 We started now with panel two, where we're going to talk about the use of mobile phones in the area of countering extremism and counterinsurgency. And obviously, there is some overlap with the panel before, where we're just starting to get into very good discussion around mobile phones and accountability among district officials and how those call-in programs have been used and other tricks of the trade and without much progress, I might add. So we're going to pick up on that theme with this next panel. And I'm delighted to say that I've got a co-moderator here to take the microphone, Colonel Matt Venhouse, who has just ended a stint with us here at USIP as the Army Fellow in our Jennings Randolph program, a career U.S. Army officer. And his research here really sets him up nicely for moderating this panel. I have had the good fortune to read his work on why youth are attracted to extremist movements and joining al-Qaeda and the like, which makes it a very good sense that he would approach an issue like that since he has spent most of his 23 years in the Army in the field of foreign media influence operations. So I think we've got a guy who is going to be just right to take over this panel on an extremely important and challenging topic. Matt, let me turn it over to you. As Shelton said on Matt Venhouse, he's also given me a little bit of guidance during the break. Don't talk too long. Get us back on schedule. We need to get people moving. And oh, by the way, don't talk too long because we've got a schedule. So he also said that he wanted to be controversial. He wanted to kick over some preconceived bins of what people thought, and he wanted very desperately for us to turn the discussion around and not talk about how mobile technology can be used or will be used to benefit the Afghans, but how mobile technology can be used, will be used, could be used to benefit the United States. So when we talk about what is the U.S. role in Afghanistan, we did not send hundreds of thousands of armed individuals to Afghanistan purely for the benefit of the Afghans. We have a stake. And how are we going to achieve that stake? So I'd like this panel to focus a little bit more on. Let's talk about who's on the panel. Adam Kaplan, media advisor and senior field advisor with USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives, an amazing list of places where he has actually physically done things on the ground, so a wealth of knowledge there. Ivan Siegel, the executive director of Global Voices. If you read his bio, you ought to be amazed by the fact that this is someone who doesn't just talk about the value of user-generated content and who doesn't think that the only way you can use the internet is just to, you know, blog about Britney Spears, but actually getting usable, meaningful, newsworthy user-generated content, which is something a lot of people talk about and a few people do. Dr. David Warner, the CIO of MindTel, and love this title, the Arch Synergist of the Synergy Strike Force. If you wanted to do something called humanitarian intelligence in a strongly Muslim-held country and what you sought to gain was terabytes of information from people, what would you need? Evidently, the answer is beer, so the beer for data program, which has got to be an interesting discussion generator. To my left, Vikram Singh, senior defense advisor to Ambassador Holbrook, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and talk to us a little bit about U.S. objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and finally, Mr. Jake Schaffner, the longest title on the panel, the senior advisor for science and technology and the directorate of cyber information operations and strategic studies in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. Comments, if you saw my page here, they're all been crossed out and things thrown out, and I'm trying to put stuff more together that's applicable to this venue. I am not going to talk about what's in this for the U.S., okay? Coming from where I am in the Department of Defense, our office looks at a couple of things related to this general topic. I'm an information operations specialist. For those who are not clued into military doctrine, information operations is a general disciplinary field, multidisciplinary, where we're interested to keep it short in what people know, how they found it out, what algorithms they used to decide what it is that they think they know, how they move data back and forth and how we can influence that process. So I'm interested in everything from sensor systems that generate raw data to people to decision-making processes in leadership teams to how you get the message out to how I can get in there and manipulate it. So I'm interested in both offense and defense aspects of that. From there, moving into the context of this discussion, DOD inherently looks at what's happening with internet and telephony growth, radio growth, communications growth in Afghanistan, and we inherently look at it with a duality, okay? I want to lead with the positive side of it. We are absolutely committed to doing everything we can that's appropriate for our department to ensure that the communications infrastructure in Afghanistan only becomes more robust and reaches more people, okay? We cannot help but benefit from more people being able to communicate with others and being able to improve their lives through resolution of land disputes, the ability to securely and without corruption move money around and to do all those things. I mean, it just gets better, increasing literacy rates because people get intrigued by what they're able to do with the telephone. These are the kinds of things that the Defense Department is supposed to support and which we in our hearts like to support. On the other hand, we are who we are. We're a combination of people who, well, we're originally created to defend the nation and to do bad things to bad people. We look at how systems get used. In an unfortunate part of the human condition is there is nothing that gets invented for good that you don't find someone else who tries to use it for bad or to the detriment of someone else. To that respect, I want to talk a little bit about networks and about putting these things in. When we talk about putting in the communication systems, you have to concern ourselves with some unfortunate underlying things that tend to escape the interests of a lot of people because to most folks, they're just boring, okay? One of them is network endurance. Once equipment starts going in, you can't consider that to be a one-time investment. There has to be an enduring infrastructure that generates energy for it, the power for it. There has to be an enduring schema by which the equipment is renewed, okay? There has to be an education process that teaches people how to use these things. There has to be some investment by the users of this in the ownership of it because it's going to require resources consistently over time in order to keep it up and in order to allow more and more people to use it. One benefit that Afghanistan has, which is a burden that the U.S. has, is they don't have the legacy infrastructure. They're not all wrapped up in having to convert the old copper landline systems into the wireless communication methodology of the future, and that's a great thing, okay? That's a wonderful thing. But on the other hand, the people, the population in the United States that grew up with copper landline telephones and then gradually moved into fiber, moved into some coaxial RF and wireless networks and all that kind of stuff, you know, that's kind of a subliminal background education we had as we grew up with that stuff. We kind of understand what the inherent flaws and vulnerabilities of those kinds of networks are, and that is a very subtle danger with the proliferation of new systems into Afghanistan or to places like it in the world. There's