 Good afternoon, my name is Peter Bergen. Welcome to the New America Foundation. Really delighted to have Xavier Cronin here today. He wrote a book about the road between Kabul and Kandahar for the Louis Berger Group in 2010. He's written other books, Grave Exodus and Our Appliances. He's currently an editor and writer with Petro Kamweir. He's writing a novel and he will talk about the story of the rebuilding of Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar, and then sort of a broader take on what are the kind of whole infrastructure story in Afghanistan, what is the tens of billions of dollars that have been spent there really bought us. So he's going to speak for about 20, 30 minutes. I'll submit him to some Q&A and then we'll open it to you guys and over to you, Xavier. Thanks a lot, Peter. And thanks a lot to the New America Foundation for inviting me to talk about this remarkable post-911 story which I wrote about in this book for Louis Berger Group. The story is really several different stories and with all that has happened since 9-11, it hasn't received a lot of attention for obvious reasons. I mean there's been many, many books written as you know and 9-11 was a huge event of historic proportions, but this particular story is about on one level the rebuilding of Afghanistan's major Highway 1 and you can look on the map from Kabul to Kandahar, 300 miles part of the, you may have heard of the Ring Road of Afghanistan that circles the country. Under orders the rebuilding the road was completely devastated from the Soviet war and then the Taliban rule in the 1990s. It was built in the 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. So after 9-11 the Bush administration wanted to have a signature project to show that we were making a lot of progress in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. As of course we were planning to go into Iraq and invade Iraq. So they decided after consulting with Karzai and his people and various people in the U.S. government that the signature project would be rebuilding Highway 1. And so it's really the story of how the highway was rebuilt in a very short timeframe because the U.S. Agency for International Development, I know we have a few people here from that agency USAID, they got the orders to do a lot of reconstruction in Afghanistan and specifically get this road built. They in turn awarded a contract in September of 2002 to the Lewis Berger Group, which I know there's several Lewis Berger people here and they do a lot of USAID work all over the world. And the U.S., so the AID gave the Lewis Berger Group this contract to rebuild schools and roads and highways. So what happened in 2002 is they got the contract and they started work on the rebuilding of the road. And in 2003, Wolfowitz visited this is January 2003, Wolfowitz visited the road construction site and he was concerned that they weren't making much progress. A couple months later we invaded Iraq. A week later, April 1st of 2003 the National Security Council had told USAID the President, meaning Bush of course, had told Karzai were getting the road done by the end of the year. They had decided that they would create this timeframe and this race to get the road paved to show everyone just how quickly we were moving in Afghanistan. Most of the attention of course at the time was on Iraq, of course we had just invaded Iraq. So the Lewis Berger Group was charged with they huddled up and said, how are we going to get this road rebuilt? This wasn't just a simple repaving the road was going to be rebuilt with U.S. highway specs, meaning if you know anything about highway building, I know we have some highway specialists here. I mean there's a base level there's another level and there's the top layer. So the Lewis Berger Group huddled together and they decided that they would divide the reconstruction into five sections. So what further complicated it is the first, I believe it was 30 kilometers from Kabul going south on the highway had already been paved by the Taliban so that just needed repairs and then the 50 kilometers out of Kandahar to 50 kilometers north was being handled by the Japanese in a separate contract. So you had about 389 kilometers of the rest of the road that needed to be rebuilt. So Lewis Berger Group hired five subcontractors three Turkish firms, one Indian firm and one Afghan firm which actually had staff in New York so they had five different subcontractors working on this road. And what was remarkable and I spent a lot of time in the book talking about this is they had this massive mobilization. I mean imagine the Taliban, Afghanistan, 2003. I mean how are you going to build a road when there's no infrastructure there's no construction companies, there's no supplies. So they did these massive airlifts of construction equipment and supplies and diesel and in the giant Antonov Russian cargo planes. They did 70 of these airlifts and they just had a constant stream of equipment coming in and then they had to get bitumen, the liquid asphalt and they had to get it from Egypt and they had to ship it in the Indian Ocean port. Some came through the Khyber Pass. A lot of it was in barrels so you had huge trucking. So all this was going on and essentially what was a war zone. I mean this is again 2003, Afghanistan people were getting killed and you had kidnappings and a lot of this was covered in the press and all the while the clock was ticking and every day the National Security Council would contact AID in Washington and Kabul how many kilometers have been done and it literally became this race and so AID would get on Louis Berger like how much, how many kilometers are done and you're going to make the deadline and so at some point they had to hire a lot more security. It peaked in November of 2003 like 1100 security drivers. So the end of the story, I