Afghans left out of their own rebuilding

"If NGOs don't participate in construction work, some [skilled Afghans] may go back to government. Some may go to the private sector, which is something we want to develop as well," says Umer Daudzai, chief of staff for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was in Washington discussing reconstruction with President Bush Monday.

The Kabul-Jalalabad road, like most big road projects here, went through a competitive-bidding process and was awarded to private international firms.

But one of the subcontractors was an Afghan NGO that was found to be a for-profit enterprise - another problem that the new reform law hopes to eliminate. More than 2,000 local NGOs operate here, most of them for-profit enterprises set up under earlier weak governments. Under the new NGO reform legislation, all NGOs will have to reregister, and many of these "fake" NGOs are expected to be weeded out.

Several officials, however, in donor agencies suggested that neither Afghan construction companies nor the ministry of public works would become competitive bidders on international contracts anytime soon because they are still incapable of carrying out such projects.

The European Commission (EC), a major donor for the new highway, did not make hiring and training of Afghans a priority for this project, though it does have others aimed at building capacity.

"The decision was made that this important road to Pakistan should be done quickly," says Harold Paul, press officer for the EC in Kabul. The road connects the Afghan capital to Towr Kham, in Pakistan, via the Khyber Pass, a crucial trading route traveled by 5,000 to 6,000 trucks a day. "The ministry at the moment doesn't have the capacity to do it properly and do it now," he says.

The Chinese contractor didn't have much success finding employable Afghan engineers. The lack of skilled local engineers for the top jobs on the Kabul-Jalalabad highway boxed out Afghans from some of the less-skilled jobs as well.

"I recommended hiring local staff. And [site managers] employed some of them after a test. But later on, the Chinese technicians and engineers complained about the language barrier and the level of skills," says Mu Naisheng, an assistant manager for SinoHydro, one of the two Chinese firms.

Given the high stakes in road building, the donor community has opted instead to pursue construction projects and capacity building in parallel. Rasooli says the Ministry of Public Works has received money from the EC, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank for such efforts. Programs include a new series of courses for the engineers at the ministry, as well as money to hire international engineers to team up with Afghans on projects.

"I hope that after two years our engineers will be ready to design roads ourselves, and everything will be done by our engineers," says Rasooli.

That vision isn't universal, even within the Afghan government, however. Several members of Mr. Karzai's Cabinet say that ministries should stick to quality control and monitoring, leaving implementation to the fledgling private sector.

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