As NATO Nears Exit, Construction Dries Up

[unhappycamper]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/world/asia/as-nato-nears-exit-afghan-construction-dries-up.html



A driver at an Afghan construction company on Jalalabad Road, in Kabul, which is lined with formerly busy contracting firms and idled heavy equipment.


As NATO Nears Exit, Construction Dries Up
By ROD NORDLAND and SANGAR RAHIMI
Published: November 4, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan — Jalalabad Road, the heart of what might be called the Afghan capital’s military-industrial complex, has also become the place where heavy construction equipment comes to die.

Lined with Afghan and NATO military facilities and the contracting firms that serve them, the road is also garlanded with miles of brightly colored holding yards — in the yellows, oranges, blues and reds of backhoes and diggers, forklifts and bulldozers, cranes and cherry pickers, graders and rollers.

Most of them are new, or newish, and nearly all are idled. Nowhere is the impending collapse of Afghanistan’s construction industry more evident than here, where Afghan companies that hire out heavy equipment to construction firms have hit hard times.

“In the past two months nobody has rented a single piece of my machinery,” said Shafiq Ahmad Sidiqi, 28, who owns a construction company and rents out hydraulic lift platforms, of which he has 30 in various sizes. “The foreigners are leaving, and the money is drawing down.”

[lalalu]

1. Good

NATO countries need to go home and rebuild their own countries. We have dumped billions over there. Karzai has made a personal fortune off this war that he can use to rebuild Afghanistan.