October 18, 2004

WIRELESS  WARS

Eric Ellis

AT Yaka Badem, high in the rugged mountains of northern Afghanistan on a cloudless day New Yorkers would recognise, a platoon of warlord Mohamed Daoud Khan’s militiamen are enjoying a picnic. Two campfire-roasted lambs and bottles of whisky are laid under a purloined UNICEF tent 2000m above Daoud’s stronghold of Kunduz. It was a bomb-cratered tank-strewn peak away from this remote mountaintop that the Taleban had its last stand against these same fighters.

But that was four years ago and Afghanistan is trying to move on. Commanders like Daoud have been co-opted into government, the Taleban are on the run and the country has managed to stage presidential and parliamentary elections. And here, on what was once a killing ground, the Afghan Wireless Communications Company is completing Afghanistan’s first mobile phone network.

Kunduz is AWCC’s missing link in the backbone. Its arch-rival, the Aga Khan-funded Roshan Communications, has stolen a march on AWCC by getting here first. AWCC’s engineers reckon Yaka Badem, 15km outside Kunduz, is the best place to position a tower link to a base station at Mazar-e-Sharif, 50km west, to create a wider network to overwhelm Roshan. Warlord Khan has agreed to the site, and ground has been broken for construction. Connecting Kunduz’s 100,000 people to the world is sufficient cause for celebration in the New Afghanistan. An hour’s bacchanalia later, the lambs have been stripped to the bone and the whisky drained. Suddenly the air fills with jaunty Tajik folk tunes, booming out the tailgate of a 4X4. Drunken wildmen in flat woollen caps and shalwar kameez whirl dervishly, their Kalashnikovs flinging about. At the precipice, the less festive rain rounds of automatic weapon fire into the valley below, because they can.

In the midst of this pandemonium, a beaming Amin Ramin hands out greenbacks, Afghanistan’s time-honored way of ensuring loyalty. Ramin says he is a manager at AWCC, a New Jersey-based consortium of Afghan-American returnees and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications, but he’s selling himself short. The government in faraway Kabul may be a part-owner of AWCC but its Imprimatur counts for little in many of the lawless fiefdoms outside the capital where President Karzai’s writ is limited. And that’s where Ramin steps in as AWCC’s Chief Troubleshooter, the go-to guy who makes things happen in this difficult country that after 30 years of war desperately wants to be normal.

Ramin hails from a grand Tajik family of warrior-patriots, the well-connected hard man who AWCC relies on to cut deals with regional warlords like Kunduz’s Daoud, or the fearsome Ismail Khan in Herat. Ramin has crammed a lot into his 36 years. In 1984, he earned his cred among Afghans by helping kill Russians, a teenage mujahid fighting a jihad against the Soviet invaders of his beloved homeland. Ten years later - self-exiled to the U.S while those same mujahideen fought over the spoils of victory - Ramin was an apprentice millionaire in New York, pulling 18 hour days for $3 an hour in a Brooklyn greasy spoon he would build into the Luther’s Fried Chicken chain. In 2001 came September 11 and the U.S-led war that ousted Osama bin Laden’s Taleban hosts. For wealthy Afghan emigres like Ramin, 9/11 and the subsequent war that ousted the Taleban presented a business opportunity to re-build their shattered homeland with the cash and connections they’d made abroad.

Ramin’s a handy man to have around in a clinch. En route to another cell site near Kunduz, he pulls over the 4X4 he’s driving at 60mph over dusty roads. He tells his bodyguard to walk 100m into the desert, where he places a plastic bottle among the scrub. Grabbing his AK-47, Ramin takes potshots at the bottle, then looses off a few from his Glock sidearm. “Once a muj, always a muj,” he smiles. “You are always with them.”

Afghan warlords are not men to trifle with. In July, Amin was called urgently to Mazar to negotiate the release of AWCC’s regional manager and his deputy. They had been detained by yet another warlord, Atta Mohamed, for refusing Atta’s demand to eavesdrop on the calls of rival clan leader, Commander Akram Khakrezwal. Each warlord alleges the other is a drug kingpin, profiting from the heroin poppies openly cultivated around Mazar. Ramin eventually won his colleagues’ freedom but refuses to describe how because, as an AWCC insider says, ‘it could compromise his valuable ability to leverage their influence in future.”

