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Soldiers watch the US withdrawal from Bagram through the lens of Pokemon Go

187 points by lalaland1125 5y ago

RandomWorker 5y ago
The most interesting part is that this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence. I thought the placement of staff and personnel was supposed to be a much guarded secret.
- bigdict 5y ago
  Are you imagining the Taliban running around with iPhones, ordering mortar fire on areas where all valuable Pokemon have been plucked by US military?
  - tyingq 5y ago
    It would probably be effective.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    Guerillas can't be choosers.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Why not? The despite most most depictions, the Taliban (and insurgents in general) are capable of impressive feats of engineering and electronic hacking. Seems like this would be pretty basic.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    When you put it like that, that does sound like a risk I wouldn't be willing to take.
  - aaron695 5y ago
    If you could IED a Pokemon Go site or base location and hurt or kill personnel, every soldier in the region would be told about it and it would affect their daily lives if they played the game. It would work. If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location. The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit. But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
  - peteretep 5y ago
    The US has some very technically advanced adversaries who’d happily share their data with the Taliban
    - paganel 5y ago
      > who’d happily share their data with the Taliban Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
    - vkou 5y ago
      No, they currently don't, but this is a convenient boogieman to trot out whenever you need to drum up patriotism, or to accuse your political opponents of a lack of patriotism, or demand a higher defense budget or a justification for another extension of the forever-war in the Middle East. This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism. (The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    The article mentions using a hacked client to spoof your GPS location. You just need a computer that can run multiple android emulators. You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
  - herbst 5y ago
    Don't you think they have smartphones too? Why would that be weird?
- stickydink 5y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
- throwanem 5y ago
  Pretty sure the location of Bagram isn't.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    A Fitbit could reveal patrol routes and timings. Something like Pokemon Go could permit dropping something rare to attract people to a sighted-in spot you'd then drop mortars on.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      So could an interpreter. Also, Afghanistan has mountains and binoculars, neither of which requires guessing Air Force usernames on Strava or whatever. Not that you don't do anything you can that works in asymmetrical warfare or whatever the inside-the-beltway crowd prefers to call it these days, but it's hardly as if there's much in the way of a unique threat model here. In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.
      - atatatat 5y ago
        We weren't guessing usernames, lol — these assclowns had a public map — of every user's data!!
- dfsegoat 5y ago
  > this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0]. Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you? [0] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-go.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke
- parsimo2010 5y ago
  I don’t want to be too dismissive of your claims, because the sentiment is well placed- lots of apps present security concerns. But the location of every FOB and COP is/was well known to the locals. Hopefully Pokémon Go isn’t revealing the locations of more sensitive locations, but the people running clandestine operations aren’t letting E-3’s play games on a cell phone next to them. There may be other vulnerabilities but Pokemon Go isn’t too big of a problem since it only reveals where people have been congregating for a while. So it’s different than a terrorist revealing their camp’s location because Twitter geotagged a post.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Several bases I went to in the continental US had all the gyms/pokestops disabled after the game came out. I wonder if that was intentionally not done at Bagram for morale reasons?
- Thorrez 5y ago
  Yeah, fitness tracking app Strava revealed a secret army base: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
  - akersten 5y ago
    It may not be your intention, but both this and the parent comment really misplace the blame. The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base. I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
    - matsemann 5y ago
      News are terrible at that kind of writing. For instance with traffic incidents, it's always "a person getting hit by a car", not "a driver ramming their car into a person". So they write it like as if the driver had no agency, and the incident was completely non-avoidable and no one should stop to think about why it happened or how it can be prevented in the future. For good measurement they also use the word "accident" a lot. Wording matter.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        "Wording matter. " It does. "a person getting hit by a car" is quite neutral. "a driver ramming their car into a person"." This sounds intentional and shifts blame to the driver.
        5y ago
divs1210 5y ago
Is this satire? I read the whole thing and im very confused.
- pm90 5y ago
  I don’t think it is. As the US withdraws it’s troops after an incredible amount of time, the next few months will likely see many such stories about “life in Afghanistan” and what is being left behind.
- culturestate 5y ago
  Stars and Stripes isn't technically published by the Department of Defense, but it's as close as you can get while maintaining a veneer of editorial independence. I don't think this variety of satire is in their repertoire.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
  No, it is not satire. Apparently there were Pokemon Go gyms and Pokestops on overseas military bases. The last US military Pokemon Go players put their Pokemon in gyms before they left. Those Pokemon are still in those gyms when they would have normally been kicked out by other players. This means those Pokemon will stay in those gyms until another Pokemon Go player comes along which might be a very long time.
  - divs1210 5y ago
    I read the entire thing. What about this? > Like other veterans, he said he is pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. But he hopes the situation improves one day, to the point he can once again play Pokemon Go there.
    - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
      That pessimistic / optimistic view seems like a realistic, yet hopeful view of the country--still not satire: Pessimistic / realistic view: once the military coalition forces withdraw there will almost certainly be armed conflict, perhaps a full civil war. Optimistic / hopeful view: somehow Afghanistan will stabilize enough that people will be able to travel there as tourists.
Havoc 5y ago
Does this website also come in functional flavour? Reset scrolling to top of page every couple sec for me
pm90 5y ago
This is incredible. What happens if a country invaded another one and both has users on this game? Could future invasions be for digital assets rather than physical ones?
- pmorici 5y ago
  Have you ever seen the movie "Robot Jox"? it's about a future where conflict is settled using a match between two human piloted robots. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102800/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102800/
  - dmix 5y ago
    The 80s left us so many hidden sci-fi gems. Thanks for the link. Needed some long weekend material.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon Already been done, in 1967.
throw7 5y ago
"Digital rodents and abandoned Pokemon presided over the streets of Bagram Airfield..." Is this a joke? Satire? Why? I suppose trillions of dollars later this is what we deserve. Mission Accomplished.
- krapp 5y ago
  Maybe you should consider reading the article past the first sentence.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    Why? The entire article reads like that. What is one newsworthy thing you read in the article?
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Apparently, USA military is withdrawing from Afghanistan!
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      You expected "newsworthy" things in an article about pokemon go?
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Maybe it's trying to make a horrible shitty situation a little less bad. There was zero right answer in this war. We don't have some corrupt cabal of leaders in our government and military. I can't recall a single American that didn't want to go into there after 911. Our soldiers have been stuck there putting their lives on the line to keep the house of cards from falling down. This power vacuum will disappear with another incredibly violent war after we leave. There will be zero way for the current government to maintain control. I don't see how it could possibly avoid becoming an isis like state that will lash out with more terrorism and I'm afraid this won't be the last time American boots will be in country.
  - 5y ago
redis_mlc 5y ago
For those who aren't aware of Bagram and other bases in this war ... Most of the US Army hid in large bases that were isolated from the actual war. Contractors made huge sums of money supplying what are essentially overseas cities that didn't contribute directly to fighting or controlling the area. So 40,000+ Americans lived in Bagram, most who never left the gates to even see Afghanistan. And after dusk, a dozen Taliban could take over the region outside the walls of Bagram. Or they could just wait for the Americans to leave the country. So playing Pokemon Go inside the walls of Bagram had no impact on the war, since what happened inside those walls had nothing to do with the war. It was a different story with the stories about fitness watches tracking outpost sentries and departures/arrivals from a few years ago.
rexf 5y ago
This page is not working well. As I'm trying to read the bottom of the article, it keeps jumping to the page top. As for the content, it doesn't seem newsworthy to me. PokeGo players know that your Pokemon will stay in a gym for a long time (indefinitely) if there's no rival team to knock it out.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  There's a time limit. Eventually a "boss" will come to the gym and kick out the Pokémon you have earning coins there. I think it's 48 hours or so.
  - Larrikin 5y ago
    Since when?
  - xuki 5y ago
    There is no limit.
  - rexf 5y ago
    Source? There is no 48 hour limit. Did you read the article? It's about US troop pokemon staying in gyms long after the personnel have left. Googling gave me this answer for how they stay in gyms: "Forever. Someone has to defeat it in battle to knock its motivation down to 0. Otherwise, it will never hit 0 through normal decay." https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/fjl4xz/how_long_will_my_pokemon_stay_in_a_gym_if/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/fjl4xz/how_long_...
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      https://www.imore.com/pokemon-go-gyms https://www.imore.com/pokemon-go-gyms I guess they call it "motivation decay". It's a mechanic where you have to feed your pokemon food to keep it motivated. You can feed it remotely, though. They can be fed up to 10 times with normal food, or an unlimited number of times with golden raspberries. EDIT: I was wrong about getting kicked when the boss came. So if you kept feeding your pokemon, you could keep it there indefinitely. My bad.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> "Bagram once had a thriving Pokemon Go community of troops, contractors and civilians who played the game while exercising and after work." This is why i dont like Stars and Stripes. Little disingenuous comments like this show thier priorities. Does anyone actually believe that soldiers didnt play during work? And, for a soldier, exercising is work. We know that a bunch of young men away from home with cellphones will play mobile games. We dont need to be told that they are all boys scouts who would never do so during office hours. Im more woried about the security implications. A camera app that involves soldiers wandering around a base chasing gps-tagged sprites is ripe for intelligence gathering. How secure was pokemon go at this time?
remarkEon 5y ago
There was an instagram post I saw (one of the boys sent it to me, I'm not a social media guy) that showed the Taliban walking through our old FOB in Afghanistan. What was odd to me about seeing that is I really had no emotional response to it. I thought I would, but I just ... didn't care anymore. Over the last few weeks I've also been sent article after article about the withdrawal from other friends (not veterans) who are deep in policy circles, about how this or that thing will mean this or that thing for Afghanistan. Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do. My brother today asked me if I had an opinion on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when we did our weekly gaming session (tonight was Hearts Of Iron), and I told him "no, why would I? The war was over years before I even got there".
