“The Panjshir Valley is held by anti-Taliban resistance fighters, and the Taliban effectively cut internet and telecommunications access, a BBC reporter tweeted Monday:
“Local sources tell me almost all internet and telecom services have been disrupted by the Taliban in Panjshir. An anti-resistance movement has been forming there since the fall of Kabul #Afghanistan”
Loss of internet access will affect the resistance’s ability to communicate, particularly with the outside world as the Taliban seek to consolidate their hold of the country after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal completed.
Cutting internet access is a common tactic in communist countries, mimicking the Cuban regime during the protests there earlier this summer, the Free Beacon reported.
Kabul residents still have internet and telecommunications access, but Panjshir Valley residents noted Monday that their access was cut. China, a potential Taliban ally, has internet firewalls limiting access throughout their country, the Free Beacon noted.
Taliban leaders had met with officials at the Afghanistan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority last week, and former chairman Mohammad Najeeb Azizi warned, “the internet is under threat in Afghanistan,” fearing the censoring of anti-Taliban speech.
Internet in the country was already in peril as the Taliban have been destroy cell towers in recent months and South Africa’s MTN Group announced it would cease operations in Afghanistan. Newsmax
Comment: Yes, I know, you all are pleased to be out of the infernal place. So am I, but we will be less pleased as evidence piles up of the devilment that will become evident as the medieval goat f–kers consolidate control of the country and move to cut the place off from both internal and international communications. They will surely do that.
The weepy, lefty, creeps who run the Biden soviet will not do anything about that but sob a bit. What they should do is saturate the country with pre-paid SATCOM communications. If they don’t know how to do the saturation a few of us here would be glad to inform them. pl
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/taliban-resistance-internet-censorship/2021/08/30/id/1034387/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Internet_via_satellite_phone
I’m no expert but I bypassed US military internet restrictions on my base in Afghanistan by ordering Hughes Net for the entire Company. We all put up coin and installed it ourselves. Only problem I ran into was Soldiers complained it wasn’t lightening fast like back home…meh. Can they really block a direct SAT feed? I don’t think so.
Babeltuap
“Can they really block a direct SAT feed? I don’t think so.” I don’t know what means. Inform me.
Col Lang,
We purchased the equipment, routers, switches and ran our own internet. I even had an Army comms guy help us on his off time align the Hughes signal. The base never tried to block it but assume they could have? All I know is it worked. I guess the hard part would be getting equipment shipped. Our stuff was shipped to Bagram then made it to FOB Fenty on supply run to us. I doubt anything can be shipped to Afghanistan at this point without being captured.
“pre-paid SATCOM communications” does seem like something that should be within our skill set and even fairly cheap to implement. If the Tajiks succeed in holding their ground, communications should be done as a minimal level of support.
If they can’t hold the Panjshir, then the effectiveness of “saturate the country” will depend on an ability to access the communications without registering yourself as an opponent or publishing your location. I am not qualified to judge that. Can we provide a communications network independent of a nation’s government? If so, why hasn’t that already happened? Suitable candidates seem plentiful.
The internet and phone service to Panjshir was cut sometime Sunday the 29th. And yet acting Afghan President Amrullah Saleh who is with Masood in the Panjshir tweeted this last night about midnight just as the last C-17 was leaving HKIA: “Afgh wasn’t packed & put in the bag of the last US solider The country is here. D rivers are flowing & d mountains are majestic. Talibs R an unpopular proxy force & hated that is why the whole country wants to escape from them. A super power decided to be mini power that is OK.”
And Fahim Dashty, spokesperson of Masood’s National Resistance Front of Afghanistan was televised and broadcast last night. He shared details of the latest seven to eight Taliban casualties in an attack attempting to enter into the Panjshir Valley.
So not all was cut. The impact will be mainly on the ordinary folk in the Panjshir, not on the resistance leadership itself.
Pre-paid SATCOM is just someone paying the SATCOM contracts and getting the handsets to whoever you want to have that connectivity. For Y2K we signed a contract with Iridium and sent out SATCOM handsets to our DAOs worldwide. The biggest logistical catch is getting those handsets to whoever we want to have them. In Panjshir and probably large parts of Afghanistan, that’s very doable. We’re fools if we’re not giving Masood’s NRF a SATCOM video teleconferencing capability now.
Just this morning I read a story on Apple’s move to install a LEO satellite communication chip in their next iPhone. It’s rumored to be just a limited emergency service to start with, but that’s just a matter of economics. If SPACECOM and CYBERCOM don’t glom onto this new technology and the existing Thuraya, Inmarsat, Hughesnet and Starlink systems now, they’re missing the info ops boat.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/29/22647252/the-iphone-13-5g-leo-satellite
It might be worth exploring the possibility of getting them lots of Starlink dishes. I could imagine that Musk might see that as an interesting project.