mean on one level may just sound like a boring construction story but I detail in the book the people who actually made this happen on the ground and so they made the deadline. They had the final kilometers paved, I believe it was December 2008. So it was a big celebration and Karzai was there to cut a ribbon. The AID administrator, Natsios was there, the Japanese ambassador to Afghanistan was there and it was a big deal however three days before we had captured Saddam Hussein so it's this event which probably would have gotten a lot more press, sort of upstaged by that event. So they got the black top down and it was considered a success and Louis Berger group which hired me to write this book. I mean they were real straight about it. They said from the beginning that the president of Louis Berger group, Larry Walker, he said from the very beginning said this is going to be remembered as one of the great civil engineering accomplishments of the 21st century. He's very unapologetic about it. He was straight and I think he's right. I mean I'm not an engineer but it was remarkable that they got this done. So it chronicles that story but on a completely separate level it was a political story. I mean the neocons had decided that this was going to make us look good. You could argue why did it need to be done by the end of 2003. Well it really didn't but it was something that they could say look we got it done, look how fast we're going. So on one level was political. There was another story I didn't write about which was really a story of turf battles between the Department of Defense and AID because the Department of Defense was skeptical. I didn't do a lot of reporting on this but this is part of the story. They were skeptical that AID could get this done and so they had people in Kabul who were sort of overshadowing them. So that was a subtext, a subplot that I didn't write too much about which probably hold another book. So on that level it was a political story. And there were a lot of the other side of the story one of the other aspects of the story I did is I profiled people who made it happen. And there's some very sad stories. Guy from Texas Mark Humphries, he knew somebody from the Lewis Berger group went over there, was a construction manager in the summer of 2003 while this was going on. Subsequently died in a plane crash in February of 2005. Three kids he would tip the Afghan Shushine boys five bucks. I mean everybody loved this guy and he's one of the many casualties over there. So I profiled him. They set up a foundation for him in his name. There was an Afghan-American, this guy Saeed who's actually over there now, an engineer who escaped the Soviets in the 70s when they came got to New York, made his way to California, became a Caltrans engineer, raised three kids and when this whole accelerated reconstruction, as they call it was going on, they needed experts. Somehow they got a whole of him. He went over there during this period and helped reconstruct the highway and he was a very good source of mind. He subsequently returned to California and then a few years ago he went back again and he's now working on road projects there. The protagonist of the book, it's obviously not fiction but the sort of the hero of the book, this guy, his name is Jim Myers. God bless him, he passed away a couple years ago. He was what they called the chief party. He was the boss who overseeing the entire operation. He had worked for Lewis Berger Group, rebuilding Cambodia's major highway Phnom Penh to the seaport and he had worked for them in Ethiopia in the mid 70s. We have a picture of him. He killed a tiger for the Ethiopian government in 1975. This is a remarkable photo of him from 1975. He looks like Indiana Jones or who's the Australian guy. It's a remarkable resemblance. He's holding this giant lion looking up like this. He had sort of a legendary quality to him. He was a deep seed diver. He had been known to be in firefights. The reason he's also central to the story is that after 9-11 Lewis Berger Group knew that there was going to be a massive amount of reconstruction in Afghanistan and they had a lot of business where they did reconstruction all over the world. They needed somebody to get to Kabul in the chaos, which of course Peter knows as much as anyone, the chaos post 9-11. So he somehow he got to Islamabad in December of 2001 and I think Christmas Day was he got a flight with a UN flight to Kabul and he got there and one of the first things he did is he was officially charged with assessing the damage of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul because we were of course going to reopen the embassy there and then after he did that he decided on his own to do a survey of this major road from Kabul to Mazhar-e-Sharif, if I didn't butcher the pronunciation which includes a trek through, you may have heard of the Salang Tunnel accident there I think in the 70s the worst tunnel accidents or highway accidents ever but anyhow he did this survey report based upon this trip. He hired local Afghans and armed gort guards and he went up this road that was very dangerous and that document got sent back to Washington and the donor groups who were going to be responsible for reconstruction saw that document and that helped Louis Berger establish their presence in Afghanistan and probably help them get this massive reconstruction contract so I detail what he did over there and how he set up shop and the actual investigation that this trip that he took then he subsequently started to survey all the roads throughout Afghanistan because again Louis Berger knew that part of this reconstruction a big part was going to be rebuilding roads so then the AID got the contract and as I said the accelerated reconstruction was ordered by the neocons get it done as quickly as you can. So he's