the Sept. 18 parliamentary election.

U.S. officials also note they had to coordinate their actions with the Ministry of Education, a challenge considering the Afghan government didn't even have pens, desks or computers — let alone a working staff — until mid 2002.

"Building the capacity of the new government to deliver is as important as the buildings, and it takes time," said Alonzo Fulgham, the USAID mission director in Afghanistan.

Under the same difficult conditions, however, other international lending agencies like the World Bank and non-profit organizations have demonstrated better results.

Atlanta-based CARE International, which has worked in Afghanistan for 44 years, built 40 schools in 2004, which in most cases cost $10,000 to $20,000 less than U.S.-sponsored projects. Schools constructed by USAID contractors cost between $60,000 and $80,000. CARE's faster pace was possible in part because it already had relationships with Afghan villages and businesses with whom to organize and build.

U.S. government agencies also have been hindered by bureaucratic battles not faced by the private aid organizations like CARE.

USAID, a branch of the State Department and the main American aid agency, had to make room for the Defense Department's new role in reconstruction, which has been expanded since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. USAID still has the lion's share of the aid budget for Afghanistan, about 83 percent.

Both agencies had to hammer out a philosophy of aid work acceptable to military and civilian staff. By 2004, the two U.S. agencies — partly at the urging of Afghans — worked out a cooperative effort known as provincial reconstruction teams. By design, these small teams of U.S. workers, led by armed soldiers, are based in rural districts, making them well placed to evaluate and fulfill the needs of local residents.

But shuffling personnel in and out of the teams, often under pressure to show quick progress, sometimes led to overlapping efforts, according to Courtney. Often, outside aid agencies weren't consulted. In one town, for instance, the team built one school, while on the other end of town a private aid group financed construction of another. This was occurring as many Afghan districts remained without any educational facilities.

While U.S. officials say they have improved coordination, a lack of oversight of contractors continues to plague American-financed projects. In some cases, U.S. officials have not been able to identify where their projects were located, nor have they kept credible records of contractor work, the GAO report said.

"Projects are expensive but they're not following up on them," said a U.S. official who formerly worked in Afghanistan, adding that "it's entirely up to the goodwill of the contractor" to make sure the work has been done right, especially since most Afghans lack technical expertise.

Analysts and some aid workers say that earlier in the reconstruction effort the U.S. government put too much emphasis on numbers — putting the quantity of reconstruction projects above the quality of the work — that hindered progress.

"Eight-hundred schools does not mean you have education," said Suraya Sadeed, the Afghan-American founder of Help the Afghan Children, a Virginia-based non-profit organization.

USAID director Fulgram says the agency is building schools, but also training teachers and printing schoolbooks, initiatives that he contends have yielded significant results.

But some USAID contracts to build schools do not obligate the contracting company responsible for construction to also equip the building with desks, blackboards or other necessary educational tools, a task USAID said falls under the Afghan Ministry of Education.

Dozens of U.S.- built schools, lacking trained teachers, books, or even drinking water, sit empty, according to Sadeed.

Shelter for Life International, a Wisconsin-based non-profit organization, in May 2003 won a $14 million U.S. contract to build 32 schools and 20 clinics. Officials there said that they had to seek money from private sources to finish their schools and correct what they saw as poor planning on the U.S. government's part.

Ten miles from Showkhei, in the village of Jamil Agha, townspeople call the recently built girls school there a castle. Complete with electricity and computers, it was constructed with private U.S. money.

Sadeed's organization provided the technical assistance for construction and added funds to attract good teachers and run a generator that provides electricity to a computer lab.

Local Afghans helped to build it after she first sought village elders' approval, helping create jobs and not offending their sense of pride.

The 1,300 girls studying at Jamil Agha range from age 5 to 15. Some walk 90 minutes each way to study at the school, which has the reputation of being the premiere education facility in the district and is attracting small shops and other businesses in its vicinity.

Having built 11 such schools with private funds, Sadeed is now turning her attention to fixing poorly built U.S. schools.

"You can't do nation-building and have it crumble," she said.

Coker reported from Afghanistan, Usher from Washington.