Afghan EE toils to rebuild Kabul's infrastructure

Afghan EE toils to rebuild Kabul's infrastructure
SAN FRANCISCO — Abdul Rashid Janbaz has his work cut out for him. The 47-year-old electrical engineer is the Minister of Planning and Finance for Kabul, Afghanistan. He chats about a digital wireless boom in his city, where cellular technology, using European-style GSM modulation, is the simplest way of rebuilding the communications infrastructure destroyed by the factional fighting that leveled Afghanistan in the first half of the 1990s. However, more pressing problems loom.

Since the fall of the Taliban regime, more than a million refugees have flooded into the city. Kabul has electricity for roughly four hours a day. It can guarantee clean drinking water to only 15 percent of its residents; the rest draw water unsupervised from possibly contaminated wells. Roughly 95 percent of Afghans are illiterate and wouldn't know what to do with the buttons of a cell phone, Janbaz says.

Sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area Friends of Afghanistan and the local chapter of the Society of Afghan Engineers, Janbaz's visit here is intended to familiarize him with modern city planning techniques and practices. Fremont, Calif. — across the bay from San Francisco and home to many Silicon Valley companies — has arguably the largest population of Afghan immigrants in the United States. The local press mostly ignored Janbaz's trip, but the San Francisco Chronicle reported on his visit to the water purification plant in Carson City, Nev., outside of Reno. In addition to the crash course in Western-style modernization, Janbaz is also serving as fund-raiser and talent recruiter for his troubled city.

Asked by EE Times to prioritize his needs, Janbaz hardly knew where to begin. "All infrastructure is a priority: We need healthy water, transportation, sewage systems, emergency housing . . . We need electricity. We need schools, roads, street lamps," he said. "An old gas turbine generator came apart when the fighting started. We need people [experts] to get it working again."

Slim preparation

Janbaz's engineering education, an EE degree from the Afghan Institute of Technology (whose faculty and curriculum were borrowed from U.S. colleges, particularly the University of Nebraska and the University of Wyoming), hardly prepared him for the reconstruction tasks he's currently charged with. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-82 and the subsequent civil war effectively short-circuited Janbaz's commercial engineering career, though his largely mechanical-engineering work on sanitation systems for a German charitable organization (from 1995 to 2001) earned him visibility in the government of Hamid Karzai, and paved the way for his current appointment.

But the need for money — private investment, as well as international humanitarian contributions — is clear. The United Nations Tokyo Conference a year ago allocated $4.5 billion over a five-year period for the emergency reconstruction of Afghanistan. But Afghan officials are encouraging private-sector investment as means of promoting long-term growth.

The Society of Afghan Engineers sponsored the Bay Area visit of Rashid Janbaz, left, the head of planning and finance for the city of Kabul. He met with Afghan expatriates Humaira Ghilzai, center, a San Francisco-based marketing consultant, and Abdul Rashid Joyaa, president of JEI Automation Systems, a material-handling equipment supplier in Fremont, Calif.

The buzzword Janbaz uses is "privatize." Wherever possible, the government is encouraging private business interests to set up shop as profit-making ventures. The national government and the city of Kabul are establishing mechanisms to make it easy and profitable for the investor, Janbaz said.

The phone system, for example, is a profit-making venture of the Afghan Wireless Communications Co. (AWCC), a subsidiary of the New York-based Telecommunications Services Inc. TSI shoulders the investment cost and extracts 80 percent of the profits. The contract is worth $2.25 million, said Humaira Ghilzai, an Afghan expatriate and San Francisco-based marketing consultant.

The GSM system has 10,000 subscribers in Kabul and 30,000 throughout Afghanistan, Ghilzai said. The latter number is expected to double to 60,000 this year. The handsets used are primarily Nokia and Motorola models, she said, but a city-imposed "tax" could bring the cost of a handset up to $450. Since there are no mechanisms for billing air time, cell phone users need to buy talk time in advance (in the form of a phone card) and must enter an access/billing code every time they dial a number.

Afghans favored

Afghanistan will allow limited competition among telephone service providers: The government foresees two wireline and two wireless service providers, but not more. Applications to do business in Afghanistan tend to favor Afghans, Ghilzai said, but expatriates are as valued as those who have never left the country. The president of AWCC, for example, is an expatriate.

This same model is being used to finance the development of business-class hotels, required to bring Western attention (and investment) to developing nations. The Karzai government has received many proposals for the construction of new hotels, Janbaz said, and the Intercontinental (the name leased from the worldwide chain) is currently being renovated as a five-star hotel with funding from the Aga Khan foundation. Here too, Afghan interests (including Afghan Americans) are favored.

Janbaz said he wants to use the same investment model for building and home construction. The government is trying to establish credit systems to enable individuals to buy new homes. "First, we like to give Afghans shelter," he said.

Of its geographic neighbors, Afghanistan most admires Iran and India, Janbaz told EE Times. His country's language and culture are most similar to Iran's, he said, while India's thrusts in high technology are a regional success story. Indeed, Indian business interests have been among the most aggressive new investors in Afghanistan, Janbaz said.

Humble beginnings

Still, it would be difficult for Afghanistan to follow India's lead directly, since the skill set of the Afghan work force does not come close to that of India in knowledge of computer software, Janbaz said. Perhaps the talent for close handwork that goes with the traditional crafts of weaving and rug making could be employed in microchip packaging and lead frame assembly, he speculated, pointing to similarly humble beginnings for high-tech industries in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Bay Area engineers might find fulfillment by serving in a country that sorely needs their expertise, said Rashid Joyaa, president of Fremont-based JEI Automation Systems. Voter registration mechanisms, complete with computers and database systems, for example, are required to ensure widespread participation in the democratic process. Afghans could certainly benefit if Silicon Valley engineers chose to share knowledge in personal computers and network technology, Joyaa said, though he noted that technology expansion in Afghanistan is limited.

But some late-breaking news causes Janbaz to smile near the conclusion of his interview: The gas turbine generator is operational again, and the city of Kabul can now extend electricity to its residents for up to eight hours a day.