another person that I profiled. There was a young Afghan guy who Louis Berger hired in the fall of 2003 to be a driver and an interpreter. This was the nicest guy in the world. He subsequently, Louis Berger brought him over here in 2009 and paid for his education at the Old Dominion University somewhere around here but anyhow this guy Tariq, if I remember correctly, he was very funny. He was the driver for the construction people at the Indian sub contractors section and just as a reminder if you look at Kabul to Kandahar you had like these 50 to 60 kilometer sections that each of the five subcontractors were responsible for so Tariq was camped out with the Indian subcontractors and he wanted to practice his English so he had some DVDs and one was of Clint Eastwoods the good, you're probably too young to remember, the good, the bad and the ugly from the 60s which is was a classic Clint Eastwood film and he would practice his English at night watching the good and the bad and the ugly and this is, there's rocket attacks outside and he's in Afghanistan doing this and he'd get up in the morning, he'd drive the construction people where they needed to do, where they needed to go, excuse me and then he did a very good job of what he was doing so very sad what happened subsequently, I think it was early 2004 when the accelerated part of the project was done he was somewhere near Kandahar I believe, with some AID people I believe, this was a horrible story because one of the, I think it was an AID engineer who was shot and almost killed and anyhow they were in a helicopter they were returning to the helicopter after a meeting and the poor pilot, this Australian guy, out of the blue some Taliban or militias, who knows, they opened fire and they killed the Australian pilot and this guy had worked very heavily on the road project everybody knew this guy and loved him so the pilot is dead this AID engineer, this lady was shot and wounded and Tariq is standing there and he grabs the gun and it's holding off the shooters as he's calling on his cell phone to try to get help, eventually the US military dispatched some jets and he escaped you talk to people who have gone through stuff like this, they typically don't want to talk too much but he was very, he talked to me about this so he, you know, was considered a hero so Louis Berger decided, you know, this is so extraordinary we're bringing him to the US and we're going to enroll him in Old Dominion, he subsequently went to UC San Diego to get an advanced engineering degree, so I profile this guy, I think the point about these profiles and the book is Louis Berger group, probably if you've heard of them if you're not AID or Berger, a lot of what you read about in the media and just quickly the Justice Department settlement that some of you may know about, I am not the person to talk to about that incidentally but LBG cooperated with the government, put controls in place, it was a result of a misallocation of costs and that's something, you know, if any of you are interested in that you just have to talk to LBG, that's completely unrelated to anything that I'm doing here and that's just, that's straight that's, excuse me, a separate issue, but Louis Berger group they said, look, this, we want to tell our story, so they hired me, I was an author, I've been a journalist and we had a very good initial meeting about this and they said, look, we want to tell our story, you have carte blanche talk to anybody you want, I got tons of internal documents emails, you know, emails to the national community folks, Jim Cunder, I don't know if he's there, who the AID guy, when I first met him after doing research I called him the humanitarian go to guy because he had been doing this work all over, he was one of the first AID people at the U.S. Embassy in early 2002 all types of internal documents they gave me access to and they really didn't say don't do this, don't do this, don't do this, they allowed me to act pretty much as a journalist even though yes, they hired me and they paid me to do it, so I thought it was extraordinary in that regard and it was really telling this particular post 9-11 story from the perspective of a big government contractor that did the work and as I said they were very proud of having got this done, so I thought that was a pretty extraordinary part of this whole story is that a government contractor wanted to do this story and they went to the length to do this, now in terms of you know it's essentially a corporate book so it hasn't been distributed, you can't look it up on Amazon or anywhere, but I thought that was very important, just to move on there's a lot of specifics, a lot of details about this rebuilding campaign from basically let's call it 2003 even though it officially started I think the ribbon or the beginning of the construction formally was November of 2002 I believe and they had a press release from Washington and the whole idea incidentally the reason this road was so important, needless to say other than it was the major highway is you could now get people in the villages to go get to clinics and hospitals, you would now have commerce, you could have trucks, you could have everything that a highway brings to in this case the villages along the stretches of the highway so that they could recover and they could emerge as a bonafide economy and certainly improve their lives in a very general sense from the way things had gone in the larger discussion of costs I mean there's a 300 million dollar, there's currently a figure that for roads built in Afghanistan including security, including everything it's essentially going to cost you a million dollars per kilometer now the folks here who are in the trenches of this after there are people interested in well how do you calculate that they probably could answer it better than me