Taliban go low-tech using donkeys instead of SUVs

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: The Taliban, those of them who are left, have gone low-tech, using donkeys and motorcycles instead of their signature four-wheel drive sports utility vehicles, according to US intelligence sources.

In a recent speech at the Brookings Institution, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen Richard B Myers said, “Since the Taliban have fallen, since the Al Qaeda has scattered, mainly to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other places in the world, for that matter in the region, since then, they’ve adapted their tactics, and we’ve got to adapt ours.”

Use of donkeys and motorcycles is part of the Taliban’s “changed tactics” but Gen Myers did not say if the US forces were also now using donkeys and motorcycles in their bid to chase and capture the remnants of the once triumphant Afghanistan movement.

According to a report in the Washington Times Wednesday, the Taliban now travel alone at night so as not to draw surveillance. They also move alone in cities, blending in with friendly Afghans. “A Taliban could walk right past and you wouldn’t know it,” said an Army Green Beret who walked the streets of Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. The soldier estimates that there are still 100 former Taliban leaders who need to be killed or captured to prevent them from organising a rebel war against Afghanistan’s US-backed leader, Hamid Karzai.

Al Qaeda fighters have learned to discern the distinctive sound of the four-engine AC-130 gunships. Early in the war, these “flying battleships” had great success in attacking enemy troops. They have also learned to detect the more muffled sound of unmanned Predator spy planes and rapidly moved for cover to avoid deadly Hellfire missiles. “At night, when these groups heard a Predator or AC-130 coming, they pulled a blanket over themselves to disappear from the night-vision screen,” Maj Gen Franklin L Hagenbeck, who led US forces in Afghanistan, told the Army’s Field Artillery magazine. “They used low tech to beat high tech.”

According to the report, Al Qaeda leaders have greatly reduced their time on telephones and radios after realising American technical ability to monitor voice communications. During the summer, the US military found a large cache of unused brand-new satellite phones. This signalled that Al Qaeda fighters had found other ways to talk without being detected, a Pentagon official said.

Taliban and Al Qaeda fugitives have paid teenage Afghans to act as spies. The agents position themselves outside known US special-operations bases near Kandahar and near Khost in eastern Afghanistan and notify their handlers when special operations patrols leave the compounds. In two incidents, Green Beret teams have confronted armed Afghan men who appeared to be following the soldiers. In one case, an officer shot an Afghan who raised his weapon as if to fire. A spokesman for Task Force 180, which commands US military operations in Afghanistan, said that the incident was investigated by the Army.

Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld has taken steps to tighten the noose around Al Qaeda fighters, given the green light to a new counter-terrorism war plan that seeks to speed reaction time so that terrorists do not have days to adjust.

Last week, he also announced a major promotion for US Special Operations Command giving its first battle staff new authority to plan and carry out covert strikes against terrorists. He also gave the command certain classified intelligence assets that will help it find terrorists and carry out missions within minutes or hours rather than days.

Marine Corps Gen John F Sattler, who commands a new counter-terrorism task force on the Horn of Africa, says, “We feel very confident that by virtue of breathing down their neck, looking at them through multiple intelligence sources and collecting on them through multiple sources, that we are in fact disrupting, keeping them off balance until we can go to that next phase, which is defeat.”

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