By contrast, Daoud in Kunduz seems a pushover. In the warlord’s carpeted lair, Ramin and Mohaymen Sahebzadah, AWCC’s signals expert, patiently explain AWCC’s plans to wire his fiefdom. The bearded Daoud perfunctorily nods his approval - he seems more interested in debating the merits of a Sony-Ericsson handset over his Motorola clam. “You can get e-mail on that?” he asks, as a silent bearer prepares green tea and almonds. Daoud is one of Afghanistan’s few regional commanders who supports President Karzai’s efforts to unite Afghanistan. “We must modernize and build our country together,” he says. Investors like AWCC need to be encouraged. “I want to build industrial parks for foreign companies in Kunduz,” he says.

Fine words but it may take prospective investors more convincing. Afghanistan is by no means secure – 20,000 U.S troops scour the countryside subduing still-active Taleban and Al-Qaeda remnants. The capital, Kabul, is awash with guns, its main buildings fortified with barriers against suicide bombers. President Karzai moves around by helicopter in a 100-strong cordon sanitaire of tough American bodyguards, who cost US taxpayers $100 million a year to guard President Hamid Karzai, known in Afghanistan as the ‘Mayor of Kabul’ for his limited writ in the fractured, struggling state. And, even in Kunduz, supposedly the safest part of Afghanistan, 11 Chinese labourers were recently murdered as they slept in a camp outside town guarded by Daoud’s fighters.

Afghanistan has never enjoyed mass-market communications before. Kabul’s pre-Soviet governments were too poor, and the Moscow didn’t much bother installing a phone network. Its mujahadeen successors were too consumed fighting civil wars that trashed their cities while the Taleban’s prehistoric take on Islam didn’t include cellphones. Before AWCC and its Aga Khan-backed rival Roshan Communications arrived, druglords and Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda used satphones. But after three years and a $200 million investment, AWCC and Roshan each claim about 900 employees, 300,000 subscribers-plus and are adding 10,000 customers a month. In Taleban times, Afghanistan had less than 1000 telephone lines. International calls were routed through Pakistan via a ancient switching facility at Lataband, a snowbound peak between Kabul and Jalalabad.

Unsurprising for a band of ex-mujahideen, AWCC apply the same thinking to its mobile network as Afghans have long done for war. Both require strategic height and line of sight so AWCC’s technicians find themselves scouring fortresses like Kunduz and Mazar, and at the old Taleban station at Lataband for possible cell sites. It took Mohaymen Sahebzadah two months to find Yaka Badem. Seven times he walked through what he later learned was a minefield, overgrown with wild poppies, cacti and tulips of blazing red. A gentle, immaculate man who worked for Verizon in New York - he was fixing a cellsite on the Verrazano Narrows bridge on 9/11 - Sahebzadah still shudders at the thought of the mines. “We counted six anti-tank mines and we stopped counting the anti-personnel mines after 30.” Lataband was one of the first places hit when American cruise missiles started raining on Afghanistan in October 2001. The station’s five Taleban guards were settling down to sleep after evening prayers when the missile vaporized them. Today, all that remains is a poignant shrine of twisted metal and their melted sandals. Over the rubble, AWCC has built a state-of-the-art cell tower and transmission facility - swords to ploughshares Afghan-style.

The logistics in bringing a modern phone network to Afghans are staggering. Plant has to be transported in, usually by road from Dubai – a five day journey across Iran – or up the Khyber Pass from Pakistan. Afghanistan doesn’t have a national electricity grid so AWCC has to build its own mini-power stations for each cell sites. Fashioned from old shipping containers and powered by diesel, the generators are trucked around the country on appalling roads for installation in wild places like Yaka Badem, where 200 of Khan’s men took two months to hew a track up the rugged mountainside. AWCC’s tankers are constantly criss-crossing the country to keep diesel up to the cellsite generators, the entire ensemble guarded 24/7 by AWCC’s own private armed militia. The exercise means AWCC is not only a big telco, its also became Afghanistan’s biggest power generator and transport company by default – and commanding one of its biggest armed militias as well.

