If Afghanistan, coaltion forces are experiencing a high degree of success targeting mid-level Taliban leadership and placing precision warheads on their foreheads. The technical means are unknown (at least to me), but the Talibs are blaming their cell phones.
In response the Taliban is waging an locally unpopular campaign of cell phone tower destruction. This, they assume, will prevent the coalition from targeting them, while also rendering their cell phones useless.
Afghans tend to be stoic in the face of poverty, hardship and seemingly endless warfare. But mess with their cellphones, and the response is one of undiluted outrage.
For the last two months, Taliban fighters have been blowing up telecommunications towers, with the aim of preventing NATO-led forces from hunting them down via cellphone signals. It could hardly have been a worse public-relations move for the insurgency.
Fuming Afghans call the tactic nonsensical.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that they could eliminate the hazards of operating around high explosives by doing a little value stream mapping and leaning the process out a little. Just, you know: Turn their cell phones off.
And these people want to run the country.
No one ever said they were rocket scientists. As a matter of fact, I reserve that term for meself, being an engineer, a former SSBN sailor, and overall cutting dashing figure with my pocket protector and being handy with a pencil and an abacus.
Intelligence and forethought would not be characteristics found under Taliban in the Thesaurus.
Subsunk
I still have my “Allied Electronics” pocket protector and metal Pickett slide rule (I also have 2 TI SR52 programmable calculators; but I’m bragging) ….but I am no rocket scientist… I leave that to my friend at TI who used to do (in a former life) classified research on real rockets.
As to your comment Lex about “And these people want to run the country”; as in the U.S., understanding technology, it uses, abuses, and benefits is not a requirement for a political career. In their (the Taliban’s case), its only a requirement for those who do harm, wish to continue their existence AND have access to their cell phones.
Or just not carrying a phone at all. It seems pretty stupid to maintain the ability to actually carry the phone by destroying the infrastructure required to make it work in the first place. A cell phone without cell towers is just dead weight, so to speak.
Daveg,
They like the games.
Lex: “. . .doing a little value stream mapping and leaning the process out a little.”
I can tell you’re taking all that schooling and studying very seriously….you’re getting to the point where you’re speaking English and but I don’t know what the heck you’re saying. But you do say it well.
Since the Taliban is getting the credit for smoking the cell towers, some of our clandestine assets ought to lend a hand and drop the rest of them.
Everyone in Afghanistan would hate the Taliban. No one would be using cell phones. Sounds like a double win. Wish we could make the same thing true here at home.
ASM826, I love how your mind works!
You give too much credit, sir. Nobody wants to run that country.
So the Taliban get their technological know-how from watching TV? I blame NCIS, they are always triangulating cell signals to locate the terrorists. And let’s not forget they have a hot Mossad agent working with them.
And what is up with forcing the networks to shutdown at night in Southern Afghanistan? Do the Taliban have something against free night and weekend minutes? Or are the rank and file texting too much during evening committee meetings?
You’ve got to be kidding.
These Bozos want to live in the 6th or 7th Century, and they use cell phones?
ASM826,
Be careful, there are already rampant rumors that the US is actively working with the Taliban…and a good portion of Afghanis actually believe it. The rationale is, we defeated the Taliban within days and they disappeared. Now they have reappeared, so the only explanation is that we have allowed it to happen (followed by the reasoning that we have done so to continue to occupy that country).
Unfortunately, there have been some fiascos to give credence to that claim (supplying the Afghan military with dismal weapons, as Lex had mentioned before, and recently we inadvertently armed the bad-guys via a weapons drop at the wrong location).
Not to mention the fact that Iraq, cell phones are very useful to the Coalition, as they allow locals to surreptitiously call in bad-guy locations.
I don’t know for a fact that the Afghans do the same thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.