TIKRIT, Iraq — On the outskirts of Baghdad, 1,000 or so Iraqi farmers have paid about $8.50 each to join a locally run agriculture co-op. It’s a lifetime membership with access to training, plows and individual greenhouses, so they can grow vegetables during the off-season.
Farther north in Diyala province, the Aruba market in Muqdadiyah has grown from five stores in November into a bustling mall with more than 1,000 stores, employing some 3,000 people.
Here on the outskirts of Tikrit, local officials just celebrated the opening of the Abeer Ul-Marah Institute for Women, a vocational school offering monthlong classes in sewing, computer skills and language, taught by instructors from Tikrit University.
As the war winds down in Iraq, so too will projects such as these, backed by U.S. funds that since 2003 have totaled nearly $54 billion for reconstruction, military training and economic development.
“The days of large-scale moneys are past,” said Stuart Bowen, the man charged with auditing and analyzing how those billions are spent. “The reconstruction of Iraq is now fully the duty and burden of the government of Iraq.”
Iraq is taking over just as the U.S. military, in some ways, is finally getting reconstruction right — putting communities in charge of economic enterprises, creating long-term employment rather than short-term construction work, requiring that local leaders and institutions support the new schools and infrastructure that Americans build.
“We’ve learned how to use this thing,” said Brig. Gen. Patrick Donahue II, a deputy commander for U.S. Division-North, giving credit to the State Department’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which began working with the military in recent years to push money into projects that Iraqis wanted and needed.
“I really think the way we got smart using it is because we worked with the PRT,” Donahue said. “They taught us how to use this effectively, how to do sustainable projects, how to get the buy-in from the provinces.”
It’s unclear, however, how much of that lesson was learned too late. The results of Iraqi reconstruction are mixed, according Bowen, who heads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction.
Some rebuilt hospitals and schools show signs of success, including a new medical center in Salah ad Din province north of Baghdad.
Other efforts failed miserably.
The $40 million Khan Bani Saad prison sits empty and unwanted outside of Baghdad, Iraqi justice officials have told Bowen. He estimates that about $5 billion of the $54 billion investment was simply wasted.
Troubling scorecard
Much of the criticism over reconstruction money has focused on the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, a relatively small piece of the reconstruction pie with $3.82 billion spent as of midsummer.
In the early years, local commanders were urged to throw CERP dollars — once dubbed “walking around money” — at problems in their areas, from cleaning streets in order to make it harder to hide roadside bombs, to electrical and water projects. The push to spend created a money-grab each August and September before the end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year, that Bowen believes partially contributed to unwise choices and pressure to put more rebuilding projects on the books.
U.S. commanders know of CERP’s troubling scorecard, and some have instituted their own checks and balances to judge the effectiveness of projects they now oversee. Col. Malcolm Frost, who commands the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, is undertaking surveys of three markets in Diyala, including the Aruba market in Muqdadiyah.
That project was fed by 1,200 grants of $5,000 each, Donahue said. The military worked with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to identify good candidates for the grants. Those applicants then had to take a two-day business class. They got the $5,000 in two installments, half to open the business and the remainder when the shop was up and running.
Similar efforts are now under way in other parts of Diyala, Donahue said, where there are plans to issue 895 grants, each for $5,000, in Jalula and 1,854 grants in Khalis.
Others acknowledge the work barely makes a dent in a country where few receive electricity 24 hours a day.
Scratching the surface
John Ellerman is a Department of Agriculture adviser working with the PRT in Baghdad. The Green Mada’in cooperative operates just east of the city, where farmers use U.S.-bought greenhouses, have access to 15 tractors and rely on new slow-drip irrigation systems to lengthen their growing seasons.
Ellerman is setting up a similar group in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. So far, the State Department’s Quick Response Fund has contributed $25,000, and the military has offered $500,000 in CERP money.
But across the country, half the farmland lies fallow, Ellerman said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg, just scratching the surface,” he said of current projects.
That is where Iraq is supposed to step in as the military and State Department step back.
U.S. participation is falling quickly. In Tikrit, the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, part of Frost’s brigade, is scaling back projects. In coming weeks, 42 projects are scheduled for completion, with payouts to local contractors totaling $7.2 million. Just 14 more proposed projects will be started in the coming months, at an estimated cost of $2.4 million.
The PRTs will scale back next summer, too, from 16 teams to five throughout the country.
USAID, the independent federal agency that assists with rebuilding efforts in foreign countries, will be the main reconstruction player in Iraq after 2011. The agency has spent $7.7 billion on rebuilding Iraq since 2003, and its annual budget of $328 million is expected to continue, said Alex Dickie, the agency’s Iraq mission director.
“We’re here for at least 15 years,” Dickie said. “We’re in it for the long haul.”
So is Iraq — so far.
At the provincial level, there are signs that Iraqi officials are spending their own money, according to Iraqi contractors like Mithaq al-Fahal.
Mithaq has made millions off U.S. reconstruction projects in Iraq, U.S. military officers who work with him say. Earlier this month, his company, Saker al-Fahal, opened a renovated elementary school and the new vocational women’s institute. CERP money paid for the contracts, $199,000 for the renovation and an additional $245,000 for the sewing and computer school.
But Mithaq only has one more project on the books with the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment. At the recent school openings, he profusely thanked the battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. Donald Brown, and gave him cologne and a traditional dashiki garment.
“I can’t do anything without people like you,” he told Brown.
Clearly, though, he can. This year, Mithaq has picked up contracts from the Salah ad Din province for a government building outside Tikrit and an electrical project near Bayji, where one of Iraq’s largest oil refineries operates.
Hopeful signs
Other signs point to Iraqi investment. Kirkuk provincial officials have pledged to pay half the estimated $700,000 to $800,000 bill to pump water some 11 miles into five villages in the Rashad Valley. The province also has pledged to provide upkeep costs once the construction is complete, Donahue says.
Commanders such as Brown face the final test: the end of reconstruction money, which is drying up at a time when U.S. troops are offering counsel rather than combat to garner support and respect from Iraqi leaders.
“Like it or not, money is a weapons system,” Brown said. “If security is pretty good, compared to what it was a couple of years ago, and the government is fairly happy with how the Iraqi security forces are doing, and I don’t have any CERP money? What voice do I have left with these key leaders that we are trying to influence?”
Bowen, the inspector general, says he has about two years of work ahead of him. His staff continues to uncover cases in which military officers and troops have been caught skimming cash from unit CERP funds and mailing the money home.
He also says that despite several recommendations, the U.S. government has not established a single office to oversee the myriad of projects, which could foreshadow similar reconstruction troubles for Afghanistan.
“There is no single point of accountability and single point of authority,” Bowen said. “That continues to be the struggle.”
