Transportation and utilities infrastructure are two of the most dangerous and arduous areas of development work for government organizations and private contractors in Iraq.

Throughout the country, distribution of electricity and potable water has failed to meet the projected post-invasion levels, and transportation systems are subject to constant disruption.

In some major municipalities, such as Baghdad and Basra, basic utility availability is still below pre-war levels. Insurgent violence and lack of security has hit the electricity sector especially hard because power supplies are a constant target, especially in densely populated areas.

Electricity
Efforts to provide Baghdad, once replete with electricity, with enough energy for even basic services face continuous setbacks.

"All the transfer lines are in hot spots and are targeted by terrorist attacks," Saadi Mehdi Ali, the Electricity Ministry's inspector general, told the New York Times in December.

As of December 2006, seven out of the nine transfer lines serving Baghdad were down, largely due to coordinated insurgent attacks. The city was running on at least 1,000 megawatts of privately generated power, and electricity was available for only part of the day.

"It was better in Baghdad [before the war], because Saddam's government made a conscious decision to provide more power to Baghdad then to any other part of Iraq," said Rajiv Chandrasekaran, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post and the paper's former bureau chief in Baghdad. "The post-war change was felt most acutely in Baghdad, because it went from getting 22 hours a day to getting, at times, 4 to 6 hours a day."

But Baghdad is not the only region in the dark. Throughout Iraq, electricity output is well below the goals released by the Coalition Provisional Authority after its arrival in March 2003.

The initial estimates called for the country to be provided with 6,000 megawatts of power, roughly 10-12 hours a day, by July 1, 2004, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Office.

But while most regions have seen an increase in available electricity, from between 4 to 8 hours a day in the prewar period to just over 9 hours a day as of December 2006, the original goal has not been realized.

As in Baghdad, the major obstacles throughout the country have been the poor security of the reconstruction contractors and newly built electrical projects, as well as the immense amount of funding being diverted to security. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office and State Department statistics, security costs in the past year represented 16 percent to 33 percent of overall infrastructure project costs.

The irony, Chandrasekaran said, is that providing and maintaining secure power sources in highly volatile regions would help mitigate violence, but the power plants are being disrupted before their value can be realized.

"Even in more violence-wracked areas, if you can get more power to places like Ramadi, Bakuba, and others, that is one step in trying to promote more stability," he said.

Transportation
Stability in many regions can also be helped with a secure transportation infrastructure.

Much of the $464 million appropriated for transportation by the Iraq Reconstruction and Relief Fund has been directed toward a large-scale rehabilitation of airports, the rail system and bridges, reported the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For those who can afford it, airplane travel has become more readily available since commercial flights resumed in 2005, following three major regional airport renovations in Basra, Baghdad and Erbil. But service is inconsistent and the threat of violence is still very high, especially in Baghdad.

"The big problem with [the Baghdad airport] still is the security threat from shoulder-fired missiles, which restricts the flow of commercial traffic and requires planes to do this sort of corkscrew landing and takeoff," said Chandrasekaran.

The rail system, which underwent a $230 million overhaul, is also a major target for insurgents who are lured by the trains' static routes.

Lack of ridership further hampered the success of the railroads and caused the Baghdad-Basra line, one of three major travel corridors, to be discontinued in early 2006. Now just the Baghdad-Mosul passenger line remains.

"Most Iraqis never used the trains [during Saddam' reign]," said Chandrasekaran. "Many of them had cars or took buses. Fuel was cheap."

Car travel is still the preferred mode of transportation for most Iraqis, although the increase in number of cars, long lines at fuel pumps, and constant threat of road violence have made driving more difficult.

Consequently, mending the highway system has been a high priority for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has completed 370 miles of road construction and hopes to complete the last roadway project, the Baghdad-Kirkuk Carriageway, by December 2008.

Communication Systems
One of the success stories in infrastructure is the communications sector, with Iraqis accessing domestic mobile phone service for the first time in the country's history.

Under Saddam there were no mobile phone providers in Iraq and, according to the State Department, just 1.2 million people out of the total population of 26 million subscribed to landline phone service.

But during the looting and violence after U.S. entry into Iraq in 2003, an estimated half of the landline infrastructure was damaged, so the need for mobile technology was immediate.

Unlike the electricity and transportation sectors, the cellular tower infrastructure has been largely safe from violence, in part because the insurgents rely on mobile phones to coordinate attacks.

"Everybody needs a mobile phone, whether you are a terrorist, whether you are a government official, or whether you are a member of the public," Dr. Siyamend Othman, CEO of Iraq's National Communications and Media Commission, told the Washington Post in January 2006.

As of August 2006, there were over 8 million subscribers to telephone service, an estimated half of which are mobile users, and multiple service providers have emerged.

Internet accessibility has not fared as well, with the number of registered users falling from 207,000 in April 2006 to 198,000 in August, according to the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index.

Water
Water infrastructure development has achieved mixed results. Although some successful potable water and sanitation projects have been completed, just 4.6 million Iraqis have improved access to fresh water, and less than 10 percent of Iraqi homes are serviced by sewage systems, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"The U.S. effort has focused initially on building potable water capacity, since clean drinking water is the primary factor in reducing primary waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid," said Lt. Col. Joseph Fraundorfer, deputy chief of water for the Corps.

Much like the other sectors, the state of water resources is much worse in the south than in the north, where autonomous governing bodies have overseen infrastructure since 2003.

Years of improper environmental management, including a massive draining of marshlands in southern Iraq by Saddam's government and the construction of dams in southern Turkey, which cut the Euphrates River water supply almost in half, have rendered water undrinkable without treatment in many parts of the south.

"The water is so dirty when it gets down to Basra [from the north] that they didn't even drink the municipally supplied water," said Jane Gleason, a development specialist with the contracting company DAI and chief of party for USAID's Agriculture Reconstruction and Development Program for Iraq.

That was the case until late 2004, when USAID and Bechtel Corp. finished rehabilitating Basra's 14 water treatment plants, the canal system, and the main water reservoir, providing fresh water to a city accustomed to water with high salinity.

Irrigation throughout the country also was affected by poor management, but Gleason's ARDI project was able to fix irrigation systems and provide fresh water to agricultural zones throughout the country by September 2006.

"We reckon [our project] affected about half a million people," she said. "Our focus was in south and south central Iraq. They needed the most help."

Small-scale projects like DAI's agricultural and irrigation systems are likely the model for future water, transportation and electricity infrastructure development in Iraq.

"Small and medium-sized potable water rehabilitation projects executed by direct contracting to repair and rehabilitate neglected facilities using Iraqi labor have been the most successful," said the Army Corps of Engineers' Fraundorfer.

-- By Jon Brand, Online NewsHour