an awful lot of the population that's going to be handed a phone or buy a phone or however they access these things that will have no inherent grown-up appreciation for the bad things that that device can bring to them, okay? The human engineering of criminals who will try to steal access to their financial accounts, the people who will attempt to subvert electronic voting systems, the people who will try to generate false data for geophysitional information related to what the actual layout of the property and the land is, and all those kinds of things. Once anyone, once any criminal element figures out how they could commoditize access to advanced communication systems, the criminals show up and you cannot dig them out. That's why we have constant alerts to our citizens about phishing scams. That's why we have constant alerts to people about protecting your personal identity information, and that is a thing that is immediately accompanying the injection of advanced technology into Afghanistan into a place where the literacy rate is 22 percent for the males and 11 percent or so for the women, okay? Where is the education scheme that comes along and tells them how to be as sophisticated in their own defense with the use of this stuff as it is to use it to their own benefit, okay? Now, as far as content goes, how you actually use these networks coming in, you know, from where I am in the Pentagon, we see an awful lot of lessons learned is what we tend to call them in DOD, lessons back from the field about things we tried, things that worked, things that did not work, and one of the big screaming, flaming letters in the sky messages that comes back to us is it's not working real well to take U.S. clever ideas of networking and lay them on top of a foreign culture, okay? The way that people use SMS in the United States is not necessarily the same way anybody else wants to use it, okay? So walking in with some schema that we found in the U.S. about how to do things is not necessarily map directly over to that. The cultural context there is that people will take the device and based upon how they grew up and how they interacted with the people around them is how they're going to decide to use the device that you give them, okay? I mean they will start off in their own culture using it culturally appropriately, okay? So to kind of wrap up my spiel here, you know, DOD is interested in the proliferation of the network in the system. It supports us. It supports our operations in the field. It supports our ability to strengthen the government of Afghanistan and allow them to fight the insurgents off, and you can enumerate a long list of ways as to how it does that kind of thing. It does, however, bring burdens with it. There is going to be a constant requirement for financial investment over time to keep that network up. It's going to be a constant requirement to educate and train people in order how to use it properly, and in particular, we need to start thinking right now about security of things, security of the records, security of financial transactions, security of the identity of people who are using things when they phone in, because if you don't pay attention to the security at the very beginning of it, I can tell you, having been on the offensive side of this, it's very easy to break a system at the beginning and keep it broken if you're trying to overlay security on later, okay? Security from the onset is the way that this needs to go so that it can benefit people and keep them secure in their persons, okay? I think that's all I want to say at this point. I'll be, of course, subject to questions. I think before we take any questions, I was reminded recently about how important it is for defense officials and other State Department-type officials to get along and cooperate. So I'm going to let Vikram speak on behalf of Ambassador Holbrook's office, and then we'll take some questions and talk to the rest of you. Unfortunately, and I hope this isn't viewed as part of the overall sinister plot of some sort, but I am detailed from Secretary Gates over to Ambassador Holbrook, so technically I guess you could see this as the expansion of military and Colonel, I mean, we're really, we're not setting the right example, we're going to need Adam to be the real credible voice of civilian leadership in this deal. Good guy. The good guy, is that what you said? Listen, I'm not going to, I'm not going to have a spiel for you guys, I'm going to have basically a very simple set of ideas and a whole bunch, not a whole bunch, and a couple of fairly discreet questions. The simple set of ideas is this, many of you have probably heard me talk about our strategy before with regards to communications in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The core sort of pillar is expanding human communications capacity. We, the United States, believe that the more the people of the country can communicate for their own purposes effectively with one another, the more they can build up networks, the better off we will be overall. And to speak to that, the question of sort of US interest, I mean, the fact is there isn't, there is a very close confluence of Afghan interest overall for the Afghan society and US interest in the region. The idea that there's some sort of dichotomy, that either we're out there fighting bad guys for us, or we're out there helping Afghans for Afghans is a false distinction. Just that that's not the reality, the baseline reality is that what the US is trying to achieve and what is in the interest of the vast majority of the people of Afghanistan and the region are overwhelmingly congruent. And one of those things we believe is improved communications across the board. That means getting access to things like cellular networks in areas where you don't have ready access, or getting access on 24-7 in areas where it's not already, where it's being shut down by under insurgent threats and things like that. So that's my operating premise, more communications, better. That said, opportunity, vulnerability. We've got the duality that I think people have addressed already, that, you know, this is an open system, it's a set of tools, it's things that anyone can use. Interestingly, if you sort of step back and think about how we use it, if I put it in very black and white terms, let's say we're talking good guys and bad guys, because we're talking about counterinsurgency here. I would argue that there's a lot more gray in that, than one might like to say, but for the sake of a mental model, good guys and bad guys, overwhelmingly use these tools in very similar ways. Good guys will use their phones to do, in the most narrow sense, communications, coordination. You can call for help. There are stories in Afghanistan every week of someone who has been murdered at the hands of insurgents in a situation where, you know, it's after 6 p.m., so the cell phone network is down, so they're not able to call anybody, whether that would be the authorities or their brother or whatever. So, you know, coordinating. So on the bad guy's side, they're using the same thing, coordinating, communicating, improving their efficiency, the efficiency of their operations, using the tools in the most basic sense. And then in a broader sense, these tools are used for a whole host of things that might not be what you'd think of if you were thinking of telephones circa 1985. So that is the use of telephones to inform, you know, on the insurgent side, intimidate. You know, night letters can become night SMSs on the part of the government to do things like deliver services more effectively to provide, be that information to farmers, be that about market prices, you know, be that people doing things in collectives with each other where they're sharing vital information. There's a whole host of things, a mobile banking piece that can be done with these tools. But they're