Water and Sewage
In a desert country like Iraq, nothing mattered more than water and its evil twin, sewage. Water was what allowed humans to live in the desert, and providing water and sewage facilities on a large scale had been the responsibility of the rulers of Mesopotamia since nearly prehistoric times. The United States eventually came to understand that providing such services was also part of our own responsibility and that configuring the nascent Iraqi government to take on these tasks was key to our counterinsurgency strategy.
With water on the brain, we once again mounted our armored convoy and drove off the FOB and into Iraq proper. The ride out to the vast nonworking sewage treatment plant took us through the usual postapocalyptic landscape, with ditches on each side of the road filled with greenish muck (neither water nor mud, and why was it green?).
The plant was built in 1963, and it had not been improved on since then. It processed no sewage; shit literally flowed right through it. Raw goop, possibly related to the green muck we saw in the ditches, poured untreated into the ancient Tigris. Back in 2004, when the war was still trendy and the Coalition of the Willing was still in play, the Belgians and the Japanese promised to rebuild the sewage plant and even committed a bunch of money. Belgian and Japanese engineering firms drew up plans, produced blueprints, and created a giant three-ring binder of bad English to describe what was to be done. A big problem in Iraq with water, sewage, and power delivery was measuring capacity (for example, how much water you had) and use (how much water you used). Under Saddam and continuing to this day, water and power were free (not socialism when we endorse it), so most facilities had no measuring devices. The capacity of the new plant was set to account for the projected population growth in Baghdad in the future, originally defined as 2027, later revised to 2005 to cut costs. It was far too expensive to have that much future. Then, the plant’s future was put on hold altogether. The Belgians got out early, the Japanese engineers never visited the plant, and all sectarian hell broke loose.
Our sewage plant wasn’t the only one that needed tending, as a large and growing proportion of Iraqis had no access to potable water. The early occupation authorities initially seemed to recognize the problem, and a $680 million cost-plus water reconstruction contract granted to Bechtel called for the water supply to be repaired within one year. The United States also selected Bechtel as the prime contractor for the bulk of the $4.6 billion in sewage projects funded by the occupation.13 Only nothing was ever done.
Early notice that reconstruction was not reviving Iraqi infrastructure came in December 2004 in a report issued by the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The report enumerated the ways the impact of US efforts in Iraq had been stunted. Only 27 percent of funding committed was actually spent on reconstruction per se. The rest was siphoned off, with 30 percent spent on security, 12 percent on insurance and international salaries, 10 percent on overhead, and 6 percent on profits. An additional 15 percent was lost to a standing line item in Iraq work—fraud, corruption, and mismanagement.14 The year 2004 was bad in general for water and sewage in Iraq. In a typical head-spinning strategy shift, the focus moved to security and oil production as State took over from the Coalition Provisional Authority. Work on water, sewage, and electricity was considered “too slow to have an immediate impact,” and so spending on those areas was deliberately cut by half.15
By late 2005, the number of people served by sewers had dropped from a prewar 6.2 million to 4.5 million. Water treatment capacity dropped in the same period from 3 million cubic meters per day to 1.1 million cubic meters. When Iraqis were asked in an August 2005 poll how often they had safe, clean water, 72 percent responded “never.”16 In the neighborhood where I worked, tests in 2010 showed the local piped water was full of E. coli, heavy metals, and sulfuric acid. Though the locals dared not drink such water, they used it for bathing, causing skin diseases and other health problems. The nonoperating treatment plant we were visiting was to be part of the solution.
The plant was in the custody of a single engineer. As I learned over the course of several visits, he was trained in Moscow through a friendship pact arranged under Saddam. He was quite a character, the Engineer, spinning stories about drinking vodka in Bulgaria and picking up Russian women with the lure of then-valuable Iraqi dinars to be exchanged on the black market for rubles. A thin man with glasses he could never keep from sliding down his nose, the Engineer liked to think out loud with a pencil and paper. His office was very big but very empty. Over the last few years his staff had dwindled from seventy-five to twenty-eight, with many of them killed and others simply vanishing, maybe to live in Jordan, maybe to move in with relatives, maybe left for dead in the green muck. He told us of calling the office to say he’d be in at ten and then not showing up until three in the afternoon or of leaving a note in his appointment book saying he was away on vacation and instead sneaking in to work at night, all as a way of staying alive amidst the anarchy unleashed by our invasion.
The Engineer confirmed that the plant processed no sewage, though he and his twenty-eight workers remained on the payroll. He showed us the Korean Daewoo TV and Dell laptop a US Army unit had given him. He watched the TV all day but was not sure what to do with the laptop, so it was unplugged and dusty. He had left the filmy plastic in place on everything, even the TV screen. It made the devices look sad.
