A brilliant opportunity!

I realized today what a fantastic opportunity Afghanistan is for eco-warriors and people who hate authoritarianism!

I've talked about what Afghanistan needs before. In order to have any real options, the people of Afghanistan need reliable access to electrical power. Without that, they can't really develop any industry (whether they want to or not; meaning, without electrical power, even if they WANT industry, they can't develop it). Without industry, they cannot increase their per capita annual income, and without increased income, the country won't have an increased tax base from which to draw for public works. It all kind of grows together.

But! if you're interested, the system could be jump-started, so to speak. Granted the Coalition forces are still working hard to provide physical security, which is pretty important for developing the nation any further, but after all, the Coalition forces are still here, so there's that.

Jump start Afghanistan by spending lots of money (and here I'm speaking to eco-warriors and clean-energy advocates) putting wind-power-farms and solar power facilities into place! Ask the US to pony up the money to put the power transmission capability into place concurrently with the development of the wind & Solar facilities, and suddenly (assuming that the Taliban can be successfully dealt with, which is a reasonable assumption if we continue our current troop levels) Afghanistan could have moderately inexpensive electrical power!

All it would take (heh) is for some clean-energy company to front the equipment and installation, and the US to front the installation of power transmission infrastructure. Oh, and of course, some of the clean-energy engineers would probably need to commit to spending several years living in Afghanistan, training locals and managing the maintenance and development of this new infrastructure. But at the end of five or ten years, you could have a country with the OPTION of entering the 20th century, if they so chose.

I wonder why no clean-energy or green-friendly companies or organizations are proposing this now?