Editor's Note: Born in Quito, Ecuador, Patricio Zambrano-Barragán currently lives in New York City and works on affordable housing and urban policy. He writes about infrastructure, politics, and aesthetics. The Functionality welcomes his thoughts beyond that city's borders, examining how infrastructure is both a tool of war and a tool for growth.

Through tactical moves reminiscent of The Great Game, the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan are implicitly drawing the lines that bind Central Asian development. A fundamental belief about contemporary planning is that no society can prepare for economic growth without a clear understanding of its future infrastructural needs. Domestically, this belief is embodied in President Obama’s proposed agendas for urban policy and energy and the environment, part of a larger vision for economic prosperity, energy independence, and national security. Elsewhere, this type of planning is not as provident. Despite its rhetoric of nation-building and democracy-spreading, U.S. development of infrastructure abroad is never purely altruistic. It is easy to ignore the hubris inherent in large-scale infrastructure development, which often pits long-term ambitions against immediate needs.

Nowhere is this more evident than in conflict areas, where long-term visions for peace and (re)development are subservient to the urgent infrastructural requirements of war.

For some months now, the United States and NATO have been patching agreements with Afghanistan’s northern neighbors. The troops are badly in need of an alternative supply route to avoid the overland southern route running through Pakistan and the Khyber Pass. Constantly under attack by the Taliban, the southern route cannot reliably help NATO’s war efforts, let alone sustain the coming increase of American troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. has thus convinced Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to allow the transport of non-lethal supplies using their airports and roads. Conspicuously, these agreements come only a couple of years after the Central Asian nations expelled American bases from their countries in response to American disapproval of these governments’ human rights record.

From a military perspective, it is a sensible move, albeit a risky one: bypass an increasingly volatile Pakistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; warm up to former Soviet republics and operate in Russia’s backyard (a touchy issue in Russo-American relations if there ever was one); and, incidentally, build on/upon the existing infrastructure network in the region. Ultimately the issue is that these agreements are regional planning predicated on martial intent.

US Bridge Over Panj River Courtesy of Manas Manas My Kingdom for Manas

Less than two years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—by many measures the largest infrastructure developer in the world—oversaw the completion of a bridge over the Panj River, which marks the natural boundary between Afghanistan and Tajikistan (and, not so long ago, the southern Soviet border). Construction was then celebrated as an opportunity to promote trade and economic development in the region. Now, the bridge is where NATO forces inject supplies into Afghanistan.

In this case, as it was in Korea and Japan after WWII, there is no practical distinction between building for peace and building for war. While it is good that the U.S. is building in and around a conflict area, one must look to the long-term impact of these investments. The questions is, can and will these countries reclaim and reinvent the war infrastructure once NATO is gone?