kind of similar, they're about informing and enhancing the ability to do what we want to do as human beings, be they on the good side or the bad side. So we find ourselves in a competition, a tool we believe must be used for the betterment of all society that we know can be used to serve our interests, be that as the United States, the government of Afghanistan, that bad guys know can serve their interests. And we're in this overall competition. We often talk about the asymmetric advantages that insurgents have and the sorts of situations we face in southern and eastern Afghanistan. The one asymmetric advantage the authorities have when it comes to communications is the ability to track and monitor things that are going on over communications networks. So criminals are out there trying to use the networks for, you know, trying to get to whatever, be it people's bank account information, be it to plan a tax. The authorities do have the ability to actually see where money is going, much more than if it's just in an envelope or a suitcase or stuffed in someone's shoe. And they have the ability to track whereabouts and other things of people. So there is a little bit of an asymmetric advantage there. But then in the arena of competition, it's a lot harder to say who has the advantage. In the arena of competition, you travel across southern Afghanistan and you grab a cell phone from somebody and they'll have videos of Taliban attacks on NATO forces, almost without exception. These things are passed around constantly. And it's interesting, over here we don't think about it much because they don't have a bandwidth for transmitting these things the way we would think about video sharing, but they do it physically. Things are passed around, SIM card to SIM card, people are copying things off. And so is that an arena in which the Afghan government, civil society, or others should be doing similar things to spread other kinds of messages to the population? Similarly, the turning off of cell phone networks at night, kind of a fact of life at some level because companies are going to do what they have to do. We have Representative Roshan here. I mean, their people and their infrastructure are under real threat. Is that something that the government and its allies should focus on? Figure out a way around that, figure out how do you get a system up in a way that doesn't expose the corporate sector to those threats. Is that where we should prioritize? And so what I'll tell you is that every single piece of today's discussion is connected to countering the insurgency. And countering the insurgency effectively is connected to whether we'll ever realize the full potential of the kinds of ideas that are being discussed today. If we get it going right, it has the potential to be a virtuous cycle where the improvements we make in communication help us bring stability to the country, bringing more stability helps those services expand to more and more people. And I hope that's the direction we're going to go. Everything here from mobile money to SMS alert systems to other things are things that are being invested in by the United States, the international community, by Afghan companies, we're doing it all. My question is to this group, what should our three priorities be? Let's say the money was cut way down and I could do three things in this arena. What would people think I should focus on? Should I focus on the network expansion? Should I focus on the tools that enhance people's lives every day? Should I get agricultural information, mobile banking, those sorts of things? Should I focus on the information piece, education, health? Where would I put my resources in a resource constrained way? Hopefully we will have enough resources to invest heavily in the bulk of the things that are being discussed today. But I feel a little bit like we're sprinkling stuff around. Wildly but not necessarily knowing which will make the biggest difference in the shortest period of time. And for me, impact in a short period of time really matters. That's what will let us get into a virtuous cycle before things get too hard. And people start abandoning some of the initiatives that we're talking about today. So I'll stop there with that first question on prioritization. And one second question, the second question would be, is it feasible for us to compete in the information arena over these new emerging technologies? I mean, are there things we could do that would really work? Be it things that have been tried include little vignettes, the video clips, but video games also, in Iraq we did it. There was a video game of your new police recruit, it's a fairly simple game. But are those things effective? Do we have evidence that they're effective? Do they get used? Or is this an arena where really the only thing that's very effective is inspiring jihadi videos of David and Goliath style, somebody going and blowing up a tank or setting up an IED and armored convoy. We need to think about whether it's worth it to invest in these sorts of things too, not just invest because we can. So I'll end there, thank you. Excellent, okay, in the interest of time we're gonna do a show of hands poll. Instead of the first question, because Vikram said a couple of things that I thought were very interesting. One, Taliban puts video messages on people's phones for the purpose of influencing people's behavior. And he said, would it be appropriate for us or should we be putting positive messages from the government? The government providing information to influence the population. Government provided information. And later he said, is that feasible? And I would add, is that appropriate? So the show of hands poll is, yes or no? Who says yes, the government should provide positive information to people via their cell phones, even if it is, government provided US funded information. Is that appropriate? Just checking. All right, from there we'll go. Would the other people in saying no or were they undecided? We're saying no. No. Okay, here we go. Afghan government. Afghan government, we're not ostensibly with ours. This is not services, we're talking propaganda. Yeah, this is propaganda, isn't it? This is propaganda. Absolutely, we're talking about propaganda to counter other propaganda. That's exactly what we're talking about. And so that was the purpose of the question, is propaganda appropriate to serve our interests or is it off place completely? Well, let's distinguish between information and propaganda. Good phrase, it is positive information. So that's the real, that's the way you should ask the question. Absolutely. Sorry, I would argue that rather than spending money on propaganda or disseminating information, why don't we build capacity and empower the people? Let them do it. You know, I mean, yes, there's good and bad, of course there is. But there are, we all know, more good than bad. It's just that the bad people are equipped and the good people are not equipped. So let's spend the money where we equip good people to do good things. So Shino, what does that mean? Does that mean my first contention was we just, we expand capacity. Yeah, more communications capabilities, the more people in it. Is that what that means? Let them do what they'll do with it? And let whatever message you get from it. Yes, I mean, today's technologies allow us to block bad things. But as we all know, people will find a way around it. But what I'm saying is that when enough good happens, people get up in the morning, they want to go to work and stay at work because they're proud of the work that they're doing. They're getting paid for their job properly. They can use that money to better their lives, to, you know, treat their kids, get a home, get a car, et cetera. They can get a microfinance loan. So that's what we should be investing in, I believe. Adam, as the recently identified only credible source of the U.S. He