My Plan for Afghanistan: End the War by Giving Every Family a Cell Phone

The Afghanistan conflict has been going on for nearly 10 years now, and we now hear that Osama bin Laden has finally been killed. According to the website http://costofwar.com, the Afghanistan war has cost over $400 billion dollars. We unfortunately also spent nearly $800 billion on the Iraq war, a war we now know was based on faulty intelligence — one of the biggest military blunders of all history...

Looking back at our own revolution and formation of our democracy, it can easily be argued that the prevalence of the printed word and the easing of control of newspapers was key to getting the thirteen colonies on the same page with a spirit for independence. Without the anonymous writings of Benjamin Franklin and the _Common Sense_ of Thomas Paine, the uprising of early American patriots probably would not have occurred, at least not when it did.

We just witnessed an "Arab Spring" of peaceful uprisings in multiple countries made possible by the printing press of today: new communication technologies like the cell phone, Internet, and messaging tools like Twitter and Facebook. The substantial nonviolence of these uprisings combined with the absence of the U.S. contributed to their success. More was accomplished in a matter of weeks by local revolutionaries than our advanced military could do in ten years with $1200 billion. The activation energy was not just being able to carry on a mobile phone conversation. More important is the ability to send one text message to hundreds or thousands of followers, or post a page on Facebook so millions of people could read it...

There are about eight million families in Afghanistan, based on a quick check with the <[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/af.html>]. If we gave every family a $50 cellphone, we would spend about $400 million dollars. Not too much when we recall that we spend $2 billion per week for military engagement. <[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=expert-systems-fight-poverty>] cellphones can help lift people out of a cycle of unending poverty. Buying a cell phone for every family and installing the necessary cell-towers to provide coverage in urban areas would probably cost about $1 billion — what we spend for only about four days of military engagement today. Plus, they can't shoot us with a cell phone...

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