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If he goes to his office, Fazal Ahmad finds dozens of fuming businessmen and turbaned village elders waiting. If he stays away, people call his cell phone at all hours of the day and night.
The refrain is always the same: Give us electricity.
Mr. Ahmad, known to everyone here as Engineer Fazal, has the thankless job of running the utility company in Kandahar province. Through years of war and then neglect under Taliban rule, he has kept the shambolic system running, however imperfectly, by patching it with just about anything he could scrounge up short of chewing gum and rubber bands.But Mr. Ahmad cannot give what he does not have. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on stabilizing and rebuilding Afghanistan. Yet the electrical system here in the country’s second-largest city is on the verge of collapse, leaving people like Mr. Ahmad puzzled and frustrated. “First they should have paid attention to electricity,” he said. “Where there is electricity, there is life. There is security.”
It is now 10 years since the world started pouring money into Afghanistan. Much of the largesse came to Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. The largest part of the spending has been driven and delivered by the military, pushed into what commanders call “hot” areas where Taliban influence is strong and the Afghan government is weak.
The assumption, voiced by civilian agencies and the military alike, was that the more money that could be spent here, the more secure it would become.
Kandahar has seen the impact. It has new schools and rural government centres. The provincial capital has paved roads, a new set of sidewalks and some solar-powered streetlights. Irrigation canals are being repaired and village playgrounds built.
Yet the massive infusion of foreign money has not paid off in increased security, according to many aid experts. Nor has the money bought the Afghan government or the international community much love. And only now are foreign aid agencies and the military starting to take on the basic infrastructure, like Kandahar’s patched-together electricity network, rather than quick-fix projects that ate up most of the money in the past.
With last week’s withdrawal of Canadian combat forces from Afghanistan and the start of a wider withdrawal by other NATO countries, questions are being raised about the utility of spending aid money to achieve military objectives.
That formula, instead, may be counterproductive: raising unrealistic expectations, distorting the economy and fuelling corruption that further erodes Afghans’ confidence in their government.
“The assumptions of what could be done were unrealistic,” said Andrew Wilder, the director of Afghanistan and Pakistan programs at the United States Institute for Peace. “There were high expectations that development aid would have a security effect. In the end, you got neither.”
While Canada and the United States devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to Kandahar projects, much of the foreign spending in the restive province came wrapped in a
military package.
In just the last eight months, Canada’s last battle group spent $51 million from the Commander’s Contingency Fund, the discretionary money available to military officers in the field for small-scale quick-fix projects. The comparable American commanders’ fund has dispensed nearly $2.7-billion in the last eight years. While the portion spent in Kandahar has not been made public, officers here say most of it was concentrated in southern Afghanistan.
Mr. Wilder, who oversaw a study of the counterinsurgency effectiveness of such spending in several Afghan provinces, said it often had “perverse” effects.
“In a tribal society, that kind of spending exacerbates rivalries,” he said. “You could do a really good project in this one village and have a good effect, but then nine villages around it are unhappy.”
Much of the aid money also ended up in the pockets of “malign actors” and insurgent groups, he added. “Basically if you pour lots of money into a war zone with little accountability and oversight, it’s inevitably going to fuel corruption,” Mr. Wilder said. “In some cases there probably wasn’t as much corruption as was perceived to be, but everyone assumes the worst.”Local officials say that not enough of the aid money reaches Afghans and when it does, it distorts the economy and undermines the government.
According to recent report from the Provincial Reconstruction Team, the civilian wing of the coalition aid effort in Kandahar, city officials complained that foreign contractors on aid projects were poaching skilled professionals by paying salaries 15 times higher than the government can pay.
The provincial governor, Tooryalai Wesa, also blasted a $200-million aid project that had foreign consultants giving horticultural classes to Afghan farmers. With that money, the report quoted him as saying, he “could have paved the streets of Kandahar in gold.”
Late last year, the regional military command in Kandahar set up a joint civilian-military unit to start planning big-ticket infrastructure projects. With the military mission in Afghanistan set to end in just over three years and military money to fade with it, it marks a shift toward more classic development projects.
Commanders in the field still want money for quick cash-for-work schemes. “He’ll want to do something that will counter a source of instability, whether or not it makes sense development-wise,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre St-Laurent, a Canadian military engineer who runs the infrastructure arm of the new unit. “Between stabilization and pure development, there’s a zone in between where we’re at right now.”
The story of Kandahar’s electricity woes is emblematic of how muddy that zone has been.
Unless they have their own generators, live in the prison or stay at the main hospital, city residents have electricity for just six hours a day, every other day. Anything from a single frayed line or a strong gust of wind takes the whole thing down at any time. Poles sag. Lines droop. Insulation is worn away. Transformers lack fuses. Diesel fuel promised by the central government in Kabul to run the old generators arrives late or not at all.
Outside the provincial capital, service is even spottier. Some small towns have generators, but most places have no electricity. One small rural area gets power from a tiny hydroelectric station built by Germany during the Second World War. Mr. Ahmad, the utility director, is particularly proud of having kept its near-antique machinery in operation.
A sustainable solution remains elusive.
Before the wars that tore Afghanistan apart, the main source of Kandahar’s electricity was hydroelectric power from the Kajaki dam in neighbouring Helmand province. The dam is nearly 60 years old now and American attempts to modernize it have been frustrated for the past seven years by contractor delays and Taliban attacks. It provides only fitful power over frayed lines.
By late last summer, amid fierce fighting in the south, the city’s chronic electricity problems were finally deemed a military emergency. As a senior Pentagon official put it, fixing the system “was an essential part of our campaign plan … to defeat the Taliban.”
Using money from their discretionary cash, American commanders brought in a new set of generators and a warehouse full of equipment to repair the city’s grid earlier this year. The commanders’ fund will also pay the annual fuel bill of $106 million for four years.
“It’s going to take years to get this done, and we can’t wait to get the pretty package,” said Chief Warrant Officer 5 Thomas Black, the deputy commander of the project for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“You can’t say, wait and we’re going to do one big fix,” he added. “We have to look at what can we do right now.”
For Mr. Ahmad, it all represents a gift that is impossible to refuse but could be difficult to maintain. The Afghan government does not have the money for diesel fuel after the military stops paying for it.
Asked how many skilled employees he has who can run the new machinery, he answered, “Two or three.” He said he hopes to hire more, maybe some new engineering graduates. But the salary he can offer is not much more than what an illiterate teenaged police officer earns. His own salary is the equivalent of $400 a month.
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