In February 2009, Richard Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John Allen were taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside, according to two officials on the flight.
By then, millions of Afghans were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001 invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the country.
There was just one problem, Allen told Holbrooke. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.
The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project to build a “shadow” cellphone system.
Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project, are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected U.S. bases. A large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station, or data-collection point, for the network, officials said.
A senior U.S. official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone. The New York Times