Although no redevelopment had been done, the Belgian and Japanese money was still sitting in an account somewhere. However, the Belgian and Japanese governments were not interested in visiting the sewage plant. The Belgians had no embassy in Iraq and seemed a little surprised the project was still on the table. The Japanese rarely left their tidy enclave in the Green Zone and certainly were not coming out to a sewage plant no one remembered promising to pay for in 2004. The Belgian and Japanese engineering companies, on the other hand, were still interested in making money, though neither cared to send any staff to Iraq and instead were soliciting bids from local Iraqis to do the work. The Engineer was confident they would do a good job, because most of the Iraqi companies bidding were fronts for Turkish construction firms, who would bring in Arabic-speaking engineers from Jordan. Proud of this Coalition of the Willing, the Engineer noted that few Iraqis would have an important role on the project. We Americans would help by being the eyes and ears on the ground for the Belgian and Japanese governments, at least until we closed down our ePRT in line with the military drawdown. Bids would arrive in a few months, followed by a three-week evaluation period. (Many of the companies bidding were fronts for the same company in Turkey and would file dummy bids against themselves. The Engineer would try to figure out which bids came from the same company and would then use that information to get the lowest price.) As per the 2004 agreement, the companies would leave behind all of the trucks and heavy construction equipment imported to do the work. The Engineer planned to sell these items to raise money for maintenance. His problems were far from unique. A Government Accountability Office report in 2006 had listed the challenges the United States faced in rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq: security, lack of direction, and problems with basic maintenance, and, related, lack of Iraqi buy-in.17
Security costs were affected by the significant increases in attacks against Iraqi and US forces after 2003. The State Department reported security represented 16 to 22 percent of the overall costs of major infrastructure projects. But the Engineer already knew about the high cost of security. He told us two of his biggest needs at the sewage plant were guard towers and machine guns. He laid out a quick history of all the valuable things stolen from his plant over the years. He whipped out a plastic folder in which he had a hand-drawn plan to build guard towers around the plant, set so that at least two machine guns covered each meter of the perimeter. The Belgian and Japanese engineering companies had not spec’d for machine-gun towers, such things not being part of sewer plants in Belgium and Japan. The money provided would not cover the cost
of the towers. This was an issue in which the Engineer hoped God would intervene.
The old saying “Any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going” seemed to apply. Our efforts, well meaning but almost always somewhat ignorant, lacked a broader strategy, a way to connect local work with national goals. Some days it felt like the plan was to turn dozens of entities loose with millions of dollars and hope something fell together (monkeys typing might produce Shakespeare). Inadequate performance data and measures made it difficult to determine the overall progress and impact of US reconstruction efforts. You don’t know what you don’t measure, leaving much of our work to have all the impact of a cheap direct-to-DVD martial arts movie.
For this sewage plant, the Engineer and we had essentially no goals or metrics other than wishing things would improve. The lack of metrics—other than hope—was a common feature in our reporting on water, sewage, and other essential services, leaving us without an agreed picture of what success would look like. The absence of metrics was handy, however, in that it always allowed for the possibility that things might improve around the next temporal corner. For example, from an ePRT report:
The Team visited a sewage treatment facility where the installation of concrete pilings has delayed progress for months. We met with the contractor and the Baghdad Sewage Authority’s (BSA) resident engineer. Both men were optimistic about the facility and felt progress was being made. This is due in large measure to the hiring of a new consultant by the BSA. The current cooperation between the BSA, project contractor and the new consultant was refreshing and suggests they have the ability and willingness to solve difficult problems.
It turned out that they had neither the ability nor the willingness. Nothing happened.
The Government Accountability Office also found that the reconstruction program was hampered by Iraq’s difficulty sustaining new and renovated infrastructure projects. “Sustainment reviews” conducted in 2007 suggested projects transferred to Iraqi control were not being adequately maintained. For example, two Baghdad power stations rebuilt with US funds were not operational, largely owing to insufficiently maintained equipment.18 The Iraqis, quickly realizing that “free” facilities came with long maintenance tails, started refusing to accept projects. SIGIR noted that the Iraqi government had not accepted any transfers since mid-2006, and even in 2008 “only limited progress had been made in establishing an asset transfer process.”19 By 2010, the Iraqi government had taken on only three hundred of the fifteen hundred reconstruction projects we tried to hand over. The rest have been “put on the shelf,” because they were too shoddy to continue, didn’t meet any existing need, or were incomplete and lacked the documentation, plans, and contracts that the Iraqis would require to finish them.20
The Engineer was again in agreement. Even if everything was fixed and operational some future morning, the sewage plant got only two or three hours of grid electricity a day, well within its needs in 1963 but short of the demands of 2010. Discussions with the Ministry of Electricity were under way, the Engineer promised, and he was optimistic that under a new, not-yet-elected government the ministry might give him the necessary juice. Just at that moment the power failed, and it was dark and quiet in the Engineer’s office. The Daewoo TV stopped screaming an Egyptian soap opera. The Engineer said not to worry, because a generator separate from the plant (“a good one, from China, not the older Russian one”) powered the office and would soon kick in. He passed around a wooden box that smelled of tobacco but was filled with candies. We all had a caramel until the diesel stench overpowering the sewage stink signaled the generator was working.