All Elon would have to do is activate the Panjshir region for access and earmark the dishes for exclusive access. A militarized NGO such as Spirit of America could pay for the equipment and access.
https://spiritofamerica.org/
Colonel – I’m still getting to grips with this. It’s a report of a meeting between the US and the Taliban after Ghani fled –
“In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha — including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command — spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.
“We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”
(Relayed by your reader “FredW”, https://turcopolier.com/how-is-it-that-we-are-getting-live-reports-from-kabul/#comments)
Apparently Ghani’s officials also ceased work when the boss left. It’s not reported how many did so. If they did so in any number it wouldn’t have been only policing that was neglected. A city of six to seven million falls into ruin fast if municipal services aren’t attended to.
General McKenzie could not possibly have undertaken to do that at such short notice. It would have required an indeterminate number of men who’d have had to find out immediately how water and sewage etc worked before they could make sure it carried on working. That’s if the municipal employees had downed tools completely. Presumably in the event they didn’t, or not all of them, or there’d be reports already of the failure of essential services.
So somehow those essential services were kept going. But are Taliban fighters capable of running such infrastructure for every city and town in Afghanistan? And even if engineers and maintenance men stay in place they need organising and paying – all the things we take for granted with our own utilities.
Either the Taliban are a much more sophisticated force than has so far been apparent or they’re going to have advisors in to tell how to run the basics. Or there’s going to be all hell let loose as the water stops coming out of the taps and the electricity fails. Looking up prices in Afghanistan, it’s obvious there’s a utilities infrastructure in the cities at least that’s going to have to be kept going somehow.
Presumably we in the West aren’t able to assist with that, if we were doing so before. And it’s not merely utilities. Are the Taliban going to be able to take over the running of an entire country on their own? Or are we going to see some neighbouring country or the Russians called in to fill the vacuum?
The IEA has already done a provisional deal with Turkey and Qatar to run HKIA. Qatar in particular has excellent relations with the Taliban leadership and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them coordinating more practical help with running the country’s infrastructure. They have very deep pockets, so money may not be an issue in the immediate term.
Then steal a page from the insurgent script and have former ANA sabotage the infrastructure. Make the Taliban appear incompetent to provide safety, security, and basic necessities. When the Russians or Chinese try to assist. Kill them. Sever their heads and Facebook live the act. Flip the script on them.
“Make the Taliban appear incompetent…” That shouldn’t take much effort. The place barely worked with huge amounts of American money coming in. Without that? Is any other country likely to think there is enough value to justify such spending? Are there any candidate counties rich enough to do it even if they see value? Without that support, Afghanistan is just a desperately poor country with no native ability to organize and maintain anything larger than a province. Almost certainly their future is grim regardless of what we do. Culturally they are the opposite of the Vietnamese who, for all their gigantic faults, are gifted organizers and planners for anything they really want to accomplish. I foresee increasing levels of violence and repression not because they are terrible people, though there is a case to be made for that, but simply because they will become increasingly desperate as failure piles upon failure.
It will be interesting to see if the Russians give the Taliban advice on how to deal with restive regions. If the Taliban are smart they will get themselves a Ramzan Kadyrov.
Elon Musk has a much cheaper and faster alternative than anything you propose
https://www.starlink.com/
Après Moi, la deluge.
The technical means to “block” internet and everything else is, they say, a basic in current Russian doctrine. So, yes, “blocked”, or fried…dealer decides.
Ruski smart fellas. So are a lot of fellas. The big big ecm “secret” is that it can be done and fielded as an effective feature. Given a dozen months other fellas will be building or buying.
Ask the Crew of the Donald Duck in the black Sea, or the Dutchs ship that got her circuits permanently fried at the big Summer rodeo.
Colonel,
OT, but not too much, comes this report that 90 retired generals and admirals have generated and signed a letter demanding the resugnation of Secretary of Defence, Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley for the botch job of withdrawal. Scribd text is embedded in this post.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/90-retired-generals-penn-scathing-letter-calling-austin-and-milley-resign-immediately
Interesting. Shades of a similar letter delivered to President Macron of France recently.
“Back in line with all the other churls”, Biden tells the Afghan interpreter who rescued his visiting party after their helicopter was forced down in an Afghan snow storm:
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/08/31/biden-left-behind-the-afghan-interpreter-who-helped-to-rescue-him-in-2008-n436063
>”The weepy, lefty, creeps who run the Biden soviet will not do anything about that but sob a bit”
[Le gasp] But Colonel! What about Article 88, UCMJ?! /s
Lytenburgh
The only one subject to UCMJ is Milley.
Lytenburgh
If you mean me under Article 888, this article is not applied to retired members.