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It's Af-Pak competition time!
Since ISAF and the Pakistani forces are not doing so well at countering the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Tehreek-e-Taliban in Pakistan, it seems the two organisations have decided to compete with each other instead.
On Monday, the Taliban launched the kind of attack in Kabul that Pakistan has seen plenty of in recent months. Multiple attackers, suicide bombers, gunmen, co-ordination. Yep, it could have been Rawalpindi, Lahore or even Mumbai. The Afghans blamed the Pakistanis, as did the Indians. But amid the finger pointing, Londonstani is thinking that it's very possible that the groups carrying out these attacks are developing, deploying and then sharing tactics like its going out of fashion - even if they are officially meant to not like each other. This is all slightly alarming and suggests they aren't under the kind of pressure that ISAF forces and the Pakistanis have suggested.
If Londonstani were a Taliban commander he'd be taking it easy right now (maybe figuring out how to run double agent operations). "The information operations are going well. The seeds have been planted and the vicious circle is rolling in the right direction. The Americans and the British are running in circles while throwing money in the air and the Pakistanis are increasingly seeing the errors of their corrupt, slave rulers. All the while, the Muslim world is seeing how we take on a regional power and a superpower all at the same time. Now what? volleyball? stolen humvee racing? I know, I'll show that annoying arse Hakimullah that he's not the only one that can make like the action movies."
UPDATE: The BBC's John Simpson sums it up well with this comment: "...there are other ways to win a war than simply fighting. And persuading the world that the Taliban can strike when and how they want is one of them."... Back to the communications and comprehensive approach discussion.
"The BBC's John Simpson sums
"The BBC's John Simpson sums it up well with this comment: "...there are other ways to win a war than simply fighting. And persuading the world that the Taliban can strike when and how they want is one of them."... Back to the communications and comprehensive approach discussion."
That *is* fighting. It's simply not fighting when one is at a disadvantage. And any US fighter who calls in air support or artillery, or uses nigh vision devices, or a UAV, or an armored vehicle is doing the same thing, just from the opposite end of the resource spectrum.
It never ceases to amaze me that some people still haven't gotten the basic idea of guerrilla warfare.
OOh ! You are Awful.but I
OOh ! You are Awful.but I like you!
It still pains me to see
It still pains me to see that the western military doesnt understand the concept "Battle of Narratives". it may be the only valuable thing that post-modernism has brought to the military tradition. Of course the logsitic and operative guys from across the mosques are networking, even if the mullahs are not. WTF? Is this really a newsflash to the pundits?
I read Hitchens over at Michaeltotten.com and I just want to weep.
Reading the Guardian's
Reading the Guardian's account of the multi- attacks in Kabul I got the impression that the Afghan Security Forces handled it all, and took back control after 4 hours? Is this correct? If so, wouldn't this be a big tick for the ASF?
Also the reported casualties were not of the size that the attackers would have been hoping for . Again down to the ASF prompt response?
And also ... John Simpson is
And also ... John Simpson is all very well, but how do you persuade the world via a media obsessed with a failure narrative including and especially his own outfit? That is, short of bringing Alistair Campbell out of retirement and putting him in charge of info?
The fact is, as Iraq demonstrated, the only effective "persuasion" is to mount a Coin operation, and train the local security forces, embed with them and get them to a standard where they are killing enough of the enemy to develop pride in their own performance. That, and monotonously wiping out enough of the enemy yourself via drones, airstrikes etc without causing serious civilian casualties.
Once the enemy is defeated, then the media closes its bureaus and goes off to wherever it can report the next failure. Which will no doubt be Yemen and then Somalia ...
Right on cue - Alistair
Right on cue - Alistair Campbell writes in the Financial Times (I musta been channelling)
"Britain is at war. It does not feel like it for a population which, the young included, has its concept of war defined largely by World War 2, with its millions of deaths, wailing sirens, bombs falling on London, ration books, and every town and village losing sons. But war it is.
It feels like it in the town of Wootton Bassett on days when bodies come home from Afghanistan and crowds line the main street to pay their respects. But there too, most days, life goes on as normal.
Life is anything but normal for the soldiers involved in often vicious fighting, but other than when a soldier is killed, or a suicide bomber strikes, we seem to hear little of what is happening on the front line. 'The family has been informed' has become the most regularly used line in war reporting. Other topics crowd in and crowd Afghanistan from the public arena. The weather. Pre-election skirmishing. The Iraq inquiry. The Haiti earthquake. The latest celebrity frenzy.
Amid the relative quiet at home while this noisy and difficult war rages 3500 miles away, two things start to happen. One, as a country we begin to think the war is less important to our security than it is. Two, people forget its central purpose and wonder - a question heard all too often - what on earth are we doing there?
Giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry in London last week, when asked what lessons I thought we should learn, I expressed my fear that because of the controversies surrounding the communication of the Iraq war, we had already learned the wrong lessons for our handling of Afghanistan. Political and military leaders know why we are there - there are key strategic and security issues involved. But if large members of the public do not, that is a failure of strategic communications, not military planning or execution. Despite the controversies of Iraq, I strongly believe that the job of big picture communication is more not less important. The public need for understanding is as great as ever. But the explanations are not being heard at anything like the volume they should be.
I understand why Conservative leader David Cameron, for short term political capital, says there will be no repeat of so-called 'dodgy dossiers'. But he is wrong if he thinks the public, parliamentarians or media will go back to being told decisions are made in part with the help of intelligence material without being told what it is. He should take care not to let this become one more factor in making it impossible for a future generation of leaders - including him should he become prime minister - to take difficult and controversial decisions.
If politicians constantly apologise for being in politics, if all communications is seen as spin, if much of the mass media show only the bad side of a story, and if senior military brief against the Chief of Defence Staff, their ministerial boss, and his shadow, as is happening all too regularly, it does not build the platform needed for clear and strong communications when we are at war.
So, what should we be learning instead? First, take strategic communications seriously. When I spoke at a recent Nato conference for military leaders, the generals were encouraged, if confused by the attempt to signal an exit date when none can confidently be predicted, by Barack Obama's decision to send an extra 30,000 troops. They felt they now had what they needed militarily to fight the Taliban and choke off AL Qaida at one of its main sources. But one after another, including people who have given evidence to the Iraq inquiry, they complained about poor strategic communications. They saw this as critical not just because of the risk of losing support at home, but also because of the need for clarity of purpose and objective, and indeed good morale, on the ground.
Everyone understands a military campaign must be structured and disciplined, with everyone knowing their part. It is no different for comms. In military strategy, you must make the weather. It is the same in comms. The agenda has to be set by those communicating, not those opposing or covering you.
Second, in a multinational alliance, you have to internationalise communications so that key objectives and strategies can be communicated across time zones and political systems. The Blair government's thinking on this deepened with Kosovo, when Nato forces took on Slobodan Milosevic over his attempted ‘ethnic cleansing' in 1999. We all made assumptions about Nato. It is a great brand, but personnel levels and structures made for normal times were inadequate. There came a point when President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair decided that though Nato v Belgrade might be a one-sided military contest, the PR battle was in danger of being lost by democracies with liberal media systems to a dictatorship with total control of his. There was too much answering to national, not overall interests, and military/civilian co-ordination was poor.
So we agreed a system that no major news line would be deployed without the agreement of a small media team, on behalf of their leaders. We convened twice daily international conference calls; issued no reaction to breaking news without a call to agree lines and shared access to each other's knowledge. Those systems were adapted for use after the September 11 attacks and in the Iraq war, successfully in the build-up and invasion (the controversies came later), less so in the aftermath. Military leaders in Kosovo later said it was only when these international systems of media management were in place that they could focus fully on the military mission.
It was hard to discern that co-ordinated approach in the run-up to the Afghan surge being announced, or after it. The surge should have been followed by sustained communications across the alliance. That job is not being done with the vigour and consistency that it should, and the systems of co-ordination have weakened since Iraq.
Third, there is a need for a constant focus on the strategic and security reasons for the war and on the big picture. It is not easy when our media tends to assume moral equivalence between democracy and terror/dictatorship, and the dictatorships have the inbuilt advantage of being able to say whatever they like - whether Milosevic claiming we had napalmed schools, or Chemical Ali denying Iraq had ever used chemical weapons. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein followed western media closely and used it to support his own PR campaign. In Afghanistan, the enemy will exploit any negative shifts in public opinion. In my experience, whatever the media noise, people will listen to leaders and absorb more complicated messages over time. But the arguments have to be put out there consistently.
This focus on strategic communications is even tougher in an era of the internet and 24-7 media, in which embedded reporters send only snapshots of the war and every casualty is reported as a news-leading event; the media is eager to cover "setbacks" whilst ignoring key steps forward; anyone with a computer or a camera is able to become a reporter or a commentator; there is a virtual fusion of news and comment and our enemies are sophisticated at exploiting our media, so that terror becomes our fault not their wickedness. Osama bin Laden can send a video from a cave and it is seen as genius public relations, yet when we explain why we are worried about a threat, it is denounced as spin.
But sustained and clear communication explaining why our troops are there, what they are doing day by day, week by week, and to what effect, is essential if we are to maintain the support required for a struggle that may take years to complete. This is a different kind of war. Winning requires a united international front, keeping public support, sticking to the mission despite the setbacks - that is what strategic communications is about.
The international conference on Afghanistan, and now also Yemen, called for by prime minister Gordon Brown and due to meet in London on January 28, is welcome. What matters most is agreeing the military and political strategies going forward. How that is all then communicated should also be high up the agenda.
