KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN—Afghans have many ways to curse American power after nine years of war with no end in sight.

Kandahari cotton workers swore a few choice words of their own this month when U.S.-generated electricity blacked out and the mill’s machines shuddered to a dead stop.

When the cussing and shouting subsided, several of the Al-Madina Factory’s skilled staff quit, other workers were laid off, and the owners went back to burning profits on fuel for their own, decrepit Soviet-era generators. Dozens of plants were idled, in a dust-blown industrial park on the city’s outskirts.

Few were surprised by the latest episode in the recurring story of one step forward, two steps back, steadily eroding Afghans’ faith in foreign efforts to stabilize and rebuild their country after 30 years of war.

Trust is hard to build when, in its 10th year here, a coalition of the world’s biggest military powers still can’t provide reliable electricity to Afghanistan’s second-largest city.

Botched attempts only frustrate people more and that can be dangerous in a city where, despite improved security in recent weeks, insurgents’ assassination squads and bombers are still in Kandahar. And in this case, almost 10,000 people have lost their jobs as an ambitious American power plan founders.

And a man who loses his job after only a few days because the power died can quickly turn hostile, frets Mohammed Rahim Rahimi, director of the Kandahar government’s economy department.

“This helps the Taliban find more loyal people,” Rahimi said. “Of course, those people who are losing their jobs quickly join either the Taliban or gangs of thieves or other criminals. I have very good examples of that.”

When U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, the man tasked with salvaging the faltering counter-insurgency, took charge of NATO forces last summer, he promised Kandaharis their lives would quickly get better.

His strategy identified electricity as critical to making the economic improvements needed to drain energy from the insurgency.

The Obama administration committed hundreds of millions of dollars to get the job done, eight huge Caterpillar generators arrived, and after so many false starts, Kandaharis started to believe American power was finally coming.

The family-owned Al-Madina cotton mill went on a hiring spree. It added a second shift to process raw cotton from Helmand province, helping farmers who chose to grow cotton instead of opium processed into heroin.

The mill even imported several skilled workers from neighbouring Pakistan to maintain machines that separate seeds from cotton bolls, extract cottonseed oil to make cooking ghee and bale the cotton for transport.

Then, just six days after the electricity started flowing to factories from the new power plant, the juice ran out, the diesel generators went cold and Afghans were left shaking their heads.

“We were told that the work of Americans is reliable,” said Mohammed Saleem, the family-owned cotton mill’s deputy chief. “They also said that these generators will provide constant power for three years. They didn’t work for two weeks.

“If we have no power, we can’t pay salaries to employees and the employees can’t stay with us without money. This is really our big problem: Once we lose our trained and skilled employees, then it’s difficult to replace them. If we hire new ones, then it takes significant time to train them to use the machines.”

Thousands could be working in one of 97 factories, including an ironworks and a plant making plastic pipe for construction projects in the Shorandam Industrial Park, near the huge NATO airbase outside Kandahar, Rahimi said.

As the diesel generators fired up, plants hired new workers, and then the sudden loss of power threw scores of people out of work.

The cotton mill lost almost a third of its 70 workers. Half of the 36 men employed at the plastic pipe factory were sent home. The numbers multiplied as layoffs rippled through one plant after another.

“Now we have only 500 essential staff in the industrial park in all the factories,” Rahimi said. “At first, when all these all factories were established, they employed 10,000 workers. But now more than 9,000 workers are unemployed and have no salaries.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is spending more than $107 million (US) to build and maintain two diesel power plants in Kandahar city, and the U.S. has promised to cover fuel costs for up to three years.

This will add tens of millions of dollars to the bill as other crews try to get a third turbine installed at the Kajaki hydroelectric dam, in neighbouring Helmand province.

The U.S. built Kajaki in the early 1950s. Years of war and neglect ruined it. With some $90 million in repairs, it generates power again, but still needs a new turbine to send electricity to Kandahar, the Taliban’s former spiritual capital.

In 2008, almost 4,000 British, Canadian and allied troops launched a massive five-day operation to deliver the turbine through the Taliban heartland, battling insurgents along the way.

But the Chinese crew brought in to install it fled after a Taliban rocket attack. The U.S. Agency for International Development has hired Black and Veatch, an American firm criticized for missing deadlines and blowing budgets on other projects here, to install the Kajaki turbine.

But its team only arrived Jan. 16 to begin the turbine project’s first, conditional assessment, and it will be months before any extra power flows from the dam.

That steps up the pressure on the diesel generators to solve Kandahar’s energy crisis as Taliban commanders and fighters prepare to return from Pakistan, where they retreat each winter to train and rearm.

The eight Caterpillar generators are state of the art, said Lt.-Col. Pierre St-Laurent, a Canadian engineer in the stability office of the NATO-led forces’ southern command.

They are also complex machines that have to have to carefully synchronized. They broke down after running about six weeks in very hard conditions, including desert dust as fine as talcum powder, St-Laurent added.

“There have been hiccups, as there always are when you try to fix machines that work together,” said St-Laurent, a member of the 5th Combat Engineer Regiment, based in Valcartier, Que.

“I’m pretty sure the dust has something to do with it,” he added.

Five of eight generators went back online Tuesday and the remaining three were close to starting up Thursday, St-Laurent said. The biggest needs replacement parts from overseas.

“It’s a harsh environment and complex machines. All the ingredients are there for it to work,” St-Laurent said. “But ‘Murphy’ has been geostationary around this place for the last 30 years. So if something can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

The West can’t count on Afghans having the patience for Murphy’s Law to be overturned, for the costly, maddening slip-ups to stop.

The U.S. military has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Red Army before U.S.-backed mujahedeen guerrillas ended the Russian occupation in 1989.

Rahimi was a university student then, and remembers Kandahar having electricity, and two functioning, state-run textile factories, despite a brutal war between the Communists and the mujahedeen.

Those two factories now sit abandoned, but $6 million in renovations, and a steady supply of power, would have them up and running again, creating more than 10,000 new jobs, Rahimi said.

A revived textile industry would seed more jobs in related businesses.

“Then we wouldn’t find a single person unemployed in the city and it would help significantly with improving the security,” Rahimi added. “But unfortunately, nobody is interested in this.”

When the diesel generators fired up again this week, Saleem brought back a few of his laid off workers.

But he didn’t recall the new, second shift. Saleem expects more trouble from the power plant and doesn’t want to tell good men they’re unemployed again.

“It causes problems for labourers and us if we bring them back, the generators fail again and we have to let them go,” he said. “The power can’t be trusted. Maybe the electricity will run for a few days again and cut out. Let’s see.”