Disappointing

I've been generally supportive of the deployment of New Zealand army engineers to Iraq, on the basis that they're not in a dangerous part of the country and their primary task is rebuilding things rather than oppressing the locals. But today's news on how little they've done was disappointing.

NZAID budgeted $5 million for "reconstruction and humanitarian aid tasks", but so far they've only been able to do $400,000 of work in five months, and its expected that they will have used less than 15% of the money by the end of the financial year. While the projects they've done - rebuilding five schools and installing water systems - have been worthwhile, I can't help but feel that this has been a poor use of resources. Iraq is awash with unemployed engineers and construction workers; surely we would have achieved better results for the Iraqi people by contracting the work out, selecting projects and paying vetted teams of Iraqis to rebuild the place themselves?