Roads to Nowhere: Program to Win Over Afghans Fails

From The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. taxpayers paid Afghan entrepreneur Ajmal Hasas millions of dollars as part of a plan to win over villages in the country's insurgent heartlands.

Instead, Mr. Hasas' seven-mile road construction project went so awry that his security guards opened fire on some of the very villagers he was trying to woo on behalf of his American funders.

Mr. Hasas was a point man in a $400 million U.S. Agency for International Development campaign to build as much as 1,200 miles of roads in some of Afghanistan's most remote and turbulent places.

Three years and nearly $270 million later, less than 100 miles of gravel road have been completed, according to American officials. More than 125 people were killed and 250 others were wounded in insurgent attacks aimed at derailing the project, USAID said. The agency shut down the road-building effort in December.

As the American involvement in Afghanistan is winding down ahead of the pullout of most forces in 2014, the USAID roads saga stands as a reminder of the limited progress the U.S. and its allies have achieved here over the past decade—and at how high a cost.

In Iraq, U.S. officials embarked on the largest rebuilding project since the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. But the $53 billion initiative was hobbled by the spreading insurgency, massive security costs that sometimes ate up more than half of contract costs, uncooperative government leaders and constantly shifting priorities, according to Stuart Bowen, America's special inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq.

After concluding that at least $4 billion in U.S. aid had been squandered in Iraq, Mr. Bowen warned American officials in 2009 that they were making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. State Department officials said at the time that they had learned lessons from Iraq and were working to better coordinate military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan.

As part of America's $85 billion reconstruction program in Afghanistan, USAID has spent more than $15 billion since 2002, more than in any other country. As in Iraq, the program in Afghanistan has been repeatedly disrupted by the spread of the insurgency across the country, poor oversight, an overreliance on outside contractors, cost overruns and corruption, according to U.S. officials and government investigative reports.