but the price tag for this particular project, Kabul to Kandahar including the Japanese section and also excluding the first 25 kilometers out of Kabul that were only repaired, the whole project including the final work in 2004 which included another layer of asphalt and signs and in some cases they widened the road to accommodate villagers who said could you make it a little wider whatever it might be five bridges that they also constructed and yes I don't know all of them have been destroyed were destroyed subsequently but some of them 300 million dollars, this is the basic number 261 million of US tax payer dollars and the Japanese it cost them about 39 million for their section so those are the numbers in terms of what the costs were, now where we are now there's a road that they completed it's interesting the way this road was done I don't know a lot about it but USAID hired Lewis Berger group it's a road to Fazebaden if I pronounced it right 100 kilometers Lewis Berger group subbed it out to a South Korean firm they were the project managers and then the South Korean firm as needed subbed it out to locals to get diesel to get fuel whatever the needs were and that was completed in December of 2010 100 kilometers about 100 million dollars and Karzai did not show up for the ribbon cutting so the celebration was canceled just a little aside there, so in terms of infrastructure tens of billions spent over the last 10 years where we're at now I think what's very important now is a lot of you probably know the special inspector General John Sopko was just appointed I don't know if you've gone Segar is the acronym he's gotten his marching orders to be very aggressive in investigations into fraud and waste not that it hadn't been vigorous but from what I understand this is one of the few times where it's a special inspector general just for one country so he's gotten his marching orders to be very aggressive to go after fraud and waste and there's about 36 billion dollars of money that has been targeted for reconstruction in Afghanistan which hasn't been actually spent yet and so the question is well how much of that will be blocked because of the investigations that are going on also I believe the Obama administration currently has in the current budget 9 to 10 billion more so are we going to continue to see more infrastructure development at the same level or will it be curtailed and of course we're looking at a situation where we're leaving we're turning over the operation there to the Afghans and how that's going to affect the reconstruction in terms of what we've actually gotten and remember the World Bank the US has been the primary investor I think it's something like 89 billion minus that 36 billion but the World Bank has been a major investor and some other Japan as I mentioned and some other donor countries but 90 schools many roads obviously I've been talking about this major road and incidentally Lewis Berger also got the contract to do the road which was built by the Soviets in the 50s and 60s a concrete road from Kandahar to Hurat and they subsequently completed that in 2006 2007 somewhere around there so there's been a lot of road building there and again what to me is of interest is that a skeptic might say well why do we have to build these roads to the highest specs in the world US highway spec building we could save a heck of a lot I don't really know that's plain the devil's advocate some people might ask that there's been clinics, there's been agricultural programs of course there's been what have been labeled as boondoggles with Kajiki excuse me dam which I don't know how many of you are familiar with that but that's another AID project initially what happened is there were two turbines there you know anything about hydroelectric dams and generating systems there were two turbines in place and they were rotted out or whatever AID hired LBG Lewis Berger Group to get them up and running and they in 2003 2004 2005 they did that and they increased the electricity production from I think 10 megawatts to 30 to about 30 and so they did increase electricity initially then there was this campaign to bring a third turbine made in China and it was a remarkable logistical operation and I believe the British were heavily involved to get the turbine to the plant and they got it there and then it was like getting the water because they couldn't get the final concrete and other materials there because of security so then it's just been sitting there so there's been a lot of press about that like why did you go through all of this and then it's just sitting there I think the BBC the latest I saw was a few years ago a BBC reporter was there and this third turbine is just sitting there in pieces so you have projects like that there's been a lot of criticism about that there's dole fruits as in dole fruits and vegetables here I don't know where they're based in the US they were supposed to build a plant somewhere near Mazar Sharif and a whole agricultural program where they were going to grow fruits and vegetables and that never panned out that was I think started in 2005 so there's been projects that have worked, projects that haven't and of course this has all been going on in the context of the war on terror and what has been going on in Afghanistan since 2002 I mean there's been volumes written about it so the idea of infrastructure development there what have we gotten for if you go to AID's website for instance they have a dedicated website to the work they've done in Afghanistan now it might be a you know out of date some of it but they have a lot of details about projects that they're very proud of that they've done a reporter might investigate and say yeah you did you brought water to this village but right now the Taliban just came in and wiped it out whatever it might be but the