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Flawed projects prove costly for Afghanistan, US
For more than a year, Afghan police chief Rajab Mohammed and his men have worked out of a dark, cramped mud home in a remote corner of Afghanistan while waiting in vain for construction workers to finish building the U.S.-funded police station across the street.
With winter fast approaching, some of the men, who'd been sleeping in a dirt courtyard, recently took over the idle construction site and set up cots inside the half-built station after they learned that the U.S. government had fired the Afghan company responsible for the project.
The U.S. is spending billions of dollars to build facilities like the one in Badakhshan for Afghanistan's expanding national police and new garrisons for its army. The ambitious program is a linchpin of President Barack Obama's strategy to strengthen Afghan security forces so 100,000 U.S. troops can come home.
However, like much of the wider Afghan reconstruction effort, it's faltering, according to current and former U.S. officials, Afghan and American contractors, and contract documents.
Dozens of structures across the country either were poorly constructed or never completed at all. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers who were supposed to be living in garrisons by now are still housed in tents.