INTL Kabul Suffers Blackout After Taliban Fails to Pay Power Bill

Millwright

Knuckle Dragger
_______________
At least 16 Afghan provinces including Kabul province, which contains the nation’s capital city of Kabul, suffered electricity blackouts on Thursday, Afghanistan’s online news service Khaama Press reported.

Afghanistan’s state power monopoly, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), issued a statement on January 12 confirming “a shortage of electricity and blackout in 16 provinces including the Afghan capital Kabul.”

DABS attempted to blame the power outages on Afghanistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, which it said had “decreased” the amount of electricity it usually supplies to Afghanistan by “60 percent” in recent days. Afghanistan’s state-run power company neglected to mention on Tuesday that the Taliban, which seized control of Afghanistan’s government on August 15, 2021, has failed to pay bills owed to its electricity suppliers, including those in Uzbekistan, since coming to power. Afghanistan does not have its own national power grid and thus relies on foreign imports for roughly 78 percent of its electricity supply.

“Electricity imports from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan account for half of Afghanistan’s power consumption nationwide, with Iran providing additional supplies to the country’s west,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on October 3, 2021.
“Domestic production, mostly at hydropower stations, has been affected by this year’s drought,” the business-focused newspaper noted of Afghanistan’s power supply at the time.

“Afghanistan usually pays $20 million to $25 million a month in total to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran and now unpaid bills stand at $62 million,” Safiullah Ahmadzai, then-acting C.E.O. of DABS, told Bloomberg on October 6, 2021.

Afghanistan’s neighbors could cut their power supplies to Kabul “any day they want,” Ahmadzai said, foreshadowing the capital’s current electricity blackout.

The DABS C.E.O. said at the time he had recently asked the United Nations (U.N.) for assistance in paying Afghanistan’s overdue power bills but had not received a response.

“We’ve asked the UNAMA in Kabul to assist the people of Afghanistan to pay the country’s power suppliers as part of their humanitarian aid,” Ahmadzai told Bloomberg by phone on October 6, 2021. He referred to “UNAMA,” or the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Just 38 percent of Afghanistan’s population of 38 million have access to electricity under normal circumstances. The Taliban’s seizure of power last August prompted an ongoing period of political instability in Afghanistan that has affected its power situation.
The country was already beleaguered by decades of war and relied almost entirely on foreign sources — such as the United Nations and the U.S., which backed its previous government in Kabul from 2001 through August 15, 2021 — for financial support.

“At the time of the Taliban takeover, DABS had some $40 million in cash in its accounts,” WSJ recalled on Ocotber 3, 2021.
“The Taliban, starved of funds because of international sanctions, haven’t approved the use of that money to pay invoices from power suppliers,” the newspaper revealed.

“DABS liabilities have since grown to more than $90 million and are rising,” Ahmadzai told WSJ at the time.
“Collection from customers, meanwhile, shrunk by 74 percent last month, with only $8.9 million in revenue since Aug. 15,” the newspaper reported, citing DABS officials.

 

vector7

Dot Collector
They like the Western infrastructure but now have the Western problems of paying the bills. HaHa. Back to shitting in the street and goat turd candles.
Sounds like Democrat run areas waiting on someone else to pay their bills.

E9v2WZuWEAEgC3G
 

packyderms_wife

Neither here nor there.
“Electricity imports from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan account for half of Afghanistan’s power consumption nationwide, with Iran providing additional supplies to the country’s west,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on October 3, 2021.

“Domestic production, mostly at hydropower stations, has been affected by this year’s drought,” the business-focused newspaper noted of Afghanistan’s power supply at the time.

Taliban aside, this boys and girls is why you never let another country have control of your power supply/grid!
 

Dennis Olson

Chief Curmudgeon
_______________
When I was working for the state of Minnesota human svcs dept, one day a couple of people I'd never seen came to my desk. They said that for some reason, the dept hadn't paid its phone bill in three months, and the phone company was getting pissed. Since the pre-processing for bill payment went through a MS Access application tied to a MS SQL database (truth; you can't make this crap up), they came to see me because I was the ONLY person in Human Svcs IT who knew anything about Access.