point is there's dozens and dozens of these projects that have been completed and that's essentially where the tens of billions of dollars have been spent and so you could the schools for instance I mean you could argue under the Taliban and the way they treated women and children that's been heavily you know chronicle many many books but you know kids are going to school in September of 2002 as quickly as that AID had opened there's a great picture in the book I'm sorry I'm promoting that but great picture in the book from September of 2002 one of the AID collaborators Fred Shake is there at this I'm going to show you the picture at this they just reopened a kindergarten daycare center this is September of 2002 imagine a year ago what's going on in that country I'm not suggesting this is Pollyanna but to me that and here's the picture I mean you can see I mean this is September of 2002 and look at these these beautiful little kids and look at the dress and here's this you know AID administrator this post Taliban Afghanistan you know a year after 9-11 so you could say well that's pretty remarkable isn't it and so there's been a lot of good stuff women's rights I mean there's been a lot about you know women voting and the university in Kabul I mean there's a dedicated association here in Washington which focuses on this particular university I mean they have a soccer field that used to be a minefield and incidentally I don't want to go too much longer we can open it up there's an entire I should have mentioned there's an entire chapter in the book on demining that's another I mean you probably know Afghanistan per per square mile had more landmines unexploded ordnance like bombs that didn't go off RPGs, tank shells than any country in the world so a part of the other thing that made this pretty remarkable one of the other things completing this highway is they had to demine the entire section they brought special dogs in from South Africa because they were with this special demining process and technology they had in a company called Mekhem from South Africa and while this is all going on they're demining and there's a remarkable picture also of these Afghan deminers I think six of them every one of them has lost a limb they're back working with prosthetics they look like a band of brothers it's one of the most remarkable images I've ever seen and so you know there had been there had been a lot of demining going on I mean the United Nations had an extremely active demining program going on at least in the 90s but probably not during the somebody might speak to this more authoritatively but maybe not during the Soviet war but so there was a very it was an industry essentially you know demining that the place was just glittered I mean the amputees were all over the place so that was another aspect of this accomplishment how they demined the roads and the environs while excavating, digging up, bringing gravel to sites and bulldozers excuse me so I wanted also to add that so just to wrap things up I think we can you know talk more about this particular project I'm sure you might have questions about the dynamics of the actual work that was done the people involved and the political side and then where are we now October 2012 is this special and maybe I'm thinking that SOPCO's investigations may not be that relevant to the work that's going on I don't know if you look at his most recent report July 30th I believe it is 200 page document it's a heck of a lot going on and his next one he's testifying you know in front of a congress a lot his next one will be out in two weeks so how is that going to affect this massive 36 billion dollars that has been targeted but hasn't been spent yet so I think that's very important but the story I just think of all the post 9-11 stories I mean hundreds of them ranging from the horror of the collapse of the Twin Towers to the Pentagon to the movies and it's just massive amount of stories this is a forgotten one that has its own position in history in the annals of civil engineering and I think also in the annals of call it nation building and also the US response to 9-11 because as we know the strategy was invade Iraq but at the same time we wanted to rebuild Afghanistan not just rebuild it I mean this was the country that harbored the folks who excuse me the people who took down 9-11 terrorist attack and we'll never let that happen again so we're going to rebuild the country in a massive effort and it was basically with a budget that was unlimited like roads to completely rebuild the country so I think in that regard it's an important post 9-11 story on all those different levels so I'll just leave it at that and thank you very much for your attention thanks for the presentation this is not really a question but more of a comment I'm glad you brought up the demining because when you go to Afghanistan if you went to Afghanistan for the first three or four years after 9-11 there were deminers everywhere and now you almost never see them and the country has been largely demined and that's something I think that people tend to sort of forget I mean it's I traveled down that road under the Taliban before it was obviously reconstructed and it was a 17 hour drive without any stops and I've taken the road subsequently and it's been about seven hours I guess the big difference now is that it's almost too dangerous in certain parts to take the road and certainly even in 2006 it became dangerous to take the road north of Ghazni and I don't think that has changed very much anyway I'd like to open it up to questions if you have a question just to identify yourself and David Izby? I just say while I've only written on parts of this road in Ghazni and Wardak province in recent years it appeared to me in the ask and said that if it's built to US standards they've deteriorated