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  For the past 20 years we have been focused on what it costs us to remain. Leaving has shown the cost to others for us to go. No matter what you think we should do, that cost is a bitter pill to swallow.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    Not when I step over homeless/needy Americans. Don't get me wrong, it's sad, but the USA is not what it used to be, and we need to target our borrowed money resources. (I have no idea as to the real reason we stayed so long there. I'm beginning to think it was military practice. I wouldn't be suprised if some defense guy said, we have to build up our the iron in our military in order to keep our lead on China's expanding fleet of war machines. (I used "iron" because I'm lazy, and figured it was ok because of what Xi just said.)
- parsimo2010 5y ago
  > Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? I don’t think too many people care out of compassion for individual Afghans, but the original reason we “liberated“ them was because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for Al Qaeda to train and launch terrorist attacks. The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs and keep terrorists from operating in its country. There are many Americans that care that after 20 years the Taliban will take over again shortly after the troops are gone. Nothing changed, the next OBL could be operating out of Afghanistan and Americans got nothing for their 20 years of wasted tax money except thousands of casualties and a lot of broken families. So I don’t know if too many Americans care exactly which government Afghanistan adopts, but I’m pretty sure anyone paying attention is disappointed that they didn’t get literally anything different. Edit: to be clear, this wasn't me critiquing the plan, saying whether it would or wouldn't work. This was me responding to GP's prompt about whether America cared about what style of government Afghanistan adopted. Yes America cares, not so much about the style of government but about the outcome. They were told that Afghanistan was going to get a new government that wouldn't allow terrorists free reign to operate as they please; as a result America and the world would be safer. They didn't get that. Yes there are other places that terrorists could operate from, but removing Afghanistan from the list would have been nice. Yes, democracy would be nice, but America would have accepted if Afghanistan had adopted a limited monarchy ran by a Grand Poobah. What we're about to end up with is the Taliban running the government again and probably handing a few of the recently vacated facilities to terrorists as new training camps.
jl2718 5y ago
The FOBs in Afghanistan felt like America to me. All the best years of my life were spent there. What I came back to was often unrecognizable. This feels a bit personal. Little anecdote: Bagram is quite large, and sometimes I used to run late at night into the places where nobody goes. Well, 'nobody' is a legend of some old contractors from back before the centralized personnel tracking systems, who had set up a shantytown in the junkyard in between contracts, and eventually just 'went native' and made it their home. I can't be sure, but there seemed to be signs of life in strange places. I would have bought property and settled in myself if I could. There were a lot of men I worked with who had been completely replaced by their families, stopped taking leave, and didn't want to go back, ever. I can relate. My fiancee died during my first tour, and out there I could be fully in love with a ghost; it was like a superpower. I think I needed a few more years of that.
- CalRobert 5y ago
  This is fascinating. If you wrote more I'd be interested in reading it.
- kilroy123 5y ago
  I don't fully understand. You wish to live there and stay on base? Or you wish to live in Afghanistan in general? I mean I've heard and seen pictures, it seems Afghanistan is beautiful nature wise.
  - YinLuck- 5y ago
    People rarely like or dislike a place for its nature, buildings, food, etc. That's all BS we tell ourselves. People connect with people. I can see how a military base is conducive to forming the kinds of personal bonds that are so rare in today's developed nations.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    After having traveled to the Middle East and Pakistan, I’d consider living in some of those places. I haven’t made it to Afghanistan yet. The people are super friendly. Pakistan’s hospitality culture is an order of magnitude more than anything I’ve experienced in the USA. I would probably want an air conditioner though!
technofiend 5y ago
I haven't played the game in years but the more obvious affect would be in ingress as fields come down as captured assets decay or are taken over. Ingress fields can be transcontinental.
everyone 5y ago
"a hacked version of the game in which the user changed the game’s GPS coordinates to Bagram." What? they need a different version of the game to do this? On Android anyone can can set their gps location to whatever they want. I do this to test stuff all the time.
tuukkah 5y ago
"battle digital monsters, who can be found using the app’s barebones version of Google Maps." Pokemon Go is based on OpenStreetMap since Dec 2017: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16725748/pokemon-go-map-changes-openstreetmap https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16725748/pokemon-go-map-ch...
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Reminds me of Apocalypse Now where colonel Kurtz explains the US will lose because in their minds they aren't fighting a war in Vietnam they're still in America. I realize nobody actually watches that movie anymore but I have and everything still fits.
- setBoolean 5y ago
  I was too young to see the original release in a movie theater and was all the more exited to catch up on this when the Final Cut was released. Truly a remarkable and timeless piece of cinema. The 4K Dolby Atmos/Vision version is also highly recommendable if you've never seen this gem.
icemelt8 5y ago
This article evoked so many emotions and feelings on different levels.
Goety 5y ago
I completely disagree with the decision to abandon the project in Afghanistan. We could have used a few decades to truly cement democracy and values that the US stands for. Leaving now is an incredible waste and lack of leadership.
silexia 5y ago
America’s policy in Afghanistan is absolutely horrifying. Invading them, then occupying and setting up a government, then abandoning it is a foolish waste of trillions of dollars. It is incredibly inhumane to all of the Afghanis who supported us and to all of the regular citizenry there. Remember all of those schools for girls and things like that? Those poor girls are now in for a short and tortured life. America should have done what Rome did and annexed Afghanistan and set it up as another state in our union. A permanent commitment would have paid off in the long run, but now we just have created a failed state that will fall into civil war.

