Afghanistan war logs: Nato feared Taliban could tap its mobile phones

Source: Simon Tisdall, The Guardian.

Given the US-led coalition’s obsession with security, the realisation that Taliban sympathisers and foreign spy agencies were routinely tracking top secret phone calls made from its military headquarters in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan must have come as a bit of a blow.

But the findings contained in a classified “threat report” circulated by the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) on 25 August 2007 were both unequivocal and alarming.

Mobile phone calls, whether made by top diplomats, commanding generals or frontline soldiers, were vulnerable to interception by hostile forces, it said. In fact the Taliban, the Pakistanis, the Iranians, the Russians, the Indians and the Chinese were probably all listening in.

Investigating possibly the first instance of cyber warfare in the Afghan theatre, the report detailed how mobile phone calls in Afghanistan and in “major border crossing” areas with Pakistan, Iran and Uzbekistan were handled by the Roshan network, Afghanistan’s largest service provider for GSM (global system for mobile communications).