Tagging the Taliban

Strategy Page:

The Taliban claims that the U.S. is giving its agents in Pakistan small electronic devices, to plant near high value targets, so that American UAVs can find and hit those targets with Hellfire missiles. Despite all the chatter (and videos of American "spies" confessing to their use), the Taliban have not been able to display one of these "electronic chips" (as they like to call them).

But such devices do exist. They are small (half an inch thick, but otherwise the size of two or three pennies). These "remote tagging systems" can be used to transmit its location for months, enabling aircraft, or UAVs, overhead to collect the location information. These have been used to find Taliban and al Qaeda safe houses and bases. But in Pakistan, they are apparently used by a local American operative to show which building in a village or compound, the bad guys are in. The UAV comes along, picks up the tagging system device location, then fires the Hellfires.

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I was skeptical of this claim by the Taliban when I first saw the story. If we have it and are using it in Pakistan it indicates we have some pretty good human intelligence in Pakistan. That is encouraging. It also means that claims of hitting civilians are not well found.

I still think it would be interesting to make some phony devices that could be placed at locations we want the Taliban to avoid or on some of their allies to play on their paranoia.