What the world (particularly poor countries) needs now is more leaders like Amirzai Sangin, Afghanistan’s minister of communications.
The against-the-odds progress achieved by Sangin, who made the rounds in official Washington last week before heading up to New York to receive the Intelligent Community Forum’s Visionary of the Year Award, is a latter day profile in courage. His is an success story in a long-suffering, all-but-forgotten land that reappeared on the map in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.
Sangin, born in the Urgun, Paktika province and trained as an engineer at South London College, was forced to flee his home country and his job as instructor (later head) of the Telecommunications Training Center in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded. Sangin landed in Sweden. Rather than lament his newfound refugee status, he quickly mastered the Swedish language and created a forum to assist the Afghan people-hostage to a civil war and then the ruthless Taliban regime after the Soviet withdrawal-from afar.
In 1982, Sangin hooked up with Swedish Telecom and helped launch an international unit that won eight GSM mobile licenses in Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Hungary, Italy, Namibia and India during the ’90s.
With his success, Sangin could have ensconced himself sweetly in Sweden. But he chose otherwise, returning to Afghanistan soon after 9/11 and picking up where he left off-training telecom engineers. Why? He missed his country and wanted to aid the reconstruction effort. “Sometimes in life you have to take risks,” Sangin told me at his hotel.
Sangin subsequently was asked by the-then Afghan communications minister (a former student of Sangin’s) to be his senior adviser. Together they laid the foundation for a telecom regulatory body that would go on to license three GSM mobile-phone operators. A fourth GSM operator is set to enter the field later this year. In 2004, Sangin became the Afghan communications minister of the newly elected government under President Hamid Karzai.
The number of Afghan wireless users is now more than 1 million, and prices have dropped dramatically since Sangin’s return to Afghanistan-inspiration for brave international investors and welcome business for a poverty-ridden country that would be even poorer but for the flourishing poppy crop. Indeed, the combination of the narcotics economy and resilient terrorists is undermining political and economic reform in Afghanistan. In a cynical, ironic twist, the Taliban-which managed to keep the opium business in check before their ouster-now appears to have joined forces with drug lords.
The Taliban, somewhere among the 1.1 million cell-phone users in Afghanistan, apparently has little tolerance for fellow subscribers. According to news reports, it can be fatal if a Taliban member happens to ask for your phone at a checkpoint and calls a stored number to someone who answers in English.
It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “dead spots.”