187 points by lalaland1125 5y ago

The most interesting part is that this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence. I thought the placement of staff and personnel was supposed to be a much guarded secret.

bigdict 5y ago
Are you imagining the Taliban running around with iPhones, ordering mortar fire on areas where all valuable Pokemon have been plucked by US military?
- tyingq 5y ago
  It would probably be effective.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  Guerillas can't be choosers.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Why not? The despite most most depictions, the Taliban (and insurgents in general) are capable of impressive feats of engineering and electronic hacking. Seems like this would be pretty basic.
- contravariant 5y ago
  When you put it like that, that does sound like a risk I wouldn't be willing to take.
- aaron695 5y ago
  If you could IED a Pokemon Go site or base location and hurt or kill personnel, every soldier in the region would be told about it and it would affect their daily lives if they played the game. It would work. If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location. The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit. But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
- peteretep 5y ago
  The US has some very technically advanced adversaries who’d happily share their data with the Taliban
  - paganel 5y ago
    > who’d happily share their data with the Taliban Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
  - vkou 5y ago
    No, they currently don't, but this is a convenient boogieman to trot out whenever you need to drum up patriotism, or to accuse your political opponents of a lack of patriotism, or demand a higher defense budget or a justification for another extension of the forever-war in the Middle East. This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism. (The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  The article mentions using a hacked client to spoof your GPS location. You just need a computer that can run multiple android emulators. You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
- herbst 5y ago
  Don't you think they have smartphones too? Why would that be weird?
stickydink 5y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
throwanem 5y ago
Pretty sure the location of Bagram isn't.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  A Fitbit could reveal patrol routes and timings. Something like Pokemon Go could permit dropping something rare to attract people to a sighted-in spot you'd then drop mortars on.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    So could an interpreter. Also, Afghanistan has mountains and binoculars, neither of which requires guessing Air Force usernames on Strava or whatever. Not that you don't do anything you can that works in asymmetrical warfare or whatever the inside-the-beltway crowd prefers to call it these days, but it's hardly as if there's much in the way of a unique threat model here. In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      We weren't guessing usernames, lol — these assclowns had a public map — of every user's data!!
dfsegoat 5y ago
> this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0]. Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you? [0] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-go.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hanke
parsimo2010 5y ago
I don’t want to be too dismissive of your claims, because the sentiment is well placed- lots of apps present security concerns. But the location of every FOB and COP is/was well known to the locals. Hopefully Pokémon Go isn’t revealing the locations of more sensitive locations, but the people running clandestine operations aren’t letting E-3’s play games on a cell phone next to them. There may be other vulnerabilities but Pokemon Go isn’t too big of a problem since it only reveals where people have been congregating for a while. So it’s different than a terrorist revealing their camp’s location because Twitter geotagged a post.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Several bases I went to in the continental US had all the gyms/pokestops disabled after the game came out. I wonder if that was intentionally not done at Bagram for morale reasons?
Thorrez 5y ago
Yeah, fitness tracking app Strava revealed a secret army base: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
- akersten 5y ago
  It may not be your intention, but both this and the parent comment really misplace the blame. The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base. I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    News are terrible at that kind of writing. For instance with traffic incidents, it's always "a person getting hit by a car", not "a driver ramming their car into a person". So they write it like as if the driver had no agency, and the incident was completely non-avoidable and no one should stop to think about why it happened or how it can be prevented in the future. For good measurement they also use the word "accident" a lot. Wording matter.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Wording matter. " It does. "a person getting hit by a car" is quite neutral. "a driver ramming their car into a person"." This sounds intentional and shifts blame to the driver.
      - 5y ago

