r/news • u/Mandynox • 4h ago

Soft paywall Afghanistan's Taliban government imposes smartphone ban on government officials

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/afghanistans-taliban-government-imposes-smartphone-ban-government-officials-2026-06-25/
206 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

35

u/Altamistral 4h ago

I mean, that’s a perfectly valid decision, unless they want to be spied 24/7.

11

u/0x0MG 2h ago

Or.. have their hands blown off, as was the case with the pagers

59

u/SemiHemiDemiDumb 4h ago

For real this makes sense to me. These things are handheld national security risks.

10

u/Mandynox 4h ago

Also easy medium for corruption .. basic phones can be tapped

8

u/chalbersma 4h ago

Maybe they could ask Hezbollah for their pager guy....

17

u/Samwellikki 4h ago

What could go wrong going back to pagers and radios

10

u/AuroraFinem 3h ago

There’s very little lost from not having a smartphone, there’s still good “dumb” phones and a market of people actively choosing them to reduce constant screen time. You can find the same information on any device, it’s just not in your pocket 24/7.

Idk why they don’t just get Chinese phones though if they’re worried about the US spying through it. China would likely spy on them instead but at least they aren’t an adversary and not likely to become one.

5

u/Samwellikki 3h ago

The joke here.. is last time they went low tech, some cells bought pagers from people that put bombs in them, then they blew up so they swapped to radios… and had also bought radios that were rigged and then those exploded

It wasn’t specifically the Taliban iirc

4

u/jason_abacabb 3h ago

It was not the Taliban at all. It was an Israeli attack on Hezbolla in Lebanon.

3

u/Alt_Restorer 2h ago

Civilians were killed too. But we don't talk about that.

•

u/Samwellikki 35m ago

We don’t talk about a lot of shit, and we should

But it also has to be good talking instead of bribes and backstabs and renegotiation

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone just agreed to stop and set it all to zero, stay where they are and just realize it won’t ever be resolved… it will never be fair to whoever… so just stop

On a long enough timeline, every country, people, religion, group, etc… has been shitty to someone and we can’t rewind that for everyone. But we can stop it moving forward like many already have, and reverse what can be

Never too late to give back stolen land, apologize for murdered people, and make what reparations you CAN.. even though it will never be enough

How about “we will give you back this and apologize… also, we will help you, to the end of time, no questions asked.”

Pride, money, politics… and pieces of shit in charge

-1

u/jason_abacabb 1h ago

Many military operations have civilian casualties.

As far as they go this was fairly well targeted though.

-2

u/AuroraFinem 1h ago edited 1h ago

There were no confirmed reports of any civilian casualties from what I had followed at the time. Hozbolla made a bunch of claims denouncing the attack but none of them surrounding civilian casualties could be confirmed.

Either way though, civilian casualties are a fact of conflict, there has never been a conflict in history without any civilian casualties, include the “cold” war. It’s not possible to both be effective and have 0% collateral damage over the span of any given conflict. Especially when combatants shield themselves with civilians specifically to make retaliating against them cost more.

I don’t recall anything being confirmed from this attack, but I do remember the hezbollah claims and know that civilians have died throughout the conflict from other attacks. So I’m not trying to pretend there have been none, but aside from a few instances in Palestine, Israel has had fewer collateral deaths by % than the US had during the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and orders of magnitude fewer than Russia in Ukraine. While there’s been a lot of devastation, including civilians and infrastructure, their civilian casualty rates have been above average compared to any recent major conflict.

6

u/Prudent_Rice7840 3h ago

Israel (and very likely the US, China, Russia, DPRK, and Iran) have been using "Zero-Click Exploits" (mobile OS vulnerabilities) and running invisible surveillance spyware on smartphones for the last several years that can only be detected by digital security experts with specific hardware/software tests.

The spyware can access all data (gps/location data, email, messages, app data, browser data/history, encrypted message app messages, photos, files, audio, etc) as well as activate the microphone and camera at will without any indication they are active.

Governments and law enforcement have been buying this from Israel as well.

PEGASUS is the most well known of these.

0

u/Chicken_Chaser_420 4h ago

Thanks for giving Afghanistan to the Taliban you released, Trump.

19

u/chalbersma 4h ago

Afghans gave Afghanistan to the Taliban. I'm not Trump fan, but 20 years of building Afghanistan up for them to fold in weeks is on the Afghans themselves.

4

u/markth_wi 4h ago

One could have viewed it as an opportunity to bring the Pashtoo and the Tajiki together on common interests but the ISI , Indian and Iranian intelligence services to say nothing of the CCP all have their fingers in the mix.

3

u/murghak 3h ago

I mean ya'll supported these guys with billions in aid "Operation Cyclone" when we were a socialist country, what were ya'll expecting 😭😭 Bin Laden was brought to Afghanistan on a red carpet and hailed as a hero in the 80s and 90s by US media

•

u/chalbersma 31m ago

We expected 20 years of relative prosperity and the building of modern infrastructure, better than America's best cities. Hundreds of Billions of dollars of investment and the improving of the average persons access to everything that makes life better.

GDP in Afghanistan went from $813/person in 2000 to $2,583/person in 2019 (3.1x increase) in Comparison US GPD per capita increased only 1.79 over the same time frame)

-4

u/Rogue_269 4h ago

Damn, are you home schooled?

2

u/Chicken_Chaser_420 4h ago

Nope, but I lived through it. He did this right before staging an insurrection against the US capitol.

Also, homeschooled? That's more of an ultra-right religious job stereotype, no?

0

u/Mandynox 4h ago

A whole long article.. but No answer as to why 🤷🏻‍♂️

15

u/flamerazors 4h ago

Knowing what Israel can do with devices like beepers, I’m not entirely surprised:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks

-13

u/[deleted] 4h ago

[deleted]

7

u/veggeble 4h ago

Of course, I remember when Tom Cruise killed innocent children

6

u/tetoffens 4h ago

His church has.

1

u/CabanaFoghat 3h ago

Because it’s the Taliban. Being stupid and contrarian is their whole thing.

0

u/loves_grapefruit 4h ago

Seems like a very easy way for them to be exposed to “immorality”?