The Foreign Service Journal - December 2017

38 DECEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Power Plant Projects Local Power Afghanistan 2016 • By Jeremiah Anthony Carew Kajaki Dam has figured large in our engagement in Afghanistan for more than half a century. The story of how the hydroelectric project there was finished illustrates how development actually works in the field. In 2003 I was a junior consultant working on the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Afghanistan desk. When a senior manager announced portentously that we were “going back into Kajaki,” I remember quickly googling “Kajaki” to find out why this was such a big deal. As I learned, the U.S. irrigation and power generation project in Helmand province—started in the 1950s and further developed in the 1970s—had a lot of his- tory before we re-engaged on it. Over the decades, it moved slowly, beset by obstacle after obstacle, even though it remained a key piece of infrastructure for southern Afghanistan. In 2009, during my first overseas tour in USAID Afghanistan’s infrastructure office, we were frustrated. A year earlier, a major British-led military operation had trans- ported a third turbine for the dam by land through Taliban-held territory despite loss of life. But because of the security condi- tions and contracting difficulties, we were unable to install it. In 2015, I returned for a second tour in Afghanistan. Just days into the tour, I sat nervously in the mission director’s office as the decision was made to evacuate the Kajaki site due to nearby indirect fire. Starting in September of that year, a colleague took the initiative and, working closely with the ambassador, man- aged to remobilize at Kajaki by early 2016. When he left in July, I took over to lead the team through the final stretch to project completion, anticipated in October. A critical issue when I took over was the state of the transmis- sion line connecting Kajaki to nearby towns and cities. It was conventional wisdom that, although Kajaki would be able to pro- duce significantly more power when our project was completed, the transmission line was so badly deteriorated that it would not be able to transmit the additional power. Yet another years-long project would be needed to upgrade that line. In August we invited the CEO of the Afghan power utility company, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat, for dinner, and talked through the game plan for the critical final months of the project. In between bites of food, the CEO casually announced that DABS would be rehabilitating the transmission line while power was shut off from the dam, taking advantage of the outage to do long-needed work. We were dumbfounded. The CEO’s announcement contradicted years of experience-based assump- An Afghan linesman works to fix a flaw in the 200-km transmission line delivering electricity from the Kajaki power plant. PHOTOCOURTESYOFJEREMIAHANTHONYCAREW