An excellent report by IEEE Spectrum in the October 2011 issue. Links are also worth reading.
"Put aside for the moment the $53 billion (including security costs) that the United States made available to reconstruct Iraq and the $55 billion it has spent on Afghanistan. Consider instead the hundreds of people who died trying to bring modern infrastructure to the people of those two countries, according to the website Icasualties.org. It compounds the tragedy that some of them died in the s...ervice of something as poorly run as USAID's projects in those countries.
Something else perished as well: A rare and potentially momentous opportunity was squandered. Counterinsurgency (PDF) is complicated and messy and hard, as I was told over and over again in Afghanistan. As theories about counterinsurgency were endlessly debated and tried out in Iraq and Afghanistan, some unconventional ideas were proposed and put to the test. None was more radical than the proposition that helping ordinary people become more comfortable and productive could be as valuable, in military terms, as killing bad guys.
Was that proposition right? We will never know for sure."
For half a billion dollars, every man woman and child in Afghanistan could've been given a solar lantern for free. In two years. The savings in kerosene would keep the market going.
Some of this is 'fog of war'. People don't think and do things right, and large complex organizations are unwieldy, esp. civilians having to work in wars as difficult as these. These problems are compounded by the fact that the US hasn't fought any 'conventional' war since the Korean War, and 50+ years later the philosophies and the methods of war have changed along with the technologies. Then you have the utter stupidity of the BCRR quartet (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld) going to war in Iraq on borrowed money, keeping the rich quiet by cutting their taxes.
(I thought of this while posting the Meltzer piece a few minutes ago. What did the rich do with the money we gave them via tax cuts? Blew them on the bubbles, egging on the bankers who were merely taking advantage of the relaxed rules. Nobody asks -- just what were the leaders of business and money doing when the Congress, the regulators, the media were all cooking up the storm? It's as if once someone has a million or 100 million dollars, it's someone ELSE's responsibility to make sure the system runs right, that Bernie Madoffs are exposed, that wartime contractors deliver the impossible.)
Returning to the power story, I don't think it was wrong for Black and Veatch to say that the Tarakhil diesel was necessary or that it could be built much faster than a hydro. (I think the Indians financed the transmission line for power imports into the North.) If at all, I would have subsidized more fuel and given more connections to the booming populations of Kabul and Kandahar, and made sure the lights stayed on. Some complaints of the Spectrum writer are highly idealistic. Recognizing that electricity was one thing the foreigners could deliver and Taliban couldn't, getting every Afghan family 2-3 solar lanterns with phone chargers could've been done for less than $300 m and in less than two years. (My highly idealistic fancy!)
"Put aside for the moment the $53 billion (including security costs) that the United States made available to reconstruct Iraq and the $55 billion it has spent on Afghanistan. Consider instead the hundreds of people who died trying to bring modern infrastructure to the people of those two countries, according to the website Icasualties.org. It compounds the tragedy that some of them died in the s...ervice of something as poorly run as USAID's projects in those countries.
Something else perished as well: A rare and potentially momentous opportunity was squandered. Counterinsurgency (PDF) is complicated and messy and hard, as I was told over and over again in Afghanistan. As theories about counterinsurgency were endlessly debated and tried out in Iraq and Afghanistan, some unconventional ideas were proposed and put to the test. None was more radical than the proposition that helping ordinary people become more comfortable and productive could be as valuable, in military terms, as killing bad guys.
Was that proposition right? We will never know for sure."
For half a billion dollars, every man woman and child in Afghanistan could've been given a solar lantern for free. In two years. The savings in kerosene would keep the market going.
Some of this is 'fog of war'. People don't think and do things right, and large complex organizations are unwieldy, esp. civilians having to work in wars as difficult as these. These problems are compounded by the fact that the US hasn't fought any 'conventional' war since the Korean War, and 50+ years later the philosophies and the methods of war have changed along with the technologies. Then you have the utter stupidity of the BCRR quartet (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld) going to war in Iraq on borrowed money, keeping the rich quiet by cutting their taxes.
(I thought of this while posting the Meltzer piece a few minutes ago. What did the rich do with the money we gave them via tax cuts? Blew them on the bubbles, egging on the bankers who were merely taking advantage of the relaxed rules. Nobody asks -- just what were the leaders of business and money doing when the Congress, the regulators, the media were all cooking up the storm? It's as if once someone has a million or 100 million dollars, it's someone ELSE's responsibility to make sure the system runs right, that Bernie Madoffs are exposed, that wartime contractors deliver the impossible.)
Returning to the power story, I don't think it was wrong for Black and Veatch to say that the Tarakhil diesel was necessary or that it could be built much faster than a hydro. (I think the Indians financed the transmission line for power imports into the North.) If at all, I would have subsidized more fuel and given more connections to the booming populations of Kabul and Kandahar, and made sure the lights stayed on. Some complaints of the Spectrum writer are highly idealistic. Recognizing that electricity was one thing the foreigners could deliver and Taliban couldn't, getting every Afghan family 2-3 solar lanterns with phone chargers could've been done for less than $300 m and in less than two years. (My highly idealistic fancy!)
spectrum.ieee.org
The coalition has spent hundreds of millions trying to give Afghanistan electricity. Unfortunately, it made many of the mistakes it made in Iraq
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