Accusations that this puts spin before soldiering should be ignored. Soldiers win wars. Failure in the battle for hearts and minds can lose them. That applies equally, albeit in different ways and sometimes with different messages from the same strategy, to hearts and minds on the home front, in Afghanistan, and indeed in all countries where extremists hope that by spreading a fundamentalist view of Islam they can force out the US and its allies from engagement, a result which would render more easy the Talebanisation of those countries, with potentially devastating consequences for them and us. It is a communications problem requiring urgent fixing, but it is fixing that can, and should, be done."
cross posting three comments
cross posting three comments from LWJ, the context is obvious:
I think the US leadership has acted as "enablers' in this unfortunate situation. I think it would have been MUCH much better for the people of Pakistan if the US had been more direct and clear about what it wants and why. For once, the US is actually trying to do something that would BENEFIT the common people of south asia if it could work. Unfortunately, most American politicians are so used to lying to third world countries, they have missed an opportunity where the truth is both in the US interest AND in the interests of the common people of the region. Its a sad situation, but it can still be saved. The hard fact is that Pakistan's elite actually needs peace with India, peace with Afghanistan and peace with the US and cannot afford to live like an international pariah dependent on whatever their BFFs in the PLA chose to fork over. The whole bluff would fall apart in two days, but thanks to the "moral hazard" of percieved indispensability, the US has encouraged them to raise their stake to suicidal levels...when the bluff is called, they will fall flat on their face and hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians and Pakistanis and Afghanis will suffer for generations...its very sad.
Moral hazard occurs when a party insulated from risk may behave differently than it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk.
The Pakistani army high command had developed a certain worldview (or rather, regional view) that was a recipe for disaster long before 9-11 brought matters to a head. After 9-11, there was a window of opportunity when the non-jihadi leadership of the army (it is my view that the majority of senior officers are not ideologically fully jihadist, but were used by the smaller jihadist core, who took advantage of their stupidity and tunnel vision regarding India, and so on) could have been turned and made to really switch to a different and less disastrous paradigm. But a lot of the conversation with the US since then has allowed them (encouraged them?) to think they hold more cards than they do. It has encouraged them to overestimate their leverage. The fact is, they will still have to do all the things they needed to do in 2001 (dump the jihadists, make peace with India, stop supporting the taliban, basically give up the jihadi paradigm, etc) but its been made more difficult than it should have been, public opinion has been fed fantasies that will encourage foolish over-reaching, hard decisions have been made harder. It would have been better to be clearer and PUBLICLY clearer about what is going on..
This is part of what I mean by the US having acted as an "enabler" for the worst addictions of the Pakistani army. After 9-11, the US (if its war on terror is actually what it is supposed to be) should have been able to see that Pakistan's official romance with jihadist/salafist groups was based less on any notion of Islamic solidarity and more on a certain anti-Indian mindset that blinded the army leadership to the other implications of jihadism. If that especially paranoid and deluded mindset had been altered (and it could have been, with a little hand holding and a little tough love), then the jihadist insurgency would be an irritant, but nowhere near the problem it has become in Pakistan's northwest. And Pakistan could have been cooperating in the new Afghan regime rather than keeping its powder dry for the day the infidels leave and the games begin again in earnest. Instead, the US allowed Pakistan to separate its anti-indian narrative from the jihadist narrative by pretending that the worst jihadi atrocities are all actually Indian plots against Pakistan. This may seem like a good idea in the short term (it gets them to fight the terrorists?) but overall its a terrible idea because it keeps the paranoid delusions that led to the army's jihadist phase firmly in place and simply postpones the day when everything will go back to status quo ante....
Maybe that IS the CIA's plan. What do I know. But from afar, it certainly does not look very smart to be encouraging this nonsense in any way....
I doubt the CIA has a plan.
I doubt the CIA has a plan. BTW their not the plans guys, really. They're the intel (sometimes) and small amounts of covert ops (providing no one leaks).
Jack Ripper had a plan. Curtis LeMay had a plan. Bomber Harris had a plan. And that plan works. Oh the enemy has a plan too, and they're schemes work.
What is actually happening - all parties except the enemy are attempting to muddle thru, and failing at it.
Innocent people: need to get the fuck out of South Asia. They'd be happier and safer somewhere else.
Jack, I hope you are wrong
Jack, I hope you are wrong and better sense prevails. Over a billion people live there, where else can they go? Just a few generals in Pakistan have to figure out what is coming down the pike and things can change for the better. On the other hand, if they are encouraged to stay in their echo chamber, they are going to miscalculate on an epic scale and the disaster will make everything that has happened in the past look like a sunday picnic....For God's sake, they probably have 50 nuclear bombs!
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