Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling

April 29, 2007

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

By JAMES GLANZ

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

--MORE--

Ex-envoy says Iraq rebuilding plan won't work

By Sue PlemingSat Feb 17, 10:32 AM ET

Kiki Munshi was showcased by the media in September as a seasoned U.S. diplomat who came out of retirement to lead a rebuilding group in Iraq.

Now she is back home, angry, and convinced that President George W. Bush's new strategy of doubling the number of such groups to 20 along with a troop surge of 21,500 will not help stabilize Iraq.

A diplomat for 22 years, she quit her job last month as leader of a Provincial Reconstruction Team -- groups made up of about 50 civilian and military experts that try to help Iraqi communities build their own government while strengthening moderates.

"In spite of the magnificent and often heroic work being done out there by a lot of truly wonderful people, the PRTs themselves aren't succeeding. The obstacles are too great," Munshi said this week in Washington, where she was pressing her view at the State Department and to Congress.

"Once again we are proceeding to lay people's lives on a line drawn with faulty information. Once again the fantasies of the 'policy-makers' drive decisions without much link to the realities on the ground," said Munshi, who retired from the foreign service in 2002 .

Her postings included Romania, India and Sierra Leone before Iraq, where Munshi said he had felt a "moral obligation to sort out the mess we have made there."

An audit by the special inspector general for Iraq last October found similar problems with the PRTs to those listed by Munshi, including an "ever-changing security situation, the difficulty of integrating civilian and military personnel, the lack of a finalized agreement on PRT operational requirements and responsibilities."

REJECTION

Members of Congress have also been critical of the program, which suffered early on from not being able to attract enough civilian staff and a dispute between the State and Defense departments over who would provide security for the teams.

The Bush administration rejects Munshi's views and the State Department said the expanded PRT plan was more focused, requiring team members to do pre-deployment training and with a clear goal of bolstering moderates and sidelining militants.

"We have been very mindful of the problems our PRT leaders have reported to us. We have worked very hard to streamline it," said Barbara Stephenson, the deputy coordinator for Iraq at the State Department, which oversees the PRT plan.

Munshi said the PRT plan was ill-conceived, under-funded and poorly staffed.

She said security was so bad that the council in the town in Diyala province where she was based had not had a quorum since last October and that death squads were rife.

PRT members found it hard to meet with Iraqis because of intimidation, she said, giving the example of training sessions that had been canceled because of poor security.

The PRTs are embedded with the military, a tactic Munshi says has varying results depending on the ability of the unit.

"All the PRTs embedded with the military are subject to the vicissitudes of military fortune, for good or ill," she said.

But the State Department countered that Munshi's experiences were not repeated in all the provinces and set up interviews with two PRT leaders who said while there were difficulties, they believed their work was making an impact.

Stephanie Miley, a PRT leader in the Iraqi town of Tikrit, said her teams managed to get out to see Iraqi officials five or six times a week but security issues meant they could not stay for long.

"I just hope that people will recognize that this is not something we will achieve overnight," she said.

Reconstruction Official on Disappeared Iraqi Billions: "What Difference Does It Make?"

Oliver on Reconstruction Oversight

Welcome to Loudon, USA, where rebuilding has sparked a goldrush

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday December 2, 2006
The Guardian

Some of the billions of dollars that Congress earmarked to be spent on Iraq have ended up much closer to home, in the plush Washington suburbs of northern Virginia.

This year Loudoun county, a mix of sleek silver office buildings and bucolic hills to the west of the capital, emerged as the wealthiest county in the country with a median household income of nearly $100,000 (£50,500). The country's second poshest place to live, Fairfax County, is right next door.

Not long ago, at the height of the dot.com boom, the big money was on the west coast. In Bush's post 9/11 America it has migrated to the east, forming a golden arc around the Pentagon which has privatised much of the war on terror and has been handing out multimillion-dollar contracts to the burgeoning defence industry.

The giant corporations that have been paid much of the $18bn set aside for Iraq reconstruction are more evenly spread around the country. Parsons is in California. Bechtel and Halliburton are in the president's home state, Texas.

But a big bite of security costs involved in every reconstruction contract has found its way to Loudoun and Fairfax, where many private security contractors have set up shop to recruit officers and defence officials as soon as they walk out of the Pentagon's doors in search of a more lucrative private career.

As the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found, conditions there have been so difficult that on some projects more than half the expenditure has been on overheads, such as paying high-earning contract employees to stay in Baghdad for months awaiting the start of construction. That money tends not to stay in Iraq but to go back to the US, to places such as Loudoun and Fairfax, where huge new private homes, known locally as "McMansions", are popping up each day, clustered around the many golf courses.

<>However, the gravy train may have "just jumped the tracks", wrote Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein. "It's not only that the war in Iraq will start to wind down, along with all the logistical support and reconstruction work that goes with it. Even more significantly, the Democratic Congress is about to lift the veil on the orgy of contractor waste, fraud and abuse that has gone unchecked at the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the homeland security
department."