divs1210 5y ago

Is this satire? I read the whole thing and im very confused.

pm90 5y ago
I don’t think it is. As the US withdraws it’s troops after an incredible amount of time, the next few months will likely see many such stories about “life in Afghanistan” and what is being left behind.
culturestate 5y ago
Stars and Stripes isn't technically published by the Department of Defense, but it's as close as you can get while maintaining a veneer of editorial independence. I don't think this variety of satire is in their repertoire.
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
No, it is not satire. Apparently there were Pokemon Go gyms and Pokestops on overseas military bases. The last US military Pokemon Go players put their Pokemon in gyms before they left. Those Pokemon are still in those gyms when they would have normally been kicked out by other players. This means those Pokemon will stay in those gyms until another Pokemon Go player comes along which might be a very long time.
- divs1210 5y ago
  I read the entire thing. What about this? > Like other veterans, he said he is pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. But he hopes the situation improves one day, to the point he can once again play Pokemon Go there.
  - thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
    That pessimistic / optimistic view seems like a realistic, yet hopeful view of the country--still not satire: Pessimistic / realistic view: once the military coalition forces withdraw there will almost certainly be armed conflict, perhaps a full civil war. Optimistic / hopeful view: somehow Afghanistan will stabilize enough that people will be able to travel there as tourists.

Havoc 5y ago

Does this website also come in functional flavour? Reset scrolling to top of page every couple sec for me

pm90 5y ago

This is incredible. What happens if a country invaded another one and both has users on this game? Could future invasions be for digital assets rather than physical ones?

pmorici 5y ago
Have you ever seen the movie "Robot Jox"? it's about a future where conflict is settled using a match between two human piloted robots. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102800/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102800/
- dmix 5y ago
  The 80s left us so many hidden sci-fi gems. Thanks for the link. Needed some long weekend material.
remarkEon 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon Already been done, in 1967.

throw7 5y ago

"Digital rodents and abandoned Pokemon presided over the streets of Bagram Airfield..." Is this a joke? Satire? Why? I suppose trillions of dollars later this is what we deserve. Mission Accomplished.

krapp 5y ago
Maybe you should consider reading the article past the first sentence.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  Why? The entire article reads like that. What is one newsworthy thing you read in the article?
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Apparently, USA military is withdrawing from Afghanistan!
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    You expected "newsworthy" things in an article about pokemon go?
bostonsre 5y ago
Maybe it's trying to make a horrible shitty situation a little less bad. There was zero right answer in this war. We don't have some corrupt cabal of leaders in our government and military. I can't recall a single American that didn't want to go into there after 911. Our soldiers have been stuck there putting their lives on the line to keep the house of cards from falling down. This power vacuum will disappear with another incredibly violent war after we leave. There will be zero way for the current government to maintain control. I don't see how it could possibly avoid becoming an isis like state that will lash out with more terrorism and I'm afraid this won't be the last time American boots will be in country.
- 5y ago

