A U.S. oversight agency has raised serious new questions about the security, financial support and staffing for the teams that Washington is creating to lead the next phase of its reconstruction program in Iraq.
The United States is planning to form reconstruction teams in the provinces outside the relatively stable Kurdish north, working with local Iraqi officials to set their own priorities for the rebuilding rather than relying on plans drawn up in Baghdad and Washington.
The initial phase of the reconstruction program, created after the 2003 invasion, relied almost exclusively on central planning and was heavily criticized.
But during recent visits to four of the five teams that were in operation, auditors from the oversight agency noted that the teams suffered problems that included security threats that seriously hampered their ability to meet with Iraqis, difficulties in obtaining supplies as basic as pens and paper, and major challenges in recruiting qualified civilians to work in Iraq's far-flung provinces.
"The deteriorating security situation has had a particularly deleterious effect on the establishment of the U.S. provincial reconstruction teams," said the agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, in a quarterly report that was officially released Tuesday.
The agency is independent and reports directly to Congress, the State Department and the Pentagon.
The pace of forming the teams has been slowed, "especially in the areas that could benefit most from their presence," the report said.
Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general at the agency, said by telephone that most of the teams were overwhelmingly composed of military personnel instead of the mix of military and civilian officials that had been originally envisioned.
Cruz said civilian agencies had been unable to recruit officials from their ranks who wanted to work in Iraq's dusty and often dangerous provincial capitals.
"The question is, are the civilian agencies able to find sufficient staff to create a joint civilian-military entity?" said Cruz, who led the visits.
She said that no conclusions had been reached on whether the teams could succeed but that the visits had turned up enough concerns that her office would conduct a thorough audit of the program.
Reconstruction teams are already at work in the northwestern province of Nineveh; the north-central province of Tamim; the western desert province of Anbar; Babil Province, whose capital, Hilla, is south of Baghdad; and Baghdad.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Elizabeth Colton, said that two other teams, in Salahuddin and Diyala provinces, had reached "initial operating capability."
Despite the problems that the initial survey turned up, there were also bright spots, particularly in Baghdad and Hilla, Cruz said.
And Commander Brian Wilson of the U.S. Navy, acting deputy director of the Babil reconstruction team, said in an interview in Hilla that new rebuilding projects in the province showed that the concept could work.
In the centralized bureaucracy that prevailed under Saddam Hussein, he said, provincial leaders had little say in the way their regions were run and were therefore still learning how to set priorities when given the authority.
"This is the first time in their lives that they've had a say in what they build and how they build it," Wilson said.
Gradually, though, Iraqis have been more assertive in discussions on potential projects in Babil, he said, and now they are often leading the meetings.
As an example, he cited a $4.2 million, 11-kilometer, or 7-mile, road project called 80th Street, which will put four lanes of asphalt through a business district on the western edge of Hilla.
The decision to give U.S. financing to the project, being overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, emerged when Iraqi leaders came to a consensus that the road was their first priority, Wilson said.
The project "gave the Iraqis the opportunity to choose," he said.
But the bureaucracy in Baghdad appears to be reasserting itself, he said.
Doug Meurs, the deputy regional coordinator at Hilla's regional embassy office, said that a provincial governor had recently "complained that in order to change the land lines in his office, he needed permission from three different ministerial offices in Baghdad."
