taliban now target mobile phones

Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - Opinion: "KABULKABUL" For once, the Taliban may have taken on the wrong target: the country’s mobile phone network. In recent weeks, four mobile phone towers have been destroyed in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, areas where the Taliban hold sway.

But in the process, the insurgents appear to have alienated much of the local population, which is willing to turn a blind eye to a public execution but is infuriated when they lose their phone service, for many their only link to the outside world.

“This has affected people very badly,” said Nazar Gul, a resident of Helmand’s Nad Ali district, where phone services were interrupted. “Our phones didn’t work and we couldn’t contact our relatives. This must not be repeated. The Taliban should pursue their aims in some other way. If they continue doing this, people are going to get upset and they will withdraw their support.”

Before 2001, telephone service of any kind was a rarity in Afghanistan. But after the fall of the Taliban, several companies entered the market and invested millions of dollars in blanketing the country with cell-phone coverage.
It was an immediate success. Today, the country has four major mobile phone providers with a total of nearly 5mn subscribers. From illiterate farmers to government ministers, everyone seems to rely on mobile phones for almost all communications.

Even the Taliban themselves, who had previous relied on more expensive satellite phones, have become major customers.
But late last month, the insurgents issued a warning to mobile phone companies, demanding that they switch off their services between five in the evening and three in the morning. The insurgents were apparently concerned that foreign military forces supporting the Kabul government were tracing their mobile phone signals to track their movements.
When the phone companies refused to comply, the mobile towers began to come down.

“The companies did not comply with our demands,” said Qari Yusuf, a Taliban spokesman in the south. “We ordered them to stop the service at night. If these companies do not observe our rules and principles, we will attack them in all the regions under our control.”

Abdul Hadi Hadi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s telecommunications ministry, denied that the mobile phone network was being used for surveillance.

“The Americans and the Afghan government have other ways of collecting information about the Taliban,” he said. “Telecommunications services are part of the public sector, and those who sabotage these facilities are enemies of the people.”

Meanwhile, the government appears powerless to stop such attacks.

“We can’t place police checkpoints beside each mast,” said one official with the interior ministry who asked that his name not be used because he is not authorised to talk to the press.

“We don’t have the capacity. The antennas are dispersed widely; if we try to cover the whole area we will be stretched too thin and we can easily be attacked,” he said.

Others speculate that the Taliban have motives other than their own security for attacking the country’s communications infrastructure.

“The Taliban are trying to increase the distance between the people and the government,” said one security official who declined to allow his name to be used. “I don’t know about this espionage. I think it’s just an excuse. They want to show the people of Afghanistan that they are strong and the government is weak. They want people not to trust the government.”

And Hadi, the telecommunications ministry spokesman, said the insurgents merely have been angered by the rapid success of the telecommunications industry.

“Six years ago, people could not even call from one province to another, and had to travel to Pakistan to make international calls,” he said.

“But now people can solve all of their problems with these mobile phones. And investments worth $1bn are a remarkable achievement. Perhaps this has raised certain sensitivities among the Taliban.” — The Institute for War & Peace Reporting/MCT

* Matiullah Minapal and Zainullah Stanekzai are reporters in Afghanistan who write for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organisation that trains journalists in areas of conflict.

[bth: this points out yet again how vulnerable infrastructure is to terrorist attack - little risk, big disruption.]