said it. What do you think? I think we have two interests here. I think we have the immediate interest, which is to be blunt when the war, or to do that which we need to do right now in order to better ourselves moving forward. That may or may not be consistent with what our longer-term objectives are. I agree that there are times when messages that we think are very, very destructive simply need to be countered. Whether we're the ones countering them or the Afghan government is ones countering them, you don't stifle bad information by being quiet. You don't stifle bad information by putting other information, good information out there, and being more responsive. And that's one of the problems that we're presently facing with the Afghan government. Their ability to communicate on issues that are critical to the Afghan public is much, much slower and much less sophisticated than the Taliban's ability to communicate on those issues. We have a lot of efforts underway in Afghanistan to try to rectify that. Some of them in the center, some of them in the provinces and the districts, these are efforts that are ongoing. Afghans, however, are very, very sophisticated consumers of information. Like us, they triangulate. They take a little piece from here, a little piece from there, a little piece from somewhere else, and they find a truth that works for them that is relevant to their local condition and say, that works for me. The more to which the information that we're putting out can be consistent with the reality that is present for local populations, the more resonance we're going to have with those populations. If it's just information being beamed in from Kabul, they aren't going to believe it. It's going to have no relevance for them. So what we're struck with is these two competing interests. We want to be able to influence people in the immediate and try to get them to not align themselves with the insurgency. At the same time, we also want to be able to build their capacity so that they have more sophisticated tools in order to create and evaluate information that's relevant and valuable to them and create the mechanism for the creation of that information, local radio stations, local television stations, local sources of information that, for the most part, we've been able to do in the large urban centers, but we've been challenged to do at the local level with any kind of resonance. I don't know whether I'm making a coherent argument here or not, but it strikes me that we're at the present state of play in Afghanistan, we have to do both. And it's not enough to say, well, which is more important? We have to engage in both spaces. We have to improve the capacity of our Afghan government counterparts to communicate responsibly, honorably, consistently, transparently with the Afghan people. At the same time, we need to build the capacity of Afghan people and systems to challenge those government officials and hold them accountable for their positions. It is both the software side, the information, and the hardware side, the systems that allow that information to be transferred that we need to engage in. I didn't put it very well. But I'm sure I can find something to say. I think just listening to Vikram talk about how technology can be used for good or bad, it makes me want to reinforce, again, a fairly simple idea. The competition in Afghanistan is, the relationship of technology and extremism and the competition in the Afghan context is mostly tactical. So when the Taliban are blowing up cell phone towers, they aren't doing it because they have a fundamental opposition to the idea of a cell phone. They're doing it as a tactical response in a conflict in a local level. And it may be true that the Taliban don't want to see images on television, but that's a different issue, right? The idea that if their goal politically is to recapture and reassert their authority as a government in Afghanistan, they are going to use technology tools in the same way that an existing government will use it, right? Towards the end of garnering support, influence, and authority. And there should be no surprise there. But the competition in this regard is technology is a tactical response. The competition is about politics, violence, war. And I think it's very helpful for us to separate these issues. So extremism, in some ways, this is the wrong language for us when we're talking about this issue. Extremism is a deviation from a norm, right? In terms of an empirical understanding of what extreme is, we establish a norm and then we say if your average Afghan in the south has an image of a Taliban attack on an American force and considers that to be in fields somehow aligned with that, I think that we could call that the norm, not the extreme. And it's important because it tells us a little bit about who we're talking about. If we say it's an extreme position, we're saying that's an other. We're saying that's somebody we can't talk to, which is not what the U.S. counterinsurgency policy is all about if I understand it correctly. So that language creates a mindset that's not helpful for us. One last point, and I think that will open it up to others. I think in some ways the technology goals, the information goals, and the communications goals for Afghanistan, as my colleague here, Doctor? Colonel? Jake. As Jake so rightly emphasized, have a lot to do with long-term investments in infrastructure that is going to be there for a long time and that is going to be a general underpinning of a modern, hopefully a modern nation state. The short-term strategic and tactical goals of the United States over the next 18 months may not well align with those things, but I think that we should be focusing our investment from the outside, on the Afghan side, in these long-term questions. And I am much more concerned to see that we get the basics right and build it properly because there may be a mobile social network in Afghanistan that helps a specific issue at a specific time, at a specific place. And there's probably going to be dozens of them responding to specific issues. But whether we're going to see a particular tool used that's going to affect or change the dynamic on the ground as regards to this political relationship, this political context that we've articulated, that we've identified, that the short-term's identified, is quite unlikely. And I think we should focus on the basics. And the basics in the regard of the political competition are exactly what Adam expressed, which is an Afghan government that does what it says it can do, says it transparently, tries to win over its population, provides good, honest information, and tries to be responsive to the people. It's been entitled to rule in government. I'd like to comment on that. And I think this observation that you just made about extremism as a deviation from a norm kind of crystallized a thought in my head. You know, we've been talking, well to me it strikes me that we've been talking so far this morning as if we can inject technology or specific means into the Afghan society and that somehow the Afghan society won't really change and it will just somehow gain benefit and will proceed on into the future just sort of incorporating these things that we provided and it won't somehow change the character of it. We're actually in the process, whether we intend it to or not, of changing the norm of the Afghan society. The injection of this technology is not going to allow them to stay the same way that they were, just as it doesn't really allow the United States to stay the same way that it was. I mean we talk a lot about digital natives and digital immigrants and all those kinds of things. There is going to be big change that happens in that nation because of the fact that they no longer lose 30% of their money to being skimmed off in some place. They have direct contact between people that may have been