Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan,
firmly recognizes the importance of information and communication
technologies to achieve development. Today Afghanistan has numerous
challenges to reconstruct the nation and to establish stability, such as
to reform and to reorganize national institutions, to create an enabling
environment for business, to fight against poverty, to disarm and
reintegrate demobilized combatants. In all these and other efforts,
Afghanistan considers that ICTs play an essential role. It underlines
that, since the birth of the new government, there has been progress
both in public and in private sector.
For example, the two telephone operators in the country have
increased substantially their investment and, with the acceleration,
more Afghan citizens have access to telephone lines. Afghanistan also
developed infrastructure projects to connect its provinces and
districts. It believes that isolated and least developed countries need
more support, particularly in four key areas : support to the
development of appropriate policy and legal frameworks to help private
and public sector partnership; long distance and rural ICT
infrastructure development; support in building local capacities,
applications and transference of knowledge; support to network security,
its protection against cyber attacks and crime abuse and, at the same
time, support of the freedom and of the privacy of access to
information.
