Thirteen years ago, the United States called the reconstruction of the Kabul-Kandahar highway “the most visible sign” of efforts to rebuild Afghanistan. But today, that stretch of road is no longer a sign of progress.
Instead, it is now littered with craters from bombs and insurgent checkpoints and is “beyond repair,” an Afghan official said, and it is a symbol of the failed U.S. intervention here.
A report released Saturday by a U.S. government oversight body paints a grim picture of the state of Afghanistan’s roads, including the roughly 10,000 miles that were constructed, paved, repaired or funded by the United States. The new roads were hailed as key to bringing economic growth and security, even when they eventually became too dangerous for travel.
Now, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says 95 percent of the sections of road it inspected were either damaged or destroyed. And 85 percent were maintained either poorly or not at all.
Read more- The Washington Post
Image courtesy of The Washington Post
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our infrastructure a D+ and said we rank 16th behind countries like France, Spain and Japan. Much of our transportation infrastructure (railroads, water pipelines, ports. dams, bridges, airports, roads) is in poor condition, 70,000 of our bridges are structurally deficient, and we need 1.7 trillion by 2020 to improve the situation. When one considers this, it is unsupportable that we constructed, paved or repaired 10,000 miles of Afghanistan's roads with a cost of billions to American taxpayers (and Afghanistan only had 50 miles of paved road in the country in 2001!) And to make it even more inconceivable, it was all for nothing as the roads are again destroyed, and some of the money even went in corrupt insurgent's pockets. I know a few billion is considered a drop in the bucket of foreign aide, but can't we drop it in our own bucket for a change?