A US military officer quoted in the excellent report by the International Crisis Group into Taleban propaganda operations released a few days ago says, “unfortunately, we tend to view information operations as supplementing kinetic (fighting) operations. For the Taleban, however, information objectives tend to drive kinetic operations ... virtually every kinetic operation they undertake is specifically designed to influence attitudes or perceptions”.
This is strategic thought of extreme novelty, and in no small way helps explain the relative success of the Taleban so far in Afghanistan. In terms of a communication strategy it certainly goes well beyond the clumsy international coalition efforts which have remained largely focused on the international audience. Western press officers’ ability to talk to the Afghan public is hindered by their minimal language skills and the cultural gaps that separate them, and remains very limited.
Equally, the idea that military operations should be decided primarily according to their effect on populations and thus should be determined to a significant degree by the exigencies of modern media technology and by journalists is anathema to most Western soldiers, most of whom see the press as a necessary evil at best.
The Taleban by contrast are quite happy to shape their military strikes according to the media demand. They know that spectacular attacks such as that on Kabul’s Serena hotel or the repeated attempts on President Karzai’s life are effective. Their day-to-day media operation targets four audiences — international Western, international Islamic, local and regional — in at least five different languages. They are careful to avoid statements that play on Afghanistan’s complex identity politics — though support for the movement remains overwhelmingly drawn from the Sunni Pashtun tribes and the history of the Taleban is replete with examples of persecution of Shiites or Afghanistan’s less numerous ethnic minorities.
As the ICG report comments, particularly given the exaggerated nature of many of the Taleban’s claims, the result is that though “out of power and lacking control over territory” the Taleban “have proved adept at projecting themselves as stronger than it is in terms of numbers and resources”. This conjuring trick has been as effective in the West as it has at home.
The second important point made by the ICG report: That the Taleban are far from homogeneous. These splits go way beyond the tripartite division into tiers one to three that the coalition uses.
When on the ground, and out from behind the blast walls around the Western compounds, this becomes very obvious. A day or so in Kandahar last year spent convinced me that international troops were battling a range of different “insurgencies”, not a single armed group. So the sort of detailed reading that the ICG has given Taleban statements reveal many splits. A statement from the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” announcing the “dismissal” of Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, a senior and particularly brutal commander, for disobedience, is followed almost immediately by another spokesman declaring that his boss “had never been sacked” and that the earlier statement had been part of “a conspiracy by some elements within the Taleban movement (who) want to weaken the Taleban movement”.