So I had to dig in forensically. I started with learning the dataflow. Come to find out that the data came from the state mainframe, and a file was cut and FTP'd over to DHS, where it was then consumed by the Access app. Fine. I got a copy of that file along with a datamap of the fields. I ran that against what the Access app was expecting. They didn't even come close to matching. Digging deeper, I discovered that the file was previously pre-pre-processed by an AS-400 minicomputer, and that file was the one that fed the Access app. I contacted the group responsible for doing that work, and discovered that the AS-400 had been "retired" without notice three months prior. What a coincidence!! (/snark)

So the secondary processing had stopped when that computer had been decommissioned. I found the person who wrote the original RPG-3 program for the task. I arranged a meeting. He went over the program with me, and essentially taught me enough of the RPG-3 language to be able to reconstruct what the program was doing. Armed with that information, I wrote a routine in MS Access that sucked in the original file, then performed the pre-processing step from inside the app itself. After that, it fed the resultant file to the input processor for the app.

That all took me about two weeks. It was so funny at first, because the people who came to see me just stood by my desk for about a half hour like they expected me to pull the solution outta my ass. I'd never seen that app before, and knew nothing of the data owners for the phone records. They honestly thought it should have taken less than a half hour. Insane.
 

Walrus Whisperer

Hope in chains...
I'm glad all I had to do was make geologic maps from the data the guys brought back with their Trimble data collectors.
Import their data, voila, instant map.
I've forgotten it all now.
 

ShadowMan

Designated Grumpy Old Fart
The GOVERNMENT bought a program for "reporting" hospital morbidity. That's basically all the types of people, treatments, diseases and such and what happened to the patients in a medical facility. The program bought was a total POS.

So I spent a month building an alternative program that would compile all the raw data, sort it out and end up with a format that we could hand input into the report of the POS REQUIRED program report.

I don't know who sold that Piece of Shitte program to the government, but WE taxpayers got totally screwed on that deal. It was TOTALLY and ABSOLUTELY worthless.
 
Last edited:

To-late

Membership Revoked
At least 16 Afghan provinces including Kabul province, which contains the nation’s capital city of Kabul, suffered electricity blackouts on Thursday, Afghanistan’s online news service Khaama Press reported.

Afghanistan’s state power monopoly, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), issued a statement on January 12 confirming “a shortage of electricity and blackout in 16 provinces including the Afghan capital Kabul.”

DABS attempted to blame the power outages on Afghanistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, which it said had “decreased” the amount of electricity it usually supplies to Afghanistan by “60 percent” in recent days. Afghanistan’s state-run power company neglected to mention on Tuesday that the Taliban, which seized control of Afghanistan’s government on August 15, 2021, has failed to pay bills owed to its electricity suppliers, including those in Uzbekistan, since coming to power. Afghanistan does not have its own national power grid and thus relies on foreign imports for roughly 78 percent of its electricity supply.

“Electricity imports from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan account for half of Afghanistan’s power consumption nationwide, with Iran providing additional supplies to the country’s west,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on October 3, 2021.
“Domestic production, mostly at hydropower stations, has been affected by this year’s drought,” the business-focused newspaper noted of Afghanistan’s power supply at the time.

“Afghanistan usually pays $20 million to $25 million a month in total to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran and now unpaid bills stand at $62 million,” Safiullah Ahmadzai, then-acting C.E.O. of DABS, told Bloomberg on October 6, 2021.

Afghanistan’s neighbors could cut their power supplies to Kabul “any day they want,” Ahmadzai said, foreshadowing the capital’s current electricity blackout.

The DABS C.E.O. said at the time he had recently asked the United Nations (U.N.) for assistance in paying Afghanistan’s overdue power bills but had not received a response.

“We’ve asked the UNAMA in Kabul to assist the people of Afghanistan to pay the country’s power suppliers as part of their humanitarian aid,” Ahmadzai told Bloomberg by phone on October 6, 2021. He referred to “UNAMA,” or the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Just 38 percent of Afghanistan’s population of 38 million have access to electricity under normal circumstances. The Taliban’s seizure of power last August prompted an ongoing period of political instability in Afghanistan that has affected its power situation.
The country was already beleaguered by decades of war and relied almost entirely on foreign sources — such as the United Nations and the U.S., which backed its previous government in Kabul from 2001 through August 15, 2021 — for financial support.

“At the time of the Taliban takeover, DABS had some $40 million in cash in its accounts,” WSJ recalled on Ocotber 3, 2021.
“The Taliban, starved of funds because of international sanctions, haven’t approved the use of that money to pay invoices from power suppliers,” the newspaper revealed.

“DABS liabilities have since grown to more than $90 million and are rising,” Ahmadzai told WSJ at the time.
“Collection from customers, meanwhile, shrunk by 74 percent last month, with only $8.9 million in revenue since Aug. 15,” the newspaper reported, citing DABS officials.

OOps. :poop:
the check is in the mail.:eek::jstr:
 
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