separated by elders in times past. There will be more people that will be educated. So the changes begin just by the simple introduction of this stuff. And you know, I have a personal fear that we don't have not sat down and in a discussion. We're going to go to David and then we're going to go to the internet. While we're doing that, I'm all over in your thoughts. If we have fundamentally changed Afghan society with the activities of the last nine years, does that bring with it a responsibility for something that we must do as a result of the change that we imposed? I can distinguish myself from not representing any legitimate infrastructure or institution. I sort of took an tie-dye-worried long hair here. I am a medical doctor. It's part of the doctorate. I also have a PhD in neuroscience. It makes me dangerously overeducated. People like to communicate. And the mobile phone system communications in general is an absolute essential for countering extremism and counterinsurgency. From a public health perspective, the insurgency is a public health issue. And it actually allows us to think about it in a different way to look at how do we intervene with information to alter outcomes. And it turns out that since we're not actually at war with the people in Afghanistan, there are a few well-armed thugs and a lot of criminals and some really bad guys that need to be whacked. If you're not going to kill them all, as I say to my DoD buddies, then we actually need another way to operate. And my perspective was when we first started working on these projects, I've been working civil communications for about a decade. And my perspective is carpet-bomb them with internet nodes because you can't oppress people that can communicate. And if we make the assumption that in general, they're good people and we have generally, you know, moms want to have their kids raised, they don't want to die in childbirth, people want to have jobs, they want to have access, they will find a way to do this. And we just need to provide some substrate. In 2,000 small implementations of our policy, a lesson learned is the thing I can tell you unequivocally is adding the sludge of bureaucracy to the fog of boar is no way to win the peace. But I'm not bitter, hostile maybe. We provided communications, communications substrates. So in Jalalabad, in Nangar province, we have Nangar University, which is aka al-Qaeda-U. Our group actually provided some of the first internet connectivity and provided some of the first technology. Well, we kind of now have very good friends and got a very good understanding of how the Afghans are adapted. And we began a sustained social engagement. Nazis go in, short cycles come out. I mean, these are people that have 100-year blood feuds. And so a sustained social engagement to exploit the communications and to optimize sort of public use of things like cell phones and mobile phones and the internet, that becomes things worthy of discussion and worthy to think about. One note here, I am amazed at the cell phone infrastructure in Afghanistan. I have better cell phone coverage in my guest house in Jalalabad than I do in my house in San Diego. That's something to do with population density. But the internet is lacking. Now we have people that can talk to each other and we can't provide the communications of the content into this. And as smartphones get better and more mapping is happening, I mean, it's quite an amazing process. And to support those kind of things, I'm a big believer if you want to do, if you want to understand something, go out and try it. And, you know, it's good to have think tanks and cubicles and that sort of thing, but it turns out the real world is a very good teacher. And sort of taking over this guest house in Jalalabad, the first thing we did is I talked to the U.S. D.I. folks into providing some communications and out of the fastest unblocked internet in the country. And during the elections... I've been there. Download all my big files. I wasn't going to implicate you, but yes... Is this the Fab Lab project? That's a subset of it. It's actually the Taj and just a comment because it was mentioned and not by me, the beer for data program, that is for expats. I put a wireless internet cafe up in the bar and I put a one terabyte drive on the bar and said, share any file of data, and I'll buy you a beer. That's probably one of the most cost-effective programs ever in the history of intelligence gathering. I have about a terabyte and a half of shareable information and imagery. And back to the cell phones last summer when the election was leading up to the election because we had this fat internet pipe and we have no adult supervision. We're in a memo-free environment. We actually had a front-line SMS server and we were able to actually bridge between the internet and the cell phones and because of the beer for data program, we had actually had all the election monitoring information. I had gotten imagery of one meter data of all of the polling sites in eastern Afghanistan and we did a little shadow operation. Not your shadow operations, but sort of ours. I guess it was between snowboarding and waterboarding. Sorry, my bad. Reverence really wasn't my strong point. One more finding is that when we insert communications and when we're optimizing, first of all, it's part of a system. There's a technology system of which the cell phones are a component of the system and there are human networks. What we've identified and what we've found is as we provide, we don't just throw comms out and go, well, see how it works because that doesn't go well. We know that historically. We actually set up programs and we teach Afghans and then they teach themselves that I can show you historically about how we've actually, I mean, we now have over 59 spontaneous internet nodes that are sort of taking bandwidth from us and popping up around the city, sharing their internet, made by the locals and they're bridging back to the cell phones and how that adds to this sort of a cruel of information because nobody talks to each other. The military doesn't talk to anybody. NGOs have their own issues and the Afghans can't talk because they don't have things. So we've been sort of creating this bucket and it's an amazing process to watch all of the information come together and watch the ability for the Afghans to take that information and come up with new ideas. I put a well, personally put a well in a village that's near our guest house and I've been a big believer and make friends with their neighbors because that's our security. I got the well started. I saw it was broken on a Friday. I had an engineer out, an Afghan engineer out on the Sunday. The well was started by the following Tuesday. I had to leave to come back to the States. I know because I've been there a lot that you turn your back and the playground sort of goes into disruption. One of the Afghans that we trained to use this social media, took images on a cell phone, came back, uploaded them up on YouTube and I have geo-referenced reconstruction, real-time information. Cell phones are sort of a mill speak thing. Cell phones actually allow us to do a whole new kind of humanitarian sensing. If you're going to whack the bad guy, they don't have all the tech to do that, but nobody knows how to help the good guy and nobody knows how to help the citizens and if you really want to counterinsurgency and you want to sort of stop extremism, lead by example, and create a mechanism so minds can connect with minds. Right now we've got a program in Jalalbad where students on the wireless network that's being provided are actually having Facebook sharing with students in San Diego. And so we can do a virtual surge without risking any American lives going over there and we watch the exchange and I have to say that learning has happened on both sides. So carpet bomb with comms. Save the willing first. And