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."