North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Afghanistan [OT]

  • From: Curtis Maurand
  • Date: Wed Sep 19 10:34:16 2001

You're talking about a country with very little electricity, non-existent
telecom and no running water.  You do realize this don't you?

Curtis

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Vadim Antonov wrote:

>
>
>
> As already was pointed out - keeping comm channels open to Afganistan is
> not an issue. The only people having access to the channels are exactly
> those who will only interpret what comes thru as more crap from the
> infidels.  Ochlocracy is the term for what's going on over there.
>
> In fact, it may be quite worthwhile to close their two-way comms to make
> coordination of adversarial activity abroad harder to them.
>
> The open access makes sense as an a tool for influencing people's opinions
> _only_ when people have widely available and unfiltered access.  If
> Afganistan had any independent ISPs, I'd say do everything possible to
> make them successful.  Alas, this is not the case.
>
> I'd say the better way of communicating would be the classical
> native-language radio translation in Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe
> fashion, otherwise known as propaganda.  Worked well for the USSR.
> Radios are cheap and realtively available (and hard to control, too).
> May be worthwhile to actually air-drop loads of small and easy to hide
> solar-powered units.  I'd expect a lot of people to listen to those in
> hiding even when threatened with execution for mere posession.
>
> Given the air superiority of NATO, controlling use of those radios by the
> local propaganda units can be very easy - just drop radio-guided missiles
> on Taliban transmitters.
>
> --vadim
>
> On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
>
> >
> > At 12:01 PM 9/18/2001 -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
> >  >>> Has anyone started to deny all traffic to/from Afghanistan ?
> >  >> It is my understanding that the free flow of ideas and discussion of same
> >  >> is detrimental to an extremist or dictatorial government.  Such
> > governments
> >  >> rarely (ever?) survive open discussions and flow of ideas.
> >  >
> >  >so i guess we should not advocate cutting off that flow, eh?
> >
> > Absolutely.
> >
> > When someone claims they are in power, or smarter than you, or just know
> > better, and tell you to do something you think is a poor idea, or simply
> > something you do not want to do, you should research and find out why.  Do
> > not just take their word for it.  And the Internet is a darned good way of
> > getting that outside information for many, many people.
> >
> > Of course, that opens a long discussion because there are obvious
> > exceptions - parents and children, military personnel, bosses &
> > employees.  It is easy to see how someone could extend that to a government
> > and its people.  I do not believe it should be in most
> > circumstances.  Maybe I am wrong.
> >
> > But that is straying too far off topic even for me.
> >
> >
> >  >randy
> >
> > --
> > TTFN,
> > patrick
> >
>

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Maurand		     System Administrator
lamere.net Powered by Prexar http://www.lamere.net
mailto:[email protected]     Linux, OS/2, Windows (any flavor)
http://www.prexar.com	     Cisco, OpenRoute, Lucent
                             MySQL, SQL Server, PHP, Perl
------------------------------------------------------------