that's the model. There's risk. There's always risk. It's a war zone. That's a risky place. But if we can sort of focus on what we can do and not focus on what might be bad or might go wrong and do small iterative steps and move quickly, agile and adaptive, we can probably make this work. One final thing on the bear for data program. It's like, yes, congressmen, I look forward to addressing the committee and no taxpayer dollars spent on alcohol in Islamic country. Thank you. What's the buzz? Well, there's one interesting comment that I think sums up the way this panel is going. They said, now we're getting past the skittles and the sunshine discussion to move to the guts and the complexities. And I think part of the worry that we're hearing out in the online discussion is, you know, by using propaganda or whatever version of that you want to call it, are we calling into question the legitimacy of the Afghan government, the very government that we've seen in the first panel, everyone just wants to get access to and believe in. I think that's a serious question. You know, I just throw out, if I could go back to my first question. I mean, what we just heard is, phones are great, they're part of the system, but you know, the internet's not there. To me, the practical implication of that is okay. Do I devote, do I sit down with all the cell phone providers and others and do I say, let's go 3G, how do we, let's invest in that rapidly? Is that, you can't just, the problem is you can't just say, let's do more of this, let's do everything. We have to figure out what to focus on. So potentially, that should be the next area of focus. So I really do want, I really would like to challenge everybody here to, you know, to propose what the Afghan government and its international allies supporting it, which are throwing in billions of dollars, should be focused on in this arena. And let's not, not to say that can't do lots and lots of things, but what should we focus on? So should I be doing, should I say, hey, let's move, let's push 3G? Finish the broadband loop. You know, our friend over here from UNICEF has been raising his own burden. I think in direct response to that, I think that if you add 3G in, who's going to use that? What phones are they going to use it with? And I think the immediate response should be that there's a spectrum of things that need to be invested in and 3G should certainly be invested in. I do my latest project in Zambia. Every single cell tower has edge on it. Does anyone use that edge other than a few people with Android phones walk around? No. So what we're using is SMS. Why? Everyone has SMS. We didn't choose that, like, willy-nilly, we chose that strategically because every single person has access to that who owns a phone. Now, that being said, then you take the subset of people who can read or technically literate. But even that, if you target the right audiences with it, if you say we're going to develop programs for people who have phones and can use them and leverage those programs to help the rest of the communities, you can take what's already existing and really expand the power and the reach of the systems that exist. And I think that's one of the things we've learned as well in our projects is it's not about creating new things or bringing in new technologies. It's about looking at what's there, I mean, where can mobile technologies advance and push things forward and investing at those points? There's leverage points that can get you huge returns. And I think that a strategic mindset around that is really important and essential to this. Consistently, we've found along the issues of propaganda and accountability, the best propaganda is having a system that works and it's accountable. Hands down. I've worked in so many clinics and albeit this is not a conflict zone. These countries are generally very peaceful and we haven't been working in the last few years. However, there are still issues with corruption. There's a lot of issues with accountability and transparency. And what we've found is that people won't be collecting blood samples for infants from age to age because they've never gotten a result back ever from the lab, ever. So they just stop doing it. The second they get that result back by SMS, their eyes open up. They're like, oh, we'll start doing this again. That matters so much more than any sort of thing that we can say or any sort of video we can promote. Deliver. Deliver. That people can interact with and that they really can take to heart and use. And it's useful to them just as their immediate needs. And so I guess that's the... And that won't cost you a billion dollars. No. Well, it'll cost him a billion. Well, it won't. That's what's going to cost a lot less. I like this idea of... I'm sorry I'm going to be dominating. I have to run out of here in about ten minutes. So I'm going to try to pick as much wisdom as I can out of this collective right now. I like the idea of leverage points. James Everhard is back there. You know, in Pakistan, we worked with them to start something that creates basically cell phone-based communities. Let's say... Internet's not there, but people all use SMS. So why not do something Twitter-like and something that can let people build communities and reach out to large numbers of people on issues of common interest easily with the phone, with the tools they know and use. And so we are looking... I think a lot of people are looking at a lot of those things, but maybe this idea of leverage points is the way to focus. What are those things that are on the cusp? We're a little boost. I think mobile banking is potentially one of those, but we're a little boost, a little turn that gets you to the point that a credible system starts, and then that sparks a major transformation. Those would be useful to identify. So what are some of those? You mentioned target audiences, and it's interesting that the not military side person said target audiences, so I'm going to jump on that just a little bit. We call them also users. It's a predator-free targeting. When we talk about the expansion of cell phones to generally literate, generally financially able people on the margin how much of the preaching to the converted or saving those who want to be saved are we doing versus getting at the most at risk? We talk about people being drawn into an extremist movement. They are less likely to be literate, less likely to have access to means, less likely to have all these other sorts of things. So as we continue to invest in expanding mobile phone technology, are we missing the segment of the population that is most at risk of being drawn into an extremist movement? And if so, how do we get at those guys? How do we get at the guys who are that far away from, not the ones who just want a little bit of good information and weren't probably going to be extremist to start with? But the ones who are potential extremists, how do we get at those guys? Because they are the ones, A, who are less likely to be able to read it, and B, are less likely to be able to access it. Prioritize access to them. I think that's easy to say how to do. Difficult. I mean, just very quickly on this one. Canada's certainty is strategic communications. You can't kill your way to victory. You just can't. Afghans have to believe that they are better off living in the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Emirates under the Taliban. Does mobile telephony matter in that fight? Well, I'm really interested in... I think it's quite simple. Maybe I'm quite simple. I'm interested in what the Taliban don't like. So, actually, I've been in chess, me not having to grow a beard, kites, women not wearing burqas. It's quite an interesting kind of thing. They don't like mobile telephony as well. And it's really useful to them. It is their way of communicating. It is their battlefield communication system. It is also