Recent Afghanistan – Summer 2008

When travelling to Afghanistan every visitor optimistically looks for signs of positive change. Hearing about fuel tankers and other vital supplies being shot and burnt by the Taliban on the main transit route (Jalalabad-Kabul) puts things right back into perspective. The daily bombings, kidnappings and killings raise major concerns about the lack of security even inside the capital of Kabul which was fairly safer just a year ago.

Reconstruction is just as painfully slow as ever and the frustration of the locals over the presence of the International Forces is growing very rapidly. The job of the donor community is perceived as being inadequate in its manner of unfair distribution of moneys, paying extremely high salaries to International staff, who do less to nothing but offend people with their expensive cars, etc. Even the donor community and the NGOs themselves are not investing in Afghanistan so how can they encourage others to do just that. The rent they pay for a year could easily build them an extravagant building. Because of their occupation of all the houses and the high rent they can afford, no one other than them can even think of living in a reasonable house.

CDP, a project of USAID, which received a fund of $218million supposedly works on capacity building but what does CDP do? I have yet to figure that out exactly. The feeling here amongst professionals is that they don’t even know what to do with the money they have – what a way to build capacity! I sat in one of their “Strategic Planning” training sessions which was no more than a complete waste of time and of course a lot of money. The money that donors pledge for the poor, the hungry, the orphans, the widows, and the less fortunate – all go to those already with deep pockets. If the donations stop, only the rich will suffer, not the poor because quite frankly they never stopped suffering. If they are not suffering more now then they are definitely not suffering any less than before.

Civil Servants from other countries take a leave from their job, so they can be rich overnight in Afghanistan by getting extremely high salaries for – once again doing nothing and the skills they bring with them “to benefit Afghans” are greed and corruption. All the hiring posts are occupied by them and the only people they hire are their own except for the posts allocated directly from donor countries such as the US. International “talents” are hired just so they can complain about the poor state of Afghanistan, its culture, security, lack of infrastructure, unemployment, pollution, dust and make fun of people. They do all that “work” while earning more in a month here than they could possibly earn in a year back home. This is without their security, housing and partying costs to make them feel at home. All this could be done by a local employee too plus it would mean one less unemployed Afghan.
It is not just about how money is spent. Donors pledge money but they never deliver as much as they promise. The only exception was Britain, last time a survey was undertaken it showed Britain spent more than it pledged.

Just a few days in Afghanistan is enough to make you heart break with disappointment and injustice. Yet you still see smiling faces everywhere; you see optimism in everyone and hope in the eyes of every child. Real progress is not in buildings or wealth but in the happiness of people. If people are happy than that is all that matters. Its not that the people here are used to the injustice so they have stopped caring or their smiles are fake because eyes never lie. So what is keeping the Afghans in high spirit and proud after 30 years of war, destruction, misery and injustice?

The only thing I find common amongst all Afghans is their strong faith. Could it be that? Faith as many scholars say is a power and a source of energy. It might be that energy, which keeps them going. The power of faith is described in every religion from Islam to Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. In the Gospel Jesus says that people with faith could move mountains. Islam says that those who have faith “They have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve”. Its not just religions that preach the power of faith, Napoleon Hill said, "Whatsoever the mind of man can conceive and BELIEVE he can achieve."

Soul as believed by Muslims (most Afghans are Muslims) is immortal and the strength that belief of immortality in itself must give people an enormous amount of hope. Knowing that, this life is not everything and that there will be an end to the misery may make it easier to live with. Any temporary torture may be bearable as the belief is that it will only be for a short time. More suffering in life means more rewards in heaven. This is what the feeling must be amongst the people in Afghanistan which gives them hope and the energy to remain happy in the never ending anguish that is brought upon them.

Localisation

Localisation is usually associated with mere translation of technology in to local languages; however it actually means adapting to local needs. A technology that may work in one country does not necessarily work in another even if their languages are the same, due to geographical and environmental differences. Adapting to local needs may include language translation to make it understandable to the local population.

Various Afghan institutions have been heavily involved in Localisation, including private/public sectors and the non-governmental organisations (NGO). While their work is worth admiring, it is subject to many flaws that are yet to be filled.

Bandwidth is an expensive commodity worldwide but especially in Afghanistan. A mere double (128Kbps) of a dial-up (56Kbps) speed costs 300 US Dollars (~ £160) per month. It is therefore important to be optimised to accommodate more users and to bring costs down. Over one billion users are connected to the Internet worldwide. Making access to the internet accessible to all those who can in Afghanistan would mean giving those Afghans over one billion opportunities to explore, learn from, do business with, socialise with, make friends with, etc.

Optimisation is far from being achieved here (in Afghanistan), it is actually being wasted. The ISPs (Internet Service Providers) seem to be more concerned with making money rather than making the internet market grow. I say this because the current internet users in the country mostly use windows and a killer for bandwidth that is associated with windows is its updates. Currently every windows user downloads updates directly through the backbone (via satellite) [See Figure 1 as an example]. The load on the backbone makes less available bandwidth and hence not only prevents the ISP from giving new connections out to new users but also affects the speed for the current users. Investing in a local cache server would avoid the repetitive download of the updates by each user separately [see Figure 2 for an example]. If a user wants to install the updates 10 times, it would not affect other users but only his own.

The other issue concerned with the localisation at the moment is the lack of awareness about the software and its costs. The average income of an Afghan is between $200 and $350 per year. A legal copy of Windows XP costs about $560 locally. For Afghanistan to be able to sell its software in the international market it would first need to comply with Intellectual Property and Copy Right laws. However, if most people cannot afford to buy the software, then enforcing the law becomes a problem. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its localisation is therefore important to provide Afghans with something they can afford. Although there is no lack of support for FOSS in the ICT sector itself but it is struggling to gain the support it needs from the government and financial support institutes (donor community). The awareness amongst the public as to why they should change to open source is also lacking.

For a system to have flaws, it will have to exist first. In a place like Afghanistan it is difficult to foresee the future clearly; hence the work is usually carried out to fulfil the immediate needs without full analysis. It might be due to those reasons, that everything was/is done superficially. However, the good thing is the ICT industry is growing rapidly and the necessary improvements may clearly be seen as the number of professionals increase in the country. Despite its flaws, if there is a success story in Afghanistan, it would have to be the growth of its ICT sector. It has come a long way in the past five years but still has a long way to go. A well developed ICT sector will boost the economy and serve as an enabler tool for development and education. It will also address the divide between those who have access to information and those that do not.

Some ministries are working on e-governance. It wouldn’t be effective if the population has no access/limited access to the internet. The importance of internet can be summarised in the words of Stuart Lynn, President of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names) in a presentation to the United Nations ICT Taskforce (October 2002), “If you can’t be found on the Internet, you don’t exist.”

Making local adaptation of ICT available and affordable is critical for the progress of Afghanistan. Let’s hope it will be very soon! There is a dedicated organisation just for the ICT sector – National ICT Alliance of Afghanistan (NICTAA) – an umbrella association of the ICT related private sector, academia and civil society. Its work has already made a huge difference and I hope it will continue its contribution to the progress of the Afghan ICT sector.