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| Afghanistan | |
| Black & Veatch's fog-of-war contract in Afghanistan | |
| 2011-04-16 | |
William Van Dyke, president of the company's special projects division, kept his tone cool. He wanted to talk about company successes time and again. Sure, his questioners said in repeatedly interrupting him, but there's something else. The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan kept raising an awkward juxtaposition: After poor marks and stern warnings about cost overruns and delays on a generating plant near Kabul, Overland Park-based Black & Veatch still landed a $266 million no-bid contract to beef up electrical power in southern Afghanistan. Van Dyke responded that the company had improved its performance and its standing with the U.S. Agency for International Development overseeing the Afghanistan rebuilding. And, he emphasized, Black & Veatch, one of the largest U.S. engineering firms, stood alone in its ability to get an urgent job done quickly. "We don't," he said, "subcontract responsibility." The twist-and-turn story that delivered the no-bid deal to Black & Veatch reveals that powering up Afghanistan, uncomfortably bridging the 12th and 21st centuries, is a pricey and dicey venture. Although billions of American dollars spent since the 2001 fall of the Taliban regime have more than doubled electric capacity, the juice remains rare and unreliable. That's despite declarations from the highest U.S. authorities that delivering electricity stands as a keystone to stamping down the Islamist insurgency and clearing a way for the planned American troop withdrawal by the end of 2014. Despite some progress, government audits conclude that tens of millions in U.S. tax dollars have been squandered by ill-planned projects, the inevitable waste that plagues war-zone construction and outright fraud. No deceit has been alleged against Black & Veatch or its subcontractors, but that hasn't spared the company or its patron agency from other criticism. Van Dyke had to defend why Black & Veatch's work on the Tarakhil power plant near Kabul finished with an 18-month delay that added $40 million to the cost. The company was ultimately forced to absorb $1.6 million in added expenses. So when Black & Veatch landed the no-bid contract in December to add electrical muscle in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, eyebrows raised -- at both USAID for awarding the contract and at Black & Veatch. Why, a commissioner asked Van Dyke, would the government give a no-bid contract to a company that the same agency a year earlier had sharply criticized? USAID rated Black & Veatch as "poor" for the quality of its service on the Kabul plant and "unsatisfactory" for its lagging construction schedule. In a separate matter, the agency gave the company an "unsatisfactory" rating on a study of an Afghan gas field. Even as the commission questioned Van Dyke, it was clear that the company didn't decide to award itself a no-bid deal. USAID made that call. The agency official who signed off on giving the job to Black & Veatch said, essentially, the government had little choice. "It's not that it was a no-brainer. ... But we really felt that, both in terms of the partners we had on the ground already, and the compelling nature of this decision, that that was certainly the best option," J. Alexander Thier, a key administrator for USAID in Afghanistan and Pakistan, told The Star. He added: "We stand by that decision." The choice was ultimately made, the agency said, because Black & Veatch was "uniquely qualified" and "uniquely positioned" to get vital and urgent work done quickly. Not all would agree. As with much of what goes in on Afghan construction, neither confirmation nor refutation is easily found. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |