But the project was contentious and costly long before the battles of the last few years between the Taliban and western forces, which saw the US bomb the site in 2001 before attempting to begin reconstruction in 2004. Tiefer said he leapt out of his chair to take a closer look at was being presented. Cold war competition with the Soviet Union - which eventually took over part of the Kajaki project - saw the US fund the installation of two power turbines in the 1970s, and make space for a third. You have to credit us. Instead, it forked over an additional $75 million and handed control of getting the third turbine online to the struggling national Afghan utility in 2013, with USAID playing an advisory role. Over two decades, the Helmand project consumed 20% of Afghanistan's national budget, as well as much US aid money. In interviews, USAID and State Department officials would not acknowledge that even minor mistakes had been made with the Kajaki project. See for yourself how that money could have been used at home. USAid obtained an extra turbine and throughout 2007 tried to persuade the British, who at that stage held Kajaki, to take it up for installation. Kajaki dam (Google Maps). Unsurprisingly, during this period, the Kajaki Dam languished, and a top USAID official told The Associated Press that the agency had discussions in 2012 about scrapping the project. And the utility continues to struggle mightily in southern Afghanistan. The Kajakai Dam is one of the two major hydroelectric power dams of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, located on the Helmand River. The other is in pieces, awaiting a refurbishment that began in 2004 but has been made impossible by insecurity. A Senate subcommittee is looking at waste by a Pentagon task force. Earlier this year, I examined the plant in a yard near the Kajaki Dam. Bolger, the Army general, argues that among the Afghans, the long-term inability to finish the dam and other energy projects has a “more demoralizing effect than corruption. It was built by the Americans in the early 1950s as a cold war showcase, the sort of mega-scheme that was supposed to modernise the developing world. With hundreds of millions invested, USAID continued to work on the mammoth project even as Helmand became one of the key areas of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in 2010, and the deadliest province for U.S. service members. According to USAID’s Sampler, at the start of the war less than 6% of Afghans had access to electricity and now 30% of the population is hooked up to an electrical grid. New Eyewitness Accounts: Feds Didn’t Identify Themselves Before Opening Fire on Portland Antifa Suspect. DABS hasn’t been able to take over. Instead, USAID had to airlift supplies, increasing the cost by nearly $7 million, according to a USAID Inspector General report. In 2013! The turbine has sat, unassembled, in rusting containers at Kajaki ever since. But Larry Sampler, a senior USAID official who has worked on Afghanistan since 2002, said the agency couldn’t have been expected to foresee the tumultuous security situation or Taliban interference with the project. You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you. The Americans were taken by the visionary nature of the project, in particular the idea that that Afghans who had never had electricity before (estimates of the number vary from 1.8m to 2.5m), could get it. Mark Urban's report on the Kajaki power project can be seen on Newsnight at 2230 BST on BBC Two on Tuesday 28 June. There are other problems too. In December, the Taliban overran the bordering district of Sangin. If the scheme is ever completed - and the level of the dam raised to the capacity planned in the 1950s - the Kajaki will provide power and perhaps some peace to southern Afghanistan. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. On a trip to Afghanistan in 2010, he said, the commission was astounded to learn of the scale of what USAID was trying to accomplish in the energy sector. • This article was amended on Wednesday 17 December 2008. For American taxpayers, upwards of $300 million could end up wasted. Then the Text Messages Started. England's new three-tier system can both control the virus and prevent economic harm, Boris Johnson says. Just a year later, however, the NATO mission, which had been focused largely in Kabul, started expanding across the country to take on pockets of resistance and troop numbers quickly increased. On Wednesday, a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on the activities of controversial Pentagon task force responsible for some of this spending. (It was originally March 2016, then May 2016, then July 2016 as security problems persisted.). That means that even the U.S.’s transition plan to make up for its failure to get the Kajaki Dam fully running is a failure, SIGAR said. But cutting off part of Iran's water supply, as the Taliban did briefly by shutting the dam, is controversial, and has had an environmental impact on the remarkable Sistan basin, an area of desert wetland. The latest estimated completion date for the transmission lines is late 2018. The project also required significant work across wide swaths of Taliban territory to connect the dam to Kandahar city with transmissions lines. This has been amended. The Kajaki Dam was built in the 1950s, when the United States had turned Helmand into what was known as “Little America,” with hundreds of contractors acting as … Each time the deadline was missed, USAID remained optimistic about the dam’s prospects, even when others acknowledged failure, such as Gen. David Petraeus telling BBC News in 2011 that Kajaki was a classic case of "over-promising but under-deliver[ing].” Former Afghan President Amid Karzai too criticized the project, saying “it is 10 years now that Kajaki Dam has been as it is…all of that money wasted.”. We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language. The 100 m-high dam was commissioned in 1953, with a power station with two 16.5 MW units completed by Morrison-Knudsen, under … Two dams were built, including the Kajaki. The British dragged their feet for many months, daunted by the scale of the task of hauling a 210-tonne plant up through the worst of Afghanistan's insurgency. She Was Afraid of Her Lawyer. The Internet is littered with stories over the years about how the Kajaki Dam would now be finished in 2007! If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our. The Taliban’s dominance of the area is such that it controls at least a third of the output from Kajaki Dam, collecting taxes from the people for its use, according to the Afghan national utility. Two turbines produce a limited amount of electricity, not enough to sustain Kandahar’s demands. Nobody Knows What Happens Next. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, ProPublica.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by ProPublica.” You must link the word “ProPublica” to the original URL of the story. . At the Kajaki Dam, Stuart Pearson stumbled across the cleared path and set off another landmine, losing his left leg. The northern part of Helmand is also an extremely remote area still littered with Russian mines and with almost no infrastructure or connection to the newly established government. The U.S. turned it into hydroelectric power station in the 1970s, but abandoned the project before completion when the Russians invaded in 1979. Recent work by the US Marines (who now hold the area) to improve the route up the Sangin valley offers hope that the cement needed for the foundations could be brought up by road. What better way to join the civilian effort towards the military campaign than to produce this tangible change in people's lives?
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