redis_mlc 5y ago

For those who aren't aware of Bagram and other bases in this war ... Most of the US Army hid in large bases that were isolated from the actual war. Contractors made huge sums of money supplying what are essentially overseas cities that didn't contribute directly to fighting or controlling the area. So 40,000+ Americans lived in Bagram, most who never left the gates to even see Afghanistan. And after dusk, a dozen Taliban could take over the region outside the walls of Bagram. Or they could just wait for the Americans to leave the country. So playing Pokemon Go inside the walls of Bagram had no impact on the war, since what happened inside those walls had nothing to do with the war. It was a different story with the stories about fitness watches tracking outpost sentries and departures/arrivals from a few years ago.

rexf 5y ago

This page is not working well. As I'm trying to read the bottom of the article, it keeps jumping to the page top. As for the content, it doesn't seem newsworthy to me. PokeGo players know that your Pokemon will stay in a gym for a long time (indefinitely) if there's no rival team to knock it out.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago
There's a time limit. Eventually a "boss" will come to the gym and kick out the Pokémon you have earning coins there. I think it's 48 hours or so.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  Since when?
- xuki 5y ago
  There is no limit.
- rexf 5y ago
  Source? There is no 48 hour limit. Did you read the article? It's about US troop pokemon staying in gyms long after the personnel have left. Googling gave me this answer for how they stay in gyms: "Forever. Someone has to defeat it in battle to knock its motivation down to 0. Otherwise, it will never hit 0 through normal decay." https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/fjl4xz/how_long_will_my_pokemon_stay_in_a_gym_if/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/fjl4xz/how_long_...
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    https://www.imore.com/pokemon-go-gyms https://www.imore.com/pokemon-go-gyms I guess they call it "motivation decay". It's a mechanic where you have to feed your pokemon food to keep it motivated. You can feed it remotely, though. They can be fed up to 10 times with normal food, or an unlimited number of times with golden raspberries. EDIT: I was wrong about getting kicked when the boss came. So if you kept feeding your pokemon, you could keep it there indefinitely. My bad.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> "Bagram once had a thriving Pokemon Go community of troops, contractors and civilians who played the game while exercising and after work." This is why i dont like Stars and Stripes. Little disingenuous comments like this show thier priorities. Does anyone actually believe that soldiers didnt play during work? And, for a soldier, exercising is work. We know that a bunch of young men away from home with cellphones will play mobile games. We dont need to be told that they are all boys scouts who would never do so during office hours. Im more woried about the security implications. A camera app that involves soldiers wandering around a base chasing gps-tagged sprites is ripe for intelligence gathering. How secure was pokemon go at this time?

remarkEon 5y ago

There was an instagram post I saw (one of the boys sent it to me, I'm not a social media guy) that showed the Taliban walking through our old FOB in Afghanistan. What was odd to me about seeing that is I really had no emotional response to it. I thought I would, but I just ... didn't care anymore. Over the last few weeks I've also been sent article after article about the withdrawal from other friends (not veterans) who are deep in policy circles, about how this or that thing will mean this or that thing for Afghanistan. Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do. My brother today asked me if I had an opinion on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when we did our weekly gaming session (tonight was Hearts Of Iron), and I told him "no, why would I? The war was over years before I even got there".

Seattle3503 5y ago
For the past 20 years we have been focused on what it costs us to remain. Leaving has shown the cost to others for us to go. No matter what you think we should do, that cost is a bitter pill to swallow.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Not when I step over homeless/needy Americans. Don't get me wrong, it's sad, but the USA is not what it used to be, and we need to target our borrowed money resources. (I have no idea as to the real reason we stayed so long there. I'm beginning to think it was military practice. I wouldn't be suprised if some defense guy said, we have to build up our the iron in our military in order to keep our lead on China's expanding fleet of war machines. (I used "iron" because I'm lazy, and figured it was ok because of what Xi just said.)
parsimo2010 5y ago
> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? I don’t think too many people care out of compassion for individual Afghans, but the original reason we “liberated“ them was because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for Al Qaeda to train and launch terrorist attacks. The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs and keep terrorists from operating in its country. There are many Americans that care that after 20 years the Taliban will take over again shortly after the troops are gone. Nothing changed, the next OBL could be operating out of Afghanistan and Americans got nothing for their 20 years of wasted tax money except thousands of casualties and a lot of broken families. So I don’t know if too many Americans care exactly which government Afghanistan adopts, but I’m pretty sure anyone paying attention is disappointed that they didn’t get literally anything different. Edit: to be clear, this wasn't me critiquing the plan, saying whether it would or wouldn't work. This was me responding to GP's prompt about whether America cared about what style of government Afghanistan adopted. Yes America cares, not so much about the style of government but about the outcome. They were told that Afghanistan was going to get a new government that wouldn't allow terrorists free reign to operate as they please; as a result America and the world would be safer. They didn't get that. Yes there are other places that terrorists could operate from, but removing Afghanistan from the list would have been nice. Yes, democracy would be nice, but America would have accepted if Afghanistan had adopted a limited monarchy ran by a Grand Poobah. What we're about to end up with is the Taliban running the government again and probably handing a few of the recently vacated facilities to terrorists as new training camps.