rather dramatically from when they built the roads in southern Afghanistan in the 1960s the roads I saw of that area now I'm sure none of this is done by military convoys but they look to be in pretty bad shape compared to things like I've seen in Afghanistan in the 1980s how did you go how do you deal in your book I realize as an official historian this is an issue how do you deal with this obvious quality control issue? Well I wrote primarily about the road building in 2002 and 2003 from Kabul to Kandahar and at that time the actual reconstruction the road was in very good shape I mean obviously wasn't there you have David Lee Anderson he did a piece for the New Yorker and I called him up and he said I believe it was 2005 it was great I felt like I was in the US southwest cruising down the road again I think it's a separate so in other words the road was built according to these US highway specs and it was a very good road I think there were the Japanese section as I understand it it took them a while to finish that the 50 kilometers from Kandahar north but I think there's two separate issues maybe you could speak to this and one is the I'm sorry I haven't been on the road no I wrote the book in 2009 and 2010 and the book is about what happened from 9-11 through 2003 now subsequently I didn't write it really wasn't part of this book in terms of well subsequently you know the roads become a gauntlet I mean CNN what was it two years ago you can Google this and they talk about illegal checkpoints and people getting killed now in terms of the road deteriorating we know in January-February 2009 when I first started the book there were some emails from some very angry AID Berger people who talked about the bridges had just been blown up can't we get enough security we spent all this time rebuilding these bridges and can't we get security to protect it so in terms of the deteriorating condition that you came across I don't have expertise on that I defer to you and anyone else who's been there but from 2001 to 2003 I relied on my sources in terms of the condition of the road and you know including journalists like the guy I mentioned John Lee Anderson who drove on the road and there was another I'm sorry I'm going to ask this question here Dan Whitman with American University I think the story you tell us AID is unknown to many of us it is an inspiring story you yourself referred to the many books that have been written on related topics if this is an unfair tangent please let me know but one of the other recent books about construction in Afghanistan of course is Rajiv Shandra Sekar's Little America is it fair to even ask this question in this setting whether you're familiar with that darker side where the argument is made contrary to your very believable story that of an earlier period post World War II that the American civil engineers who went and worked on an irrigation project bringing water from the south to the north in fact were very insulated very much not in contact with Afghan society I think your story is quite the reverse do you have any comment about this can a mutually believed reality include both versions I think the answer is it's a completely different world now and the mobilization that ensued when they said when they got the marching orders that we have to get this road done by the end of the year was remarkable it was a global turnout and I think it really showed the effects of globalization in a post-Soviet world so yes you had Americans and Australians and Canadians working side by side with Afghans and Indians and Brits and so it was truly a global effort and so I know a little bit about the early work in the early 60s when the army Corps got the contract to build this highway I mean it had been an ancient route going back to you know the silk road trade I mean you know thousands of years so there had been some road there but the army Corps I write about this briefly in the beginning they were charged with creating this highway from Kabul to Kandahar and I talked to one of the guys you probably know him Thomas Gutierre that I pronounced it correctly he's Afghan center is it Nebraska he was there in the mid 60s as a Peace Corps volunteer and I talked to him and he said yeah this was a huge deal he got bused down by AID yeah AID had been formed in what 61 by AID to the ribbon cutting this is July of 1966 because they wanted this to be a big deal because the Soviets were very aggressive in Afghanistan with their own construction projects including the highway from Kandahar to Herat so at the time I don't really know you have a lot more expertise in terms of the mindset of Americans and their interaction with Afghans all I know in this case here it wasn't even an issue this was really a lot of the expats expats who went obviously it was a financial interest there's work you know a danger pay and everything this was post 9-11 they wanted to contribute to the war on terror I think Mark Humphries the poor guy from Texas who was killed in the plane I think that's a good example and I talked with his brother who also dispatched they were very much they wanted to contribute to the war on terror and there was no consideration I can't get inside people's heads but just this was a way to do it we have a very quickly my apologies we have a map of the actual mobilization of people and equipment to Afghanistan and it just shows you there are people from Latin America, Australia and I should know where this is I'm sorry go ahead my name is Larry Cohen I'm former Foreign Service and I was in Afghanistan when this road was under construction back in 2003 at the time our impression was by the way far more than $300 million but I certainly don't know what the final cost was but at the time our impression was that this was the most expensive two lane road ever constructed and that it was