Does Official Taliban Site Exist?

Afghanistan's Taliban government, which declared the Internet unholy and banned its use for millions of Afghan citizens last June, maintained a website until shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and still has at least one e-mail address through its embassy in Pakistan. The DNS entry for the Taliban's website currently points to the null IP address 127.0.0.1. Before Sept. 11, however, it directed users to the official page of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, an austere, multi-layered website hosted by Brain.net.pk, a Pakistani ISP with a server farm in Singapore. The most recent version of the website, resurrected by Google's cache, puts a surprisingly moderate face on the regime: The website offers its readers interviews with Taliban leaders, investment opportunities in various Afghanistan businesses, and even includes a section for questions and comments. One unanswered question is how the Taliban accessed the Internet from within Afghanistan at all. Bram Abramson, director of Internet Research with Telegeography of Washington, doubts there was ever any high-speed Internet infrastructure placed in Afghanistan to begin with, since the country has been at war almost continuously since 1980. Since the U.S. bombing began Oct. 6, he believes Afghanistan has been off the Net completely. N.R. Liwal, an Internet solutions provider in Peshawar, Pakistan, said that if the Taliban is using satellite terminals to get online, they aren't using his. Despite a website that proclaims, "We brought the Internet to Afghanistan", Liwal says his company, the Liwal Group, spent the last two years trying unsuccessfully to bring solar-powered VSAT technology to Afghanistan, with connectivity services to be provided by SingTel of Singapore. VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals) systems use geostationary communication satellites and portable (less than 1 meter) satellite dishes to bring the Internet to otherwise inaccessible places.