Apart From The Land Mines It's Just Like Anywhere Else With No Infrastructure

By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien

Can you rehab an airport that's in pretty bad shape? If so, the World Bank wants to hear from you. Especially if you're from a nation that's a member of the Asian Development Bank. The ADB has provided a loan to permit Afghanistan to start rehabilitating its regional airports, which have been devastated by 25 years of civil war and are in very poor shape to serve the booming Afghan economy.

The airports in question are facilities that are barely worthy of the name Airport. Once built by contractors from American and Russian aid programs during Afghanistan's neutral period, they've since been shelled, mortared, bombed, mined, burned, bulldozed, and looted of fixtures. So they're not looking for a simple job of putting up a localizer antenna or painting new stripes on the runway -- this is a big job.

The airports in the first phase are Bamian, Faizabad, and Maimanieh (see above). Bamian is in the mountainous Hazarajat west of Kabul, and is known as the former site of the giant Buddhas destroyed by the iconoclastic Taliban. Its runway is level, somewhat rutted gravel. Faizabad is in the northeast of the country, near Tajikstan. The present airstrip has a one-way runway with a significant slope to it. Maimanieh is in the northwestern quadrant of the country, where the nearest border is with Turkmenistan. The condition of the runway there is anybody's guess.

(The photographs are of an area of Kandahar IAP, taken by Hognose in 2002, but illustrate the general condition of Afghan aviation at that -- and this -- time).

Some parts of what the ADB needs done are pretty routine, although as you can see from the list it's more like "building" than "rebuilding:"

• Survey
• Security fencing
• Detailed design of works
• Drainage structures
• Rehabilitation and widening of the existing runways
• Pavement marking
• Passenger terminal construction
• Maintenance building construction
• Fire station and control tower construction
• Staff housing
• Temperature controlled storage facility
• Generator and electrical reticulation
• Water reticulation and sewage

And some parts of the bid are a little bit out of the ordinary for the peaceable world:

• Clearance of mines and unexploded ordinance

  

In addition, contractors should bear in mind that "rehabilitation of existing runways" may mean "doing a permanent repair instead of the hasty fix where a 2000 lb. bomb cratered the runway," or "replacing hasty runways of metal planking."

FMI: www.af.mil, www.devbusiness.org