constructed as a two lane road and at the end in order to get completed by December it became somewhat of a pie crust road which given Afghan vehicles means it would break down quite rapidly there are other parts of the ring road that were built by the Soviets that are still in better shape now than I think the Kabul, the Kandahar road has become also I think your analogy with the South Koreans in building a road in Faisabad is probably not a good one because Faisabad is in Badaqshan and the geography is quite a bit different than the Chaman fault line which runs south from Kabul towards Kandahar so it's been a lot more expensive for the South Koreans to build a road up where they were building it and finally frankly the security issue it was great to get this done but it was a terrific mistake to think that all we needed to do as a U.S. government was to complete a road by a certain date and wrap it up wipe our hands and then kind of forget about the rest of the infrastructure because we really haven't done very much since the completion of the ring road did a lot about this major infrastructure of highways especially north of Kabul through the Salong tunnel which is a complete mess. Where specifically in 2003 was the road not built as a continuous black top that you talk about what section of the road pie crust or it was rushed at the very end in order to get a completion date to meet their target was rushed at the end I have no idea where but yeah and as a result of being rushed and also simply when you said U.S. specs and I think that I probably would agree with what this gentleman said U.S. specs perhaps for a two lane road but certainly not U.S. specs for say an interstate highway and you can't really compare the ring road to U.S. highway by any means. No I think what's important is that wherever these sections were that were not at quality levels again I was writing no one mentioned that to me in my research and there's two issues one so specifically if you were to say like a kilometer 79 there was a pothole that they never filled whatever it might be then we could say okay they blew it it really wasn't completed and therefore the whole thing was not legitimate the other issue I think you could talk forever in terms of why did you need to set this completion date by the end of 2003 what was the significance and it was a political decision for whatever reason this whole ribbon cutting three days after Saddam Hussein was captured it was a big deal politically it's like we got it done everybody see so in terms of that I've heard that criticism before I don't address it in the book because that's really not what this book is about it's how they got it done I would be very interested in knowing specifically where these apparent gaps in quality were throughout this 389 kilometers that Berger was charged with paving I think one of the things was the idea to get a single layer black top down they had to and again there's even a diagram of the actual specs and we have an engineer here if you want to speak to this spec and the schematic they had the base level and this is what they worked from but the actual asphalt layer at times when they were racing against the clock they didn't think they could get in some of the areas like it was getting cold in some of the areas that were higher elevation they were worried about whether they could get the black top down so they were discussing possibly using just a double bituminous if I remember correctly and also bitumen shipments I mean a big part of this with the clock ticking is that are we going to get enough bitumen liquid asphalt in what's going on with the caravans coming from Karashi can we make it unless they're specific no one's come forward I mean you're the first person that's come forward I haven't talked a lot about this since it was completed but if there were specific kilometers or areas I don't want to be a little over point obviously but you didn't develop the road was not designed for overweight and so whether it was by US specs or using bitumen it clearly was going to break down the lady over here thank you very much for this presentation for bringing this up again my name is Judy Benjamin and I'm a consultant and I was at the December 8th ribbon cutting when the road was open and spent a lot of time in Afghanistan but I think that the political issue here it clearly was a political getting it done and getting it done on time but all you have to do is drive down I-95 and get the idea that you can build the finest road with the best materials in our country and maintain them and keep them maintained they will not last so I think it's a ludicrous discussion in some ways to talk about poor quality of the road falling apart when and then this again goes back to a political issue if you're going to give the money to build a road or to build any infrastructure in these countries there has to be a maintenance plan with it and while I think the USAID did try to build up the capacity of the ministry of construction and roads and give them some funding and give them some training and in fact even give them some of the equipment that was used to construct the road when you have the security issue has fallen apart and people can't safely travel on the road let alone maintain it and they still do not have the capacity to do that nor the funds to do it I mean let go of your expectations this is going to be a super wonderful highway forever it just isn't I think that we have to think about international development where we're spending our money which I think this is what this kind of review of your book is how do we spend money and get good value long term out of it and you know build capacity I think that's you know would be our interest to carry on with it Great points. Any other questions? Thank you Xavier. As I understand it, Lewis Berger