MyAdhan Blog

Link: Cellphones are bringing Pakistanis together

For nearly seven years, Osama bin Laden, the world’s most-wanted terrorist, has eluded the best intelligence officers, military spy drones and orbiting satellites in a hideout believed to be in the northern part of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But now, a far more mundane technology - mobile phone service - is rolling out across Pakistan and the surrounding region. Some experts say it could, in the end, make it increasingly difficult for bin Laden to evade capture. In the years since bin Laden was last seen leaving the battle of Tora Bora, six operators in Pakistan have moved in and blanketed roughly half of the country with digital wireless phone networks. “People all around Pakistan now have handsets,” Zouhair Khaliq, chief executive of Mobilink, Pakistan’s largest mobile operator, said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress, an industry convention. “It is getting increasingly difficult for anyone to hide in Pakistan, even bin Laden.” But with 65 million people using mobile phones each day in Pakistan, the country is much more wired together than it was when bin Laden disappeared, which may be bad news for terrorists in general. When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked in September 2001, Pakistan had only a rudimentary fixed-line phone network operated by the government. Today, five privately owned wireless operators owned by investors from Egypt, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi and Pakistan have crisscrossed the country with cell base stations. The operators, Khaliq said, spent a combined $8 billion in 2007 to expand their networks, which now reach 70 percent of the country’s 160 million people. Some operators, like Mobilink, which has a 47 percent share, and Telenor Pakistan, a unit of the Norwegian wireless operator with 15 million customers, have even started to build base stations in the remote northwest of the country, where U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden may be holed up. Pakistan’s wireless networks are basic GSM networks, the slower predecessor of the high-speed networks common in the urban West, which can now be used as global positioning satellite devices.