This isn't pops either, but I found it very interesting. From the NY Times today . . .
Phone Deal in Afghanistan Catches Many by Surprise
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
A privately owned telephone company in New Jersey has signed a $240-million contract to build a cellular telephone system for the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalists who control most of Afghanistan and who the White House says are harboring Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, last month.
Telephone Systems International of Parsippany, N.J., said that it would start work in a few weeks and that within two years at least 1 million telephones would be available in 15 cities in Afghanistan, which has been so ravaged by two decades of war that only about 26,000 lines remain from the antiquated telephone system that the Russians built in Kabul, the capital.
The system will be built using equipment from Motorola, AT&T, Nokia and Ericsson, said Gary Breshinsky, who identified himself as one of three owners of the company. A second owner is Ehsan Bayat, an Afghani who lives in New York. Breshinsky declined to name the third owner.
There are no federal restrictions on U.S. companies doing business with the Taliban, officials at the Commerce, State, Treasury and Justice departments said Monday.
The White House said it was unaware of the deal but looked on it favorably as a means to ease the tight controls the Taliban have placed on access to the rest of the world.
"Anything that increases the Afghani people's access to information, ideas and the global economy is a good thing," said David Leavy, the spokesman for the National Security Council.
Export of advanced technology with potential military applications requires an export license from the Commerce Department if the equipment is built by a U.S. company or uses U.S. technology, a Commerce Department official said.
Breshinsky said no export licenses would be needed for the cellular system his company would build based on the GSM system used for cellular phones in most countries outside the United States.
"This is all simple technology," said Breshinsky, who said other companies he owns have built similar systems since 1981 in Malaysia, China and parts of Africa.
He said the system would give Afghani users direct-dial access to the rest of the world and access to the Internet. He said the Taliban were requiring the use of software to block anti-Taliban Web sites "and what one of them called smut."
The Taliban representative in New York, Noorullah Zadran, said the contract was signed Sept. 2 at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul.
"This contract contains an equal-opportunity provision under which women can work side by side with men for the same pay," which showed that the Taliban were not the enemies of women, Zadran said.
Breshinsky said it took 51 days to negotiate the contract, which was first disclosed in reports from Kabul on Sept. 2 by Reuters and The Associated Press. Those reports received so little attention that on Monday none of the federal officials interviewed said they had heard of the contract or the company the Taliban hired to build the system and run it for 20 years.
Telephone Systems International was incorporated in June in Parsippany, N.J., specifically to build a cellular telephone system for the Taliban, Breshinsky said.
Breshinsky and Zadran said Motorola would be the main supplier of equipment. But a spokeswoman for Motorola, Margot Brown, said the statements by Breshinsky and Zadran about using Motorola technology "are not true."
"We have not signed any contracts in Kabul and we have never heard of a company called Telephone Systems International," she said.
Breshinsky would not say what he had done for a living before 1981 and he declined to identify who would finance the system. He said that finding paying customers in Afghanistan would not be a problem, and estimated that 5 million people would want, and be able to afford, telephones.
"It's the government that doesn't have the money," he said. "The people have money -- the longer they have been free and away from the Soviets, the more cash they have and walk around with, a lot more cash than I ever carry."
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P.S. By the way, Jon, the name Ruth's Chris Steakhouse has always been a source of amusing fascination to me, too. Have you ever actually been there? |
