posted on Monday, August 07, 2006 4:41 AM
by
Endie
Taliban Problems? Call 911
An interesting tendency during the last few weeks of the Taliban's disastrous summer offensive is that of local tribesmen phoning in the locations of Taliban raiding parties and tactical-level bases.
I had been wondering for some time why quite so much effort was going into providing Afghanistan with cell-phone coverage: several companies have been investing in cell-phone infrastructure, with good urban and patchy but increasing rural coverage the result after about a year.
It now becomes clearer. As any viewer of spaghetti westerns knows, it's great being a bandit in a small and isolated village where the locals can't send word for help. But the Magnificent Seven would have been a lot less necessary if the locals, with one phone call, could have arranged a helicopter assault force to rescue them within three hours of the bandits first appearing, with a nice thank-you payment in dollars from the government when the job is done.
So that's what's happening. Johnny Taliban and his thirty or forty armed banditos roll into town, threaten the locals, steal food and money and string up some televisions from a makeshift gibbet. Previously, all that could happen was that the locals would put up with this for a week or two, then once the Islamists had left they could make some pointless and fruitless complaint to the Kabul authorities the next time anyone was in the next town with landlines.
But now the local tribe has a mobile phone or two, even if they can only get two bars of coverage, and that by standing in a three-foot square area on top of Uncle Karzai's Camel Stop. So when the choice is between putting up with the Taliban and losing money and livestock (as well as having his collection of Reo Speedwagon cassettes confiscated) or dialing in a quick call to NATO's Grass-Up-A-Taliban line and being paid muchos cashola as a result, your average Pushtun doesn't really need much encouragement.
The other wise move vis-a-vis the grassroots support situation was that we decided to stop trying to burn down the opium fields. Putting at risk, not just troops in Helman province, but our entire regional strategy was a high price to pay for providing another 2.3% price-support to the UK heroin market. But that's another story.