Billion-Dollar Start Falls Short in Iraq

In Baghdad's Sadr City, a Shiite slum with about 2 million residents, a $47.5 million project to build a water-treatment plant and lay new pipes is ongoing. (By Bassam Sebti -- The Washington Post)

"This is the Chinese plan!" he said with a roar, leaving to retrieve another drawing showing that the contractor had swiped the second design, too. "Are you working for your country or someone else?"

From the side of the table, Lt. Col. Otto Albert Busher III, a reservist in the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. government's point man on water issues in Baghdad, watched with amusement. "This is a huge leap forward," he said.

"Two years ago the Army and the U.S. government sat at the head of the table, and now the Iraqis run the meeting and take the minutes and set the agenda," he said. But not without some help. Among the skills that Busher, a former director of public works in Hopkins, Mass., is teaching the Iraqis are master planning, budgeting, procurement, contract and accounting -- and even how to run a public meeting.

Plenty of problems remain, he said, the most critical being the poor state of Baghdad's water network and the lack of money to repair it. Busher estimated that between 40 percent and 60 percent of the purified water that leaves Baghdad's treatment plants never makes it to city taps because of leaks in the system.

"You're looking at a couple of million dollars of lost water per day," he said. And because the water network was built 25 years ago with brittle cement pipes that have a 20-year life, every time a bomb explodes in Baghdad, the water system is damaged.

Even tanks rumbling on the streets crack the pipes -- and not just water pipes, but sewer pipes that run alongside. Contamination of fresh water by sewage "happens on a daily basis," Busher said.

"You could easily sink $3 billion into infrastructure in Baghdad" to fix water and sewer problems, he said. "But we're still shooting at five-meter targets. We don't have the resources for 500-meter targets."

The United States and United Nations initially budgeted about $34.4 billion for short-term relief and reconstruction, about $21 billion of which is to be paid by the United States. A recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy estimated long-term reconstruction costs in Iraq at "$100 billion or higher."

In the water and sanitation sector, the World Bank estimated that $6.8 billion was needed through 2007. Congress initially allocated $4.6 billion for the sector, and that was cut to $2.6 billion by the State Department; the savings were shifted to other priorities, particularly security, according to a September GAO report. Along the way, the original target of delivering potable water to 90 percent of Iraqis was lowered to 50 percent to 60 percent, the report said.

In testimony before Congress in February, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said that only 49 of the planned 136 large water projects would be completed because of what he called a reconstruction funding gap. "Most of the projects planned in sewerage, irrigation and drainage, major irrigation and dams have been canceled." But officials here say they are not getting credit for what they have accomplished.

Dawn Liberi, director in Iraq of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said her agency has restored water-treatment service to 3.5 million Iraqis and sewer service to 3.2 million, By the end of the year, she said, those numbers will more than double.

"The United States was never meant to do this whole job by itself. There's about a $40 billion difference in what was needed for the entire job to be done," she said, based on what the United States is spending and what the World Bank calculated was needed.