The Arab Spring showed the world how social media can help organize mass political dissent. In the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, single issues coalesced online into far broader and diverse campaigns that toppled ruling regimes. Recently, outside of the Arab world, discriminatory government policies  in Iran against Afghans have come to light. Decried by critics as overt state-backed racism, it is a scandalous hot-button issue that the rulers of the “Islamic Republic” have little chance of defending.  Already a nascent but growing social media campaign has emerged to condemn it and may soon tap into broader popular grievances against the entire regime.

“We are all Afghans” is the new rally cry among Iranian and Afghan social media users, shocked by recent discriminatory Iranian government policies against the over two million Afghans living in Iran. A Facebook page with over 20,000 members now exists. And yes, there are protests planned. Iran’s recent Oscar-winning filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi, is speaking out too.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has hardly dispelled these growing charges of racism either. On the contrary, his recent speeches have contained overt declarations of Persian supremacy. The regime of the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” whose clerical leadership claims the mantle of the Prophet Muhammad (an Arab) and his family, is baring an increasing resemblance to the resurgent Neo-Fascist parties of Europe. And it is ironic that the hated Shah Reza Pahlavi regime, overthrown by the 1979 Revolution, was once fiercely condemned by Shiite clerics for emphasizing a Persian identity for Iran instead of an Islamic one.

The BBC reports that the deputy governor-general of Iran’s northern Mazandaran Province announced late last month that all Afghans must leave the province  irrespective of their legal status by July 2 (meaning it’s not an illegal immigration issue). The deputy governor has further warned the public that offering employment or any kind of assistance to Afghans is a crime “punishable by the full force of the law.” He also asserted the validity of a law passed in 2006 that made marriage between Iranian women and Afghan men illegal. Meanwhile, last month in Isfahan, Afghans were banned by officials from attending Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations in a public park because they “caused insecurity.”

One Iranian blogger, suggesting a more pervasive racism beyond Iranian government institutions, recently posted photos of signs in Iran that ban the use of facilities by Afghans or dictate segregated facilities for Afghans. Still another Iranian blogger compared recent events to the rise of Le Pen’s anti-immigrant Front National  party in France and lamented the racism in Iran by stating: “[We tell Westerners that] we are from the land of Cyrus the Great, but we think Afghans are murderers, Arabs are savages, Turks are naive and Blacks smell.”

Responses to the controversy from officials in Iran’s “Islamic” government have ranged from silence and denial to speeches glorifying the supremacy of the Persian people among the nations of the earth. Take, for instance, a recent speech (broadcast on state television) by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on April 11, 2012, in the province of Hormozgan. In the speech, he states:

Inside Iran, some ask me why I always speak about Iran. They say this is, I do not know, nationalism, ethnic racism, and so forth. Such talk is baseless. Iran is not an ethnos. Iran is a culture, vision, ethics, and ideology. . . . You look for people similar to our people in other countries. Look around the borders and compare with neighbors, and you will see the difference. There is a huge difference. This difference does not mean arrogance and vanity. It is first of all a divine gift, the glorification of the divine gift. It points to a mission [for our people].

Ahmadinejad goes onto boldly claim that: If you take away the share of the Iranian nation from human civilization, nothing will be left. In support of his ethnocentric narrative, Ahmadinejad sprinkles his speech with a range of anecdotal stories. In one instance, he recounts how extensively he has traveled, visiting more places in Iran than anyone else. Thanks to his travels, he claims, he has seen firsthand that “the best people of the world are living in Iran today.” He also lists some recent achievements of Iran, claiming in the vaguest terms that Iran has improved “nanotechnologies and biotechnologies,” making it “among