“Some days I’ve thrown my hands in the air and said ‘that’s it, I’m going crazy, I cant do it’ says AWCC’s 42 year-old chairman Ehsan Bayat. “And then an old woman comes and kisses me on the cheek and thanks me for connecting with her relatives in the U.S and it makes your day, it really makes your day.”

If Ramin is AWCC’s tough guy, Bayat is the smooth-suited wiseguy frontman. “Look at these people, they don’t want war, they want to be normal like everyone else,” says the Kabul-born Afghan-American who if he wasn’t Afghanistan’s first ever telco mogul could make a useful living as Robert De Niro’s body double. Oozing Bobby’s quietly-initimidating charisma, Bayat even talks like the famous actor, sprinkling a ‘Noo Joisey’ accent picked up from 23 years of exile running a tri-states food distribution company with words like ‘whacked’ and ‘screwed’ and “sons of bitches.”

Claiming to be the French-educated son of a wealthy Kabuli doctor, Bayat conceived AWCC in 1995 after a 1995 meetings with Afghanistan’s then foreign minister, Abdul Rahim Ghafoorzai, whose family also owned fast food stores in the U.S and was a customer of Bayat’s frozen food distribution company. Whilst visiting the family business, Ghafoorzai networked the diaspora, urging self-made Afghans like Bayat to come home and re-build Afghanistan, which had been devastated after years of civil war. Bayat was piqued and within a year, and despite no previous experience in telecoms, he set up a New Jersey company called Telephone Systems International (TSI). In September 1996, the Taleban movement swept into Kabul and soon took over much of Afghanistan. Undaunted, Bayat believed he could work with the fundamentalist Islamist movement and kept contacts open, meeting with Taleban emissaries on their occasional sorties to the U.S, where they explored business deals with companies like Texan oil giant Unocal while lobbying for diplomatic recognition from Washington.

“The wheels were in motion but nothing was happening,” Bayat says. That also seems true of the Taleban’s senior leaders in business negotiations. At one late night meeting in New York, Bayat says the visiting Taleban negotiators broke talks with him to consult with the movement’s spiritual leader Mullah Omar in Kandahar. “Omar asked them what was going on and they said we are going for night prayer,” recalls Bayat. “Omar asked them what were they doing…’night prayer? We are just waking up here in Kandahar.’” Bayat laughs. “They had no idea.”

With the Taleban gone and disgraced, its easy, now, for Bayat to mock them. But he spent five crucial years of dealing and haggling with them to at least keep the door open to his plans. And controversial too. As an American citizen, Bayat’s dealings with the Taleban were been a constant game of cat and mouse with authorities over the extent of business links with what became, after the August 1998 U.S embassy bombings in Africa, an outlawed regime. Indeed, Bayat’s TSI and the Taleban-controlled Ministry of Communications officially signed the AWCC joint venture in September 1998, as the dust was still settling on retaliatory U.S airstrikes on Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Bayat denies he was a sanction-buster, claiming that TSI divested its AWCC interest after the U.S imposed sanctions in July 1999, buying back in when sanctions were lifted after the Taleban’s ouster in 2001.