subcontracted out the work to maybe Southeast Asian firms or other firms, non-American firms is that correct? Yeah three Turkish firms, an Indian firm and the fifth firm was an Afghanistan firm although they had representatives in New York So it might have been difficult for these firms to build roads to American specs but beyond that do you have any information as to how much profit Lewis Berger made on this I guess probably for them 270 million plus deal I have no idea in terms of what their margins were at all that was not part of the discussion at all they're obviously they're a profit making company and their profit margin I don't know The question I have for you is how did Lewis Berger act? The act as a design engineer a consulting engineer, a construction manager, or a general contractor? Well they acted first and foremost as the project manager they received the contract from USAID, design and construction yes and then they subsequently subbed it out yes but Lewis Berger worked Lewis Berger's staff worked hand in hand with the subcontractors they had a meeting for instance in May of 2003 after the AID said you have to get this road done by the end of the year they had three or four of the contractors come to Washington and they laid out a plan like how are we going to do this? Okay we're going to divide the 389 kilometers into five sections you get this, you get this, you get this where are you going to get your bitumen from? Where are you going to get your vehicles from? How are you going to do this? And then it was like a weekend and I write about this it was like a weekend 24-7 session they hold up at one of the hotels around here and so the answer to your question is they were the contract, the project managers and the general contractor and they subbed it out and that's what I write about here in terms of and incidentally the firms that were hired one of them if I pronounced it correctly I met with their officials in Istanbul as part of the research they had a caravan of trucks carrying 30 of their dump trucks from Turkey through Iran into Afghanistan. I mean just to show you part of the logistics here we have pictures of it here they, well we need a lot of dump trucks so they just you know they got the contract from Berger and they mobilized all these dump trucks you know a week or so across around and then but yes the answer to your question is yes they had those different roles, Lewis Berger group My question is whether in your research you looked at all into how Afghans in the region viewed the project was there any indication that they were generally positive towards it or was there any skepticism about US intentions? Well some Afghans embraced it because the laborers for instance they were looking for work and Lewis Berger group paid them in dollars they literally got, it was a cash business at that level they got US dollars from banks in Dubai and there was a crown agents facility in Kabul so for Afghans looking for work I don't know what the daily wage was I mean these would be truck drivers laborers at the asphalt plants they looked at it as very positive I'm sure there were some Afghans you could speak to this better than I can it was yet another foreign presence in there and here we go again you know we're skeptical and we don't want them here for some it was a curiosity look at this massive assemblage of asphalt plants and bulldozers and all these people from all over the world rebuilding this road so of course there were killings and kidnappings and at the time who the folks were who were doing these crimes I don't know again I would defer to Peter on this so I believe it was 30 people killed I don't know a dozen kidnapped so it was a war zone essentially so you had some local Afghans I'm sure who were part of you know who may have sympathized with the militias who were doing the killings and the kidnappings but you had I think first and foremost you did have Afghans who were glad that it gave them employment now Tariq the driver I told you about obviously this young guy was very happy he got a job I think he had been working for the United Nations but you know he got a job driving and interpreting and for him it was a very positive thing my name is Elizabeth Cutler and I work for DAI and going back off of the previous question though is did LBJ and or USAID implement any kind of public outreach campaign to the general public about what this road was about so that the message was more than how it benefited people financially who were actually working on it but how it would actually was supposed to benefit all Afghans and not just ones employed on the project I think at the time AID handled most of the press relations and Lewis Berger had their own communications going out I don't know how aggressive they were in trying to get the word out I do think again since it was an AID project and Lewis Berger was the contractor I think they probably deferred to AID but the fact they contracted me to do this book now it was several years later I think to tell the story of how they got it done including how it benefitted Afghans in general I don't think you could say I mean to be honest it didn't benefit all Afghans you know I mean how could it possibly benefit in such a complex situation the bottom line rationale was that the major highway from Kabul to Kandahar being opened and paved and made so you could travel it very freely could only benefit the Afghan economy people again who needed to to villagers who needed to get from point A to point B say to a hospital or clinic or just truck drivers who needed to ship commodities from point A to point B but in terms of how it benefitted all Afghans I don't think you could say that it did I mean how could you make that assertion okay well thank you for that and would like to thank Xavier for his presentation and thank you thank you