- 9/27/2009, Local boss says no big deal, NO WORSE THAN ACCEPTED U.S. MOBS LIKE THE MAFIA. AND RELIGION-WISE, TALIBAN
- NO WORSE THAN AMERICAN MORMONS:
- "The Taliban have declared war on a $114 million road being built with US funds.
- Paul McGeough and SBS Dateline (Australia) cameraman David Brill travelled to Afghanistan's south-east, where
- insurgents get their cut of the money through a protection racket.
EVERYONE, even the Taliban, gets a slice of the action when it comes to building roads in Afghanistan.
- High in the Hindu Kush, where bursts of lavender enliven a fading alpine carpet of summer's grasses, winks, nods and timely backhanders make the insurgents a key, albeit unofficial, party when big money is divided.
It is effectively the Taliban who decide which local contractors will work on a project - either by setting a level of protection money that the contractor can afford to pay, or
The Taliban also keep an eye on local individuals who get work on the project -
- especially those doing the all-important security jobs.
A key construction project in the volatile south-eastern border region is the Washington-funded K-G Road - a $US100 million ($A114 million), 100-kilometre blacktop through wild Taliban country between Khost, on the Pakistan border, and the hub city of Gardez, south of Kabul.
- The road is part of a grand design to break five strategic centres from economic and social dependency on neighbouring Pakistan. By linking them together and to the national ring-road, they might be hooked back into Kabul's orbit.
Overseeing the K-G Road is US engineer Steve Yahn, a 53-year-old Massachusetts father who has been building roads in Afghanistan since 2002 so that he can afford to send his children to college.
- He is acutely aware of the challenge ahead. ''On the earlier projects, including the Kabul-Kandahar Road, we had 136 workers killed and 158 wounded," he says. "But that was on open, flat land in the south. This one is much harder in terms of security and engineering."
Since groundwork began on the K-G Road in May last year, Mr Yahn has lost 16 workers - 13 dead and three missing - and 19 have been wounded. The project has about 1000 workers: two security men for each construction worker. Most are Afghans hired by local sub-contractors. But the South-African-run security operation includes Romanians and Gurkhas.
Deals in which the Taliban top up their coffers by
- demanding as much as 30 per cent of the value of a contract as protection money are rife.
As project manager for the US contractor Louis Berger Group, Mr Yahn is aware of the Taliban pressure on his local contractors - their staff get kidnapped and their vehicles burnt, they are harassed and threatened, and many of their workers fear for their lives.
As he speaks, one of his sub-contractors is in Uzbekistan attempting to buy 20 trucks. ''You could speculate,'' he says, ''that other truck owners have been intimidated into refusing to work for a project that had a big Indian firm working on it.''
- A foreign security observer who has studied the project, but who cannot be identified in this report, explains the grim reality of relationships in the mountains. "There are lots of local workers - some are Taliban and some of the sub-contractors are Taliban associates," he says. "The project has its eyes and ears on the ground, telling it when not to go on the road. These 'eyes and ears' communicate with the Taliban and they work for the Taliban."
The project tries to make itself as small a target as possible -
- "playing by the Taliban's rules", the observer notes. All road gangs are cleared off the carriageway to avoid becoming ''collateral damage'' as military or heavily armed private convoys, which are prime Taliban targets, move through.
The Taliban rules insist on maximum local employment and, among other things, that
It is easy to be shocked by all this. But Mr Yahn says he has seen it all before - in another place, at another time.
- "You do construction work in New York City and you'll find the same thing, just different labels - there, the factions are politicians, the Mafia and labour unions. In New York, Boston, on the Baltimore docks, there's a lot of this stuff at work," he says.
"They're not all bad," he says of the Taliban, drawing a parallel with the
"They have their beliefs and maybe they don't want to send their children to school, but if they're not disrupting my project, they are moderate Talibs."
- Before work starts each day, the construction corridor is swept for roadside bombs that may have been planted in the night. Arriving on the job, Mr Yahn is not allowed to alight until a security cordon is thrown around his armoured vehicle and one of the guards decides it is safe to open the door for him.
Depending on the terrain, the South African firm's objective is to create a security bubble in which work can proceed - anywhere between 500 metres and two kilometres either side of the road.