jl2718 5y ago

The FOBs in Afghanistan felt like America to me. All the best years of my life were spent there. What I came back to was often unrecognizable. This feels a bit personal. Little anecdote: Bagram is quite large, and sometimes I used to run late at night into the places where nobody goes. Well, 'nobody' is a legend of some old contractors from back before the centralized personnel tracking systems, who had set up a shantytown in the junkyard in between contracts, and eventually just 'went native' and made it their home. I can't be sure, but there seemed to be signs of life in strange places. I would have bought property and settled in myself if I could. There were a lot of men I worked with who had been completely replaced by their families, stopped taking leave, and didn't want to go back, ever. I can relate. My fiancee died during my first tour, and out there I could be fully in love with a ghost; it was like a superpower. I think I needed a few more years of that.

CalRobert 5y ago
This is fascinating. If you wrote more I'd be interested in reading it.
kilroy123 5y ago
I don't fully understand. You wish to live there and stay on base? Or you wish to live in Afghanistan in general? I mean I've heard and seen pictures, it seems Afghanistan is beautiful nature wise.
- YinLuck- 5y ago
  People rarely like or dislike a place for its nature, buildings, food, etc. That's all BS we tell ourselves. People connect with people. I can see how a military base is conducive to forming the kinds of personal bonds that are so rare in today's developed nations.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  After having traveled to the Middle East and Pakistan, I’d consider living in some of those places. I haven’t made it to Afghanistan yet. The people are super friendly. Pakistan’s hospitality culture is an order of magnitude more than anything I’ve experienced in the USA. I would probably want an air conditioner though!

technofiend 5y ago

I haven't played the game in years but the more obvious affect would be in ingress as fields come down as captured assets decay or are taken over. Ingress fields can be transcontinental.

everyone 5y ago

"a hacked version of the game in which the user changed the game’s GPS coordinates to Bagram." What? they need a different version of the game to do this? On Android anyone can can set their gps location to whatever they want. I do this to test stuff all the time.

tuukkah 5y ago

"battle digital monsters, who can be found using the app’s barebones version of Google Maps." Pokemon Go is based on OpenStreetMap since Dec 2017: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16725748/pokemon-go-map-changes-openstreetmap https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16725748/pokemon-go-map-ch...

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Reminds me of Apocalypse Now where colonel Kurtz explains the US will lose because in their minds they aren't fighting a war in Vietnam they're still in America. I realize nobody actually watches that movie anymore but I have and everything still fits.

setBoolean 5y ago
I was too young to see the original release in a movie theater and was all the more exited to catch up on this when the Final Cut was released. Truly a remarkable and timeless piece of cinema. The 4K Dolby Atmos/Vision version is also highly recommendable if you've never seen this gem.

icemelt8 5y ago

This article evoked so many emotions and feelings on different levels.

Goety 5y ago

I completely disagree with the decision to abandon the project in Afghanistan. We could have used a few decades to truly cement democracy and values that the US stands for. Leaving now is an incredible waste and lack of leadership.

silexia 5y ago

America’s policy in Afghanistan is absolutely horrifying. Invading them, then occupying and setting up a government, then abandoning it is a foolish waste of trillions of dollars. It is incredibly inhumane to all of the Afghanis who supported us and to all of the regular citizenry there. Remember all of those schools for girls and things like that? Those poor girls are now in for a short and tortured life. America should have done what Rome did and annexed Afghanistan and set it up as another state in our union. A permanent commitment would have paid off in the long run, but now we just have created a failed state that will fall into civil war.