Bayat agreed to invest $150 million in AWCC, money he didn’t have. So he set about gathering an eclectic group of partners; English nobility, British cricket-fanciers, a philandering European billionaire and a shadowy American who claimed to be an ex-CIA assassin. A November 1998 meeting with Taleban officials in Kandahar gathered them all together; Bayat, the English aristocrat-businessmen Lord Michael Cecil, some senior staff of the German group Siemens, Olaf Guerrand-Hermes, an heir of the famous Hermes fashion group and Gary Breshinsky, a shadowy 48 year-old New Jersey satphone salesman who claimed to have been a career spy, seeing ‘action’ in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For two years until 1999, the shadowy Breshinsky was Bayat’s de facto ambassador to the mercurial Taleban, shuttling between New Jersey, Kabul and the Taleban stronghold of Kandahar, where he met negotiated with senior clerics, including Mullah Omar and, on one occasion Osama bin Laden. Breshinsky died in late 2003 bitter, according to friends, after being pushed out of TSI by Cecil and Bayat two years earlier. As an olive branch gesture, Bayat reportedly offered to find him a job in a New York fast food restaurant. The Cecils bear one of the grander names in English politics and aristocracy. Family forebear William Cecil, or Lord Burghley, was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, who gave him Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, which is today the Cecil family seat and one of England’s statliest of homes. Viscount Cranborne, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury was a three-term British Prime Minister from 1885-1902 who shaped colonial policy in British India and Africa. More recently, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury was a defence minister in former British Prime Minister John Major’s government and was a prominent fundraiser for the mujahideen cause in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. His younger brothers, Michael and Valentine, own one of Kenya’s leading mobile phone companies, Wilken Telecommunications. Guerrand-Hermes’ role in involvement TSI is unclear though his ex-wife Olga Rostropovich, daughter of the famous Russian cellist Mistislav Rostropovich, was sufficiently convinced he had interests in the country. In 2003, she sent private New York investigators The Arkin Group on a worldwide hunts for his assets, including to Afghanistan, after he got her best friend pregnant.

Its at this point in AWCC’s evolution as a viable business that a collective amnesia seems to have set in. That’s partly due to a bitter court challenge by Cecil and his partner, British businessmen Stuart Bentham, over 30.22% of TSI they claim they own. Bayat insists he is the sole owner of TSI (though he also says he is privately backed by “people who know how desperate this country is (and) they want this country to be fixed.”) However, a TSI filing of May 2002 to the Federal Communications Commission of the US and signed by Bayat says Bentham and Cecil each own 15.11% to Bayat’s 51%. The owner of the remaining 18.78% is not specified. Cecil and Bentham say they are legally constrained from commenting on the dispute but their New York attorney, Robert Friedman of Kelley Drye, says “we are looking forward with enthusiasm to our day in court.”

Bayat’s amnesia also extends to the sensitive three years after the 1998 African embassy bombings when his Taleban partners were under sanction by Washington, London and the United Nations. Despite the sanctions, AWCC pushed forward on building a network in Taleban-administered Afghanistan and some of the early technical staff are still with AWCC. In mid 2000, a British supplier of reconditioned telco hardware, Dorset-based TMB Systems, was paid cash upfront to install switching systems in Kabul and Kandahar. On another visit to Kabul that was widely reported in the British press, the cricket-loving Englishmen Bentham and Cecil curried favour with the clerics by donating playing gear to the Taleban. The two also set up a mining company, Afghan Development, to exploit Afghanistan’s untapped resources potential. The shadowy Breshinsky was also active, reportedly offering himself to the Taleban as a mediator between them and the State Department, who wanted the mullahs to give up bin Laden after the African embassy bombings and the October 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen. Breshinsky said in an interview before he died last year that the Taleban agreed but that the U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation warned against interfering in U.S foreign policy.

Bayat’s memory improves, however, after September 11 and the subsequent two month war that ousted his partner, the Taleban. He was in New Jersey driving toward Manhattan, when a friend phoned to tell him of the attacks. “Then I could see the smoke from the World Trade Centre, I could see the building burning and that people are jumping off the top of the building,” he says. “I knew this was my time to return to Afghanistan, I knew the sanctions were going to be lifted. A little voice in the back of my head, says, you know what, I think this is an opportunity.”

It was. The new Karzai administration honoured the Taleban contract and by April 2002, just four months after the Taleban’s ouster, AWCC launched a phone and internet service in the capital, quickly extending it to Kandahar, Mazar and Herat. One of the last holdouts of the communications Stone Age had been breached. At an international summit in Berlin in April, Karzai held out AWCC as an example to foreign investors. “He said we are making a lot of money and that investors should follow our lead. Learn from them,” says Bayat.

While few foreign investors are heeding Karzai’s plea, Afghans’ expectations are rising. AWCC’s chain of internet cafes around the country are full and mobile customers who have never proper communications are now complaining of service faults. But Bayat isnt fussed. “I like that, it show the country is progressing.”