Traffic mostly comprises convoys of colourful trucks, crawling over bone-jarring rocky earth that bears little resemblance to a road. Most trucks lumbering down from the mountains are laden with firewood. The wood invariably is piled with near surgical precision - often causing the US forces to wonder about what might be buried under it.
US Army Colonel Robert Campbell says: ''Infiltration from Pakistan is a mafia-like operation - apart from fighters coming over, smugglers bring in weapons and cash that finds its way to Kabul and elsewhere.''
The business structure on the K-G project is of a kind seen around Afghanistan, much to the fury of some aid groups. Louis Berger Group is the principal contractor but has sub-contracted an Indian firm to build the road.
A US Government official, who asked not to be named, says that despite being a controversial choice, the Indian company was selected because it was one of only two companies prepared to do the job. Asked about the wisdom of the choice, given virulent anti-Indian sentiment among the local, pro-Pakistan Pashtun population, he says: ''The locals have some reservations about the Indians, but the company is doing its best to employ locals and to mitigate animosity.''
But at the same time, he says, the road is already over budget, mainly because of security. ''Insecurity has increased exponentially since the inception of the project,'' he says.
This road is vital. Long a garrison city, Khost sits strategically just kilometres from the border with Pakistan. But because the track that links it to the rest of Afghanistan is so appalling, the city, its farmers and traders have effectively been a part of the Pakistani economy. Their currency is the Pakistani rupee and much of their summer produce is trucked to Pakistan for cold storage and then hauled back for sale at twice the price in winter - because Khost does not have adequate storage facilities.
Originally, the road was to have metal guard rails, but once the Taliban found they could fix explosives to the metal to target convoys, the rails were scrapped in favour of stone walls with a reinforced slab-concrete core.
In winter, work at the higher altitudes grinds to a halt as freezing temperatures make building impossible and with the summer pasture fading already, the Kuchi are on the move. Like the Bedouin of the Middle East, thousands of these Kuchi nomads, with their herds and camels burdened with the tents that are their homes, are heading back to lower country near Khost. The know that they must stick to the narrow corridor in which Mr Yahn is trying to build the highway because white-painted rocks that speckle the shoulders of the road mark the extent to which Soviet and mujahideen explosive minefields have been cleared.
Already work is behind schedule. The road was to be completed before the coming winter, but the work gangs will be lucky to crest the Satukandav Pass before the winter shutdown. The new completion date is sometime next northern summer.
Mr Yahn talks about the 23-kilometre mark, just short of the Pass, as an ''imaginary barrier''. ''Heading out from Gardez, it's relatively safe up to that point, but from 23 to 70 we've had lots of hits - that's where the provincial governor was nearly killed."
THE military convoy on which we travelled returns to base without mishap. But less than 24 hous later, there is a mighty explosion up the road from where we had been - an IED (improvised explosive device) makes shrapnel of a lumbering truck and kills its driver, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as insurgents targeted a passing US convoy.
There had been a string of attacks in Khost and Gardez in an attempt to disrupt voting during the August 20 presidential election.
But the bomb that destroys the truck heralds a new burst of insurgency activity the length of the road - in the space of a couple of days, an Afghan National Police station at the 16-kilometre mark is attacked; massed Taliban fighters are reported on the move near Khost; and around Gerda Serai, a bazaar we visited, pro-Taliban commanders are issuing dire new threats to any locals who co-operate with the Americans or the Afghan Government.
Days later, the Afghan counterterrorism chief was gunned down in Khost and five Afghan soldiers died in an IED strike at Barmali in Paktika. The pro-Taliban network also took a severe hit - in adjoining Paktika province, what was described as a ''massive bunker complex used to store arms and shelter foreign fighters'', was destroyed.
The Taliban might be slowing progress on the K-G Road, but they have not forced the project to a halt.
Standing on flat ground outside Gardez, Steve Yahn gazes up to the heights of the Satukandav Pass. "We're marching up the hill," he says with determination.
Paul McGeough and David Brill's report Highway to Hell is on SBS TV's Dateline tonight at 8.30pm." 9/27/09,
9/27/2009, "Insurgents play a perilous mountain game,"
TheAge.com.au (Australia), by Paul McGeough and David Brill
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