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Sunday, January 24th, 2016

Afghanistan Waste Exhibit A: Kajaki Dam, More Than $300 Million Spent and Still Not Done

Author:     Megan McCloskey
Source:     Pro Publica/truthout
Publication Date:     Friday, 22 January 2016 00:00
Link: Afghanistan Waste Exhibit A: Kajaki Dam, More Than $300 Million Spent and Still Not Done
Stephan:   Remember the $43 million gas station the U.S. attempted to build in Afgahanistan, or the failed $500 million attempt to build a coal industry there? Well to that you can add the unfinished rusting $300 million Kajaki Dam. Afghanistan would have been a better place if we had just passed out bags of money to people, or just burnt it in a bonfire in the streets of Kabul. Meanwhile our bridges are falling down, our highways are filled with potholes, and our airports look like they belong to a second world culture -- and maybe that's the truth. Hundreds and hundreds of millions pissed away by incompetence, hubris, and ignorance. Quite a track-record.
The Kajaki dam in Helmand Province, Afghanistan Credit: Musadeq Sadeq/U.S. State Department

The Kajaki dam in Helmand Province, Afghanistan
Credit: Musadeq Sadeq/U.S. State Department

The five-day mission was dangerous and grueling. Thousands of troops hauled a 220-ton turbine piecemeal on trucks the entire length of a Taliban-infested province in southern Afghanistan. The feat was hailed by the British military as on par with the logistics of World War II and cost about $1 million.

The herculean effort was for USAID’s marquee reconstruction project, the Kajaki Dam, the lynchpin of an ambitious and expensive plan to bring electricity to southern Afghanistan.

That was 2008. The turbine has sat, unassembled, in rusting containers at Kajaki ever since.

As the US attempts to withdraw from Afghanistan, there is perhaps no better example of its botched efforts to rebuild and stabilize the country than the Kajaki Dam. For the past year, ProPublica has been scrutinizing the tens of billions spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan by the military, the State Department and the US Agency for International Development. Project after project […]

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