Apart from the electrical issue, the Engineer had another problem that would prevent him from processing the poop of the future: lack of skilled staff. He needed 228 people to run his 1963 plant, had 75 in 2003, and after the sectarian deaths was now making do with only 28. Of course, the plant was not currently operative, thus reducing his personnel needs. The new Belgian and Japanese equipment would require trained people, and the Engineer had no budget to hire anyone. One of the Army’s idiosyncratic rules prevented CERP money, the deepest pocket, from being used for training. Again, the Engineer was hoping God would intervene. It was probably his best strategy.
Even with local Iraqi buy-in, the obstacles seemed insurmountable. At the ground level, local officials found it no easier than we did to navigate the complex and corrupt bureaucracy above them. For example, in Narawhan, northeast of Baghdad, they had a lot of water. It was “raw water,” green and dirty, but it was indeed water and could be cleaned up and made drinkable through the aged treatment plant squatting in the midst of a large Sunni settlement. There were a lot of thirsty people there, as the few water lines in the community had been illegally tapped to the point where at a certain location downstream the water pressure was too weak to push liquid through the pipe. It seemed like a sweet deal—there was plenty of raw water, a start on a pipe system, and an existing treatment facility. At the cost of several million dollars, we proposed to the local officials that we would build pipes to haul in more raw water, rehab the treatment plant, and tidy up the existing system.
All that was needed was to get the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity to run power about two hundred meters into the treatment plant. Simple as this sounded, it was the single point of failure for the whole project. Nobody took charge, everybody kept asking the United States to fix the line, and delay followed delay. This one thing could have brought potable water to many people, but in the absence of a responsive bureaucracy nothing was ever done. We ran out of time and went home. The people do not have water.
This failure was not limited to one site. When I arrived in Iraq, the Al Qudus water treatment facility had not been working for two weeks because of a defective controller board for the generator. There was no dedicated electric power at the site. The operator explained that the pumps for the compact units were undersized and often broke down. In addition, the chlorine system for the two units was broken. He blamed contractor shortcuts during construction for the plant’s abysmal performance. No one knew where to start. The people do not have water.
Clearly, large-scale water and sewage work required technical expertise and project management skills far beyond what local officials or our small ePRT could handle. Recognizing that big ventures took years while our evaluation and promotion cycles took months, a Major hoping to make Colonel noticed a thing called Mobile Max while trolling the Internet. Mobile Max was a trailer-mounted, solar-powered reverse-osmosis water filtration machine. Drop one hose into any water source, add in some sunshine, and clean water would come out the other end. This would solve Iraq’s water problems.
Without any checking or testing, the Army spent $3 million to buy twenty-five Mobile Maxes and ship them to Iraq, just as if they were ordering slacks off LLBean.com. Shipping the units all the way to Iraq was no small task, involving massive behind-the-scenes full-contact customs work (bribes). The equipment took so long to arrive that the Army unit that ordered it had departed Iraq, and the gear was received with much enthusiasm by the replacement brigade. The twenty-five Mobile Maxes even looked confident, bright blue with sci-fi solar panels. A test well was dug and out poured … not much. It seems, for its many charms, that Mobile Max could not deal well with the high-salinity groundwater found commonly in Iraq. More freshwater was needed to back-flush the salt out of Max than Max produced, meaning the rig used more water than it made. Resolution seemed to be at hand, as the Army ordered $500,000 worth of salt-filter upgrade kits, which, months later, arrived. We parked five Mobile Max units out in Iraq for testing.
The first unit choked on the salty water. The locals used it as a source of electricity, pulling some current from the solar panels until they broke.
The second unit was stolen from its public location and reinstalled at a sheik’s home. Mobile Max managed the low-volume water use there just fine, and the sheik was happy.
The third unit, because of the salt in
the water, needed continual maintenance and filter cleaning, which we had not provided for. Local thugs took possession and started charging people for the water in return for their protection and hiring their relatives to clean the filters. Eventually that unit broke down and the people blamed the United States for sending them shoddy equipment.
The other two units just disappeared, much like water spilled onto the desert floor. The remaining twenty Mobile Max units sat on the FOB. No one knew what to do with them, and everyone wished they would just go away. General Ray Odierno himself, noticing them on an inspection, ordered the Maxes delivered to someone in Iraq, anyone, to get them off our books. No one was ever held responsible for wasting $3 million.
When in doubt, change policy. In 2006, the Embassy in Baghdad proclaimed it was moving from the previous model of building and turning over projects to Iraqi management toward a “build-train-turnover” system. To no effect. Next, the US government declared 2008 to be the “year of services” in Iraq, but it wasn’t. Neither was 2009. There was a brief policy called “Iraqis stand up while we stand down,” which neither did. We finally gave up in 2010, determining water and sewage were for the Iraqi government to resolve on its own, washing our hands in full view of problems we could not solve.
We Meant Well Page 6
