On surveying the landscape

The Washington Post reports on the rebuilding effort in Afghanistan...and all indications are that while the war was more justified initially, the end results aren't much better than those in Iraq:

By September 2004, congressional figures show that the effort's centerpiece -- a $73 million U.S. Agency for International Development program -- had produced only 100 finished projects, most of them refurbishments of existing buildings. As of the beginning of this month, only about 40 more had been finished and turned over to the Afghan government.

Internal documents and more than 100 interviews in Washington and Kabul revealed a chain of mistakes and misjudgments: The U.S. effort was poorly conceived in a rush to show results before the Afghan presidential election in late 2004. The drive to construct earthquake-resistant, American-quality buildings in rustic villages led to culture clashes, delays and what a USAID official called "extraordinary costs." Afghans complained that the initial design for roofs made them too heavy to build in rural areas without a crane, and the corrected design made them too light to bear Afghan snows. Local workmen unfamiliar with U.S. construction methods sometimes produced shoddy work...

Last summer, Post reporters made an unannounced visit to (a) 15-month-old clinic, which was filled with patients. Mold and mildew stained the ceiling. In one room, the ceiling had fallen. Paint inside and out had blistered and peeled off in sheets. Cracks crawled across exterior walls. In a side yard, two girls labored in vain to pump water from a new, U.S.-built well. Mohammed Saber, a clinic guard, said the pump had stopped working days earlier...

In his October 2004 confidential memo, USAID's Fine answered the question of "What Went Wrong" with a sweeping indictment."The schools and clinics program has been marked by a series of missteps and miscalculations that resulted in a flawed business model, inadequate supervision and poor execution," wrote Fine, who at the time was the third head of USAID's Afghanistan program in a year.

The impetus to be seen getting things done appears to have led to a complete lack of incentive to plan for the best possible long-term result. Now, the combination of excessive promises and little foresight has led to nothing but frustration for all sides involved. The U.S. is facing added costs to try to accomplish a fraction of what it promised originally, while the Afghani citizens see large amounts of time and money put into construction which is of no benefit to them.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan appears to be one of the prime examples of the U.S.' assumption that what works at home (or at least, appears to work at home until Brownie's responsibilities come into play) can be exported abroad without any need to recognize local realities. And that apparently applies equally to such simple and verifiable realities as the layout of the terrain as it does to the complexity of local culture and values.