Major Problems Found In Iraqi Rebuilding Effort

The International Herald Tribune reports:
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 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.

U.S. officials have previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time that inspectors have found that projects officially declared successes - 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, about three-quarters of the generators 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 that 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.

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

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish and promote good will toward the United States.

"These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid," Stuart Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector general, said in an interview last week.

The conclusions will be summarized in the latest quarterly report by Bowen's office on Monday. Individual reports on each of the projects were made public Thursday and Friday.

Bowen said that because he suspected that completed projects were not being maintained, he had ordered his inspectors to undertake a wider program of returning to examine projects that had been completed for at least six months, a phase known as sustainment.

Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects to continue to function once they have been built.

The Iraqis themselves appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which cropped up after the United States turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Bowen said. Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq's parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

A case in point was the $5.2 million project undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build the special forces barracks in Baghdad. The project was completed in September 2005, but by the time inspectors visited last month, there were numerous problems caused by faulty plumbing throughout the buildings, and four large electrical generators, each costing $50,000, were no longer operating.

The problems with the generators were seemingly minor: missing batteries, a failure to maintain adequate oil levels in the engines, fuel lines that had been pilfered or broken. That kind of neglect is typical of rebuilding programs in developing countries whose citizens are not closely involved in planning efforts, said Rick Barton, co-director of the post-conflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington.

"What ultimately makes any project sustainable is local ownership from the beginning in designing the project, establishing the priorities," Barton said. "If you don't have those elements, it's an extension of colonialism, and generally it's resented."