Violence puts billions in U.S. projects at risk

BAGHDAD, Iraq — On the southern outskirts of Baghdad, a sewage-treatment plant that was repaired with $13.5 million in U.S. funds sits idle while all of the raw waste from the western half of Baghdad is dumped into the Tigris River, where many of the capital's 7 million residents get their drinking water.

Adjacent to the Karkh sewage plant is Iraq's most advanced sanitary landfill, a new, 20-acre, $32 million dump — also paid for by the United States — with a liner to prevent groundwater contamination.

It has not had a load of garbage dropped off since the manager of the sewage-treatment plant was killed four months ago. Iraqis consider the access roads too dangerous, and Iraqi police rarely venture into the area, a haven for insurgents who regularly launch mortar shells across the city into the Green Zone less than six miles away.

The mothballed projects highlight a growing concern among U.S. officials here: whether Iraqis have the capacity to maintain, operate and protect the more than 8,000 reconstruction projects, costing $18.4 billion, that the United States has completed or plans to finish in the next few years, which include digging roadside drainage ditches, refurbishing hospitals and schools, and constructing electric power plants.

"The United States must ensure that the billions of dollars it has already invested in Iraq's infrastructure are not wasted," said an October report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, citing what it said were "limitations in the Iraqis' capacity to maintain and operate reconstructed facilities."

For example, the report said, "as of June 2005, approximately $52 million of the $200 million in completed large-scale water and sanitation projects either were not operating or were operating at lower capacity due to looting of key equipment and shortages of reliable power, trained Iraqi staff, and required chemicals and supplies."

The Karkh facilities — not included in the GAO report — also illustrate the security problems that plague reconstruction efforts and have forced U.S. officials to redirect as much as $3.5 billion from building projects and into security to protect them, raising the cost of infrastructure improvements by between 16 percent and 22 percent, officials say.

"It's a nightmare — you can't ask the 4th ID (Infantry Division) to go out and put their lives on the line for a sewer repair," said Charles Thomas, 59, a water contracting specialist with the Army Corps of Engineers.

"We've given the Iraqis enough to go out and fix the systems themselves. It's time for the Iraqis to step up, and they can and they want to."

These days, as money begins to run out, U.S. officials say they spend much of their time teaching modern democratic practices and personal responsibility to Iraqis raised in a system of favoritism, nepotism and pervasive corruption built during 24 years of deposed President Saddam Hussein's rule.

Lt. Col. Otto Albert Busher III, a reservist in the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. government's point man on water issues in Baghdad, is teaching the Iraqis skills such as master planning, budgeting, procurement, contracting and accounting — and even how to run a public meeting. Busher estimated that between 40 percent and 60 percent of the purified water that leaves Baghdad's treatment plants never makes it to city taps because of leaks.

Because the water network was built 25 years ago with brittle cement pipes that have a 20-year lifespan, every time a bomb explodes in Baghdad, the water system is damaged, he said.

Even tanks rumbling on the streets crack the pipes — and not just water pipes, but sewer pipes that run alongside. Contamination of fresh water by sewage "happens on a daily basis," Busher said.

Congress initially allocated $4.6 billion for water and sanitation, and that was cut to $2.6 billion by the State Department; the savings were shifted to other priorities, particularly security, according to a September GAO report. Along the way, the original target of delivering potable water to 90 percent of Iraqis was lowered to between 50 percent and 60 percent, the report said.

In testimony before Congress in February, Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said that only 49 of the planned 136 large water projects would be completed because of what he called a reconstruction funding gap.

But officials here say they are not getting credit for what they have accomplished.

Dawn Liberi, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq, said her agency has restored water-treatment service to 3.5 million Iraqis and sewer service to 3.2 million.

By the end of the year, she said, those numbers will more than double.

"The United States was never meant to do this whole job by itself," she said. The United States is making major investments in Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum with about 2 million residents in northeast Baghdad that is a stronghold of militia leader and cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A $15 million repair of a water-distribution system was finished in January. Work continues on a $47.5 million project to build a water-treatment plant and lay new pipes in the area. A $106.5 million rehabilitation of the neighborhood's power grid is also under way.

U.S. officials hope that this and similar projects will ease anti-U.S. sentiment and perhaps reduce support for Iraq's insurgent groups and violent militias.

But how Iraq will make up the huge funding shortfall is anybody's guess.

The country has no real tax base, and the government projects that about 90 percent of its annual operating revenue will come from oil. The oil sector is not producing or exporting as expected.