Quote Originally Posted by Steve the Planner View Post
This article (Afghanistan: A White Elephant Called the Ring Road), rolls up a lot of issues about security, roads, and advertised good deeds.

http://www.indepthnews.net/news/news...3:29:19&key2=1

In it, Matt Nasuti, PRT City Management Adviser, argues that the Ring Road is a mess: Poorly conceived, poorly built, and unsecurable. A boon to the Taliban. Too expensive and unnecessary to Afghans at this point in their development.

Moreover, what we learned about the Appalachian Road building projects- a road goes two ways. Built to spur Appalachian internal development, instead, they were the highway for disinvestment: goods flooding in from outside, people flooding out... unintended consequences.

Here, according to the article, the road has been a boon to the Taliban (graft, security fees, free movement of insurgents, fixing our forces to defend it, etc..., and threatens to inundate the local economies with influx of cheap foreign goods.

Sure would be good to think these things through---ahead of time.

I always shudder when I see Loius Berger attached to the planning and implementation of anything.

STP, we talked about that on another thread and that is why I said linking the System togather should be one of the LAST things you do with an unstable system.