how they can set off IEDs without having to be there. Yet, despite the fact that it is of utility to them, they decide not to allow it. So, very simply, and it's the infrastructure they don't like. They don't like it. And that tells me that it is worth pursuing in some way. Now, it's used as a propaganda tool. Mobile telephony for propaganda. I don't know. I mean, the audience here is pistol third-world farmers. They're the ones who pick up guns and fire. Not here. He didn't mean here. Yeah, they're not far. Well, that's just some of you. Those are the people in the back. Mobile telephony is a sort of... is a vehicle to propagandize them. They don't want to work propaganda. They're doing it. This is a war. It's nicer than guns. It's got...it should be used. That doesn't mean you lie, because how can propaganda has been used, too, for about 30 years? They can spot it. I'll give you one example. It's not a direct counter-insurgency thing we did, but it has a clear counter-insurgency outcome. They like these Bluetooth films. Everyone loves these Bluetooth videos. We made a Bluetooth video showing a bunch of police recruits having a final time. Firing off 50 cows. Just having a great time. We've got 300 recruits out of it. The counter-insurgency thing doesn't have to be directly countering... What's the quality of those recruits? What's the quality of those recruits? That's a question about the police, generally. I just wanted to come and shoot. It's better than the ones who just wanted to come to get hold of the opium. Maybe it can be trained. Okay, you hung on with us in the back. Who in the back got angry enough that they must be hurt? Okay, nobody in the back, raise your hand. Go ahead, sir. There's such a wide group of people looking mostly at the social networking layer. And I'll throw out a couple points that I'd like some feedback on, to see if you think this is real-world... Use the mic because it's webcast. Or using the term ground truth. Is that better? So, from what I've been told, the reason why the Taliban doesn't like the wireless systems up at night is because they can reduce our communication capacity and force us to radios, which they can then track on Bearcat scanners. Since everybody moves at night there, that seems to be a relevant point that's been shared with me. I'd like to know if you guys think that's real data. The first thing is, we've talked a lot about personal use of internet tools, but my understanding is there's some pretty substantial choke points at network operations center level and just the size of the pipes in Afghanistan. We're spending an awful lot of money out of the U.S. budget for satellite communications and backhaul costs and capabilities are very, very high and out of proportion to a lot of things that have been discussed here. So, Mr. Singh, you asked for a simple thing to focus on. I think the hardening of the knock and expansion of the base network in Afghanistan would support everything that we're talking about here. They need reliable systems that function. And I think, you know, your point about the Taliban being anti-mobile phone technology because they can follow communications on Bearcat scanners, it's important to note that, who that affects the most. You know, as a military guy in Afghanistan, we have sufficient redundancy of secure communications that nobody's tracking us on a Bearcat scanner. Who are they tracking? They're tracking aid organizations, long-tier organizations, NGOs. People out there doing good for the population is who they are tracking. Faheem Hashemi, Hudson Institute. I'm a full right-filler from Afghanistan. I would like to thank all of the panelists for their nice comments about the effectiveness of mobile in Afghanistan and welcome Afghan guests. My question is, as you discussed, indeed mobile phone has double effect, positive and negative. It helps people. On the other hand, it helps insurgency. For me, the only reason that mobile phone helps insurgency in Afghanistan is the way that it makes central government to control it as I experienced from last year that I come. It has been a year that I'm out of Afghanistan. I'm speaking from my last year experience that it is a distribution of unregistered SIM cards, which on the one hand makes the mobile stations or mobile companies to control it because they don't have registration. On the other hand, it hinders central government to track voice or monitor the talks of people who use cell phones. I wonder if anything has been done so far about this. I need your comment. Thank you. All cell phone users require registration and we pay all our agents an extra bonus in order to get registration done. Plus, we're controlled by the Afghan Ministry of Communications where we now have to produce a record of each cell phone that's owned. I don't think that's true for all the providers, though. You can still buy a $1.50 SIM card in any province. That works, that doesn't get. I know the Rochon ones do get shut off. I can only speak for Rochon. I'd like to ask you a question because we said we're going to gather a room full of experts and I believe that you're one. You are in a unique position because of being here as a Fulbright scholar to tell us from your perspective what is the difference in the way that they use mobile technology between Afghans and Americans. What's the biggest difference between the two? I'm sorry to put you on the spot and you want to think I'll take another question and come back to you. I think you can provide something that a lot of other people in the room can only speculate about. Well, it's a tough question to answer because we need to make a thorough comparison between Afghan and American culture and how culturally they use it. In general, I see some community about the use of mobile in Afghanistan and U.S. people use mobile for their business purpose in Afghanistan. They communicate with their business partners and second, they use it to communicate with their family members and their friends, which is common here. And sometimes maybe people use it just for excessive talk. That is just a start. No matter where you are, you receive a call and say, I just want to say hi to you. Okay. And I think that is kind of not common here. So in some cases, as we mentioned about the insurgency, a cell phone is used to threaten people and distribute nightletters and also even ask some of the people who work for some international organization and some type of positions to leave their job or something, which is mostly, I have heard, but I don't have any solid proof for that so I cannot 100% comment on that. That's what I have heard. These are the ways that it's commonly used. I hope I have given a clear image of that. Yes, sir. Thank you. And I appreciate that. Please. I think, I mean, your question is very interesting and, you know, if you go back to the history of the United States and the telephone, in 1880, you were not supposed to use the telephone in the U.S. to talk to friends. AT&T, or Mar-Bell, used to warn its subscribers to keep off the phone in case urgent business calls would come in. But by 1920, they started marketing this whole idea of, hey, pick up the phone and call your friends because they started charging per minute. You know, sir, there was a... Now, I think your question is very interesting and we've got a really interesting answer from our friend here, but we have to understand that this is not set in stone technology. Even if you look at markets like the U.S., go back 10 years, nobody was using the phone to send email or SMS, for that matter, in the U.S. In India, everyone was using the phone to give missed calls because it was free until the point that someone picked up the phone on the other side. So there's all these interesting evolutions. There's user innovation that takes place, which makes it very difficult to predict how a citizen, how a user, right, the target audience, will