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Keen to tap a fast-growing market, I underestimated the cultural obstacles to running my telecom startup.

When I finished my MBA last year with $20,000 in unused school loans, I realized I could tap that money to start my own business.

With a degree from the London Business School, I figured I could take my entrepreneurial talents anywhere in the world.

I chose Afghanistan.

It was even more of a challenge than I expected. The main difficulty wasn’t so much the security situation. More problematic was the fact that years of war and chaos have made Afghan businesspeople cautious about offending the mullahs and the government. I planned to sell ringtones and other mobile-phone content. To do that I had to get my customers - the country’s mobile-phone providers - to take a chance on services that the culture had yet to accept. Along the way I got quite an education.

My interest in the Middle East began in 2003, when I served a six-month tour of duty as a U.S. Marine Corps officer during the invasion of Iraq. In the aftermath I saw that development of the region’s private sector was almost nonexistent. I wanted to get involved.

I visited Afghanistan for the first time in 2005, when I interned at a new staffing agency during my summer break from business school. Back in London, I searched for a business in which I could draw on what I had learned about Afghan business culture. A friend suggested mobile-phone content. “Man, people would go bananas for this,” he said. I thought he was right. The country was just discovering cellphones. I put together a business plan.

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