The Kajaki Dam is so strategically important to Helmand and Kandahar that it was among the early targets bombed by U.S. warplanes as the war against the Taliban began in October 2001. The hydroelectric facility has two turbines, known as units 1 and 3, and space between them for a third unit, which would be known as unit 2. USAID kicked off the refurbishment of Kajaki in December 2003 by signing a contract with the Louis Berger Group, a U.S.-based contractor. Louis Berger then subcontracted with Voith Hydro to rehabilitate unit 1 and with a Chinese firm called China Machine-Building International Corp. to fix unit 3. CMIC was also engaged to build the turbine generator, transformers, and related gear for unit 2, which was to boost the output of Kajaki from 33 MW to 51.5 MW. CMIC had come to Kajaki during the Taliban years, when the Taliban had no idea how to operate and maintain it.

In 2006 another U.S. contractor, Black & Veatch Corp., entered the picture. It joined forces with Louis Berger, and USAID awarded this Joint Venture, as it was known, a $1.4 billion contract for work in Afghanistan, including the ongoing restoration of Kajaki. Meanwhile, the Taliban was strengthening its grip on the area around Kajaki, with frequent rocket attacks on the site all through the summer of 2006.

In 2008 CMIC finished building the equipment for unit 2, and that gear, weighing 220 metric tons, was delivered to Kajaki in a legendary operation code-named Eagle's Summit. The area around the dam was under Taliban control, and the equipment was too heavy to fly in by helicopter. So to get the gear from Kandahar Airfield to the dam, 60 British officers spent four months devising a daring land operation that was later declared the largest logistical mission since World War II.

The mission, which involved some 4500 soldiers, began in late August with heavy bombing of Taliban positions and raids by U.S. and British special forces on Taliban-held villages along the Helmand River. On 27 August, a 100-vehicle convoy including the trucks carrying the gear set out from Kandahar and drove into the desert, usually going just a few kilometers per hour. Well ahead of the convoy was another, "dummy" convoy of about 40 Danish vehicles that took the main road near the dam, drawing fire and diverting attention from the real convoy. Bomb-disposal teams cleared scores of improvised explosive devices along the route, including 11 in a single short stretch of road not far from the dam. The convoy transporting the massive electrical gear, which was hidden in multiple shipping containers covered with posters emblazoned with quotes from the Koran, took an alternate route through the mountains mapped earlier by a British reconnaissance team. At several points the convoys were rocketed or mortared, but on 2 September, the trucks rolled into the yard at the dam with the equipment undamaged. The casualty count for the 12-day mission was one coalition soldier dead and eight wounded and approximately 200 Taliban killed.

Sadly, the heavy-electrical gear still sits unused at Kajaki. One month after Eagle's Summit, the Chinese engineers from CMIC abruptly left Kajaki. According to a USAID official in Kabul, the engineers realized that the Taliban could not be cleared anytime soon from the area around the road leading to the plant, which meant there was no chance that NATO could deliver the hundreds of tons of concrete needed to install the third hydroturbine.

You might not be able to stomach the first couple pages, but if you work past them (or just skip them), its a pretty interesting read!

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/reengineering-afghanistan

animedad posted:
man, i remember somehow being roped into a subscription to ieee spectrum when i was a student. back then i just thought it was banal garbage but now wOw

it still is, which is why this article is out-of-fucking-nowhere. i wonder if the guy just couldnt get it published elsewhere because it is so critical of the contractor establishment, even with such glowing praise elsewhere for the MIC.