actually take this device and use it for something that they want to do. And it's amazing as to what kinds of creative purposes this technology can be used for. So I think the point that was made earlier that we shouldn't think about imposing a Western idea of the cell phone on an Afghan or a South Asian culture. We need to think about how a South Asian culture or an Afghan would use the cell phone and take that and make it their own. So this is what I think should be the question. Okay, great. Rajan, if you think you have the question that must be the last question of the session. Yes, ma'am. I just have a question for the panel in general. How much of this should be left to the... How much of this should be left to the ISAF coalition and the government of Afghanistan to reverse that order? Or how much should this be left to a private sector in Afghanistan to evolve and develop in terms of what the Afghan culture would want in terms of new technology in general and its culture? Because one of the biggest world bank issues they have is raise revenue. Raise taxable revenue and revenue base. For that, you need a private sector economy that's contributing revenue. Okay. We'll just start on the end and work down. How much of this belongs to the government, private sector, or international assistance forces that we're calling? Well, I think the government should come in on the infrastructure and help support that well. If it's the U.S. government, I think it needs to be as far removed from the public eye as possible. So funding through the Afghan government and infrastructure development, I think private sectors should develop the user-led demand, and that's the only way it'll catch on. That could be through NGOs or private companies. None in a position to speak to. I think it's all about an enabling environment. If you can get rid of the corruption, then, yes, both governments can facilitate and private sector can take the lead. I think you've got to let the private sector do what it can do, obviously. There are places, though, in Afghanistan where the private sector won't go. And when you get that situation, then I think you have to consider supporting it. And it will be U.S. government support, whether or not there's an Afghan veneer on it. Probably should be. But it's a question of filling the gaps. Adam? I just reiterate when my colleague Ivan said technology is a tactic. So for me, hearing that Taliban don't like mobile technology, for me, hearing that the comment that Taliban do not like mobile technology is saying that Taliban don't like to communicate or don't like communication. I really actually wish that Ivan was here again because I really think that his points he made were actually not picked up by the vast majority of panelists after he made those points. And I think they were very, very valid. I think we have to look at this in terms of the competition being political and then looking at the technology being testable. I see there as being roles for all three. It's not that we can... I think I would agree with my British colleague that we have to figure out where our best comparative advantages are. There's things that the U.S. government could do that it just makes more sense for the market to take on. There's things that the Afghans should really take on for themselves that they can't that we need to do for them right now. But there's... Ideally, the objective is that we back ourselves out. We have an Afghan government that's able to govern for itself and with the collaboration of its people and a place where the market can provide revenue and provide livelihoods. We are inextricably a piece of that right now to pretend that we aren't going to be in the short term that we can envision when we might be able to back out of that. I think at this point has some myopia attached to it. We need to proceed. Yeah, I'd like to echo a lot of what Adam said. I mean, we're there now. We're a part of the environment and we have a substantial amount of resources, but we don't have unique viewpoints on this. So it's three parties. It's an interaction. And it's a fairly complex dance for a period of time. I think we need to be talking a lot about, though, people communicate for reasons. They interrupt communications for tactical, fairly narrow reasons. And I think what we need to ask is the impact of affording this kind of communications to people, it has profound effects. It upsets relationships. It makes new relationships. It causes a lot of different things to happen. And we've had an awful lot of what I consider, now this is very much my personal opinion, tactical discourse, tactically focused discourse this morning. We're trying to have some immediate effects on things, but we have to think about in the long run, you know, when we're gone or substantially out of there, the ability to communicate is a fact that will not be forgotten in that society. It will have some form of long-term impact. We need to be thinking about that. Can I add anything? Yeah, please. Let's just look at the statistics today as they stand. There's been over $1.2 billion that's invested in Afghanistan for telecommunications privately. The Ministry of Communications has played a very, very important role and the telecom regulator as well in creating that enabling environment to allow this kind of private sector investment to come in. 60,000 jobs have been directly or indirectly created in the market. Now, when it comes specifically to the kinds of applications of value-added services that we're talking about here, my recent conversations with mobile phone companies, what they see right now is about 1% or 2% of their total revenues coming from value-added services, so non-voice, non-telephony services. They see this going to about 10% in the next few years. That means that just in revenue terms, if you go very conservative, if you're talking about 30 million extra dollars in revenues to these mobile phone companies, so obviously all of this has a great impact on the downstream, because what we're also beginning to see now is the growth of the IT sector within Afghanistan, a private IT sector that exists outside the government that is ready and willing to pick up some of this slack in the market and respond to this demand. So certainly the private sector has a critical role and should be the one leading the infrastructure deployments when it comes to mobile telephony, as they have been doing. They're supporting this. Not many of you may know that the government of Afghanistan collects something like a universal service fee similar to what you all pay on your phone bills, and that they have very, very aggressive plans to spend this money as well, building on the demand side of the market. So this could be one opportunity to develop some of that user base that is latent currently. But then of course the donor agencies also have some role to play here. Now what role that is is something that the government needs to think about and that we need to work together in a partnership to figure out all together. So I don't think it's an either-or situation. It's certainly a partnership echoing the comments made before. But again, the intention is to push as far as possible Afghan business, the Afghan government, in getting their decisions down to the field and getting them to deploy these networks and services. So that's what should probably happen. And I think that's a lot of what we're going to talk about in the final three. That's a lot of where this next panel's going and so to turn it over to Sheldon. Thank you very much. Matt is traveling, so we're going to let him go. And I don't want everybody to take a stand up. We're going to have just a don't leave the room. We're just going to take a stretch break here. And we're going to get right into the last panel because I want to make sure we hit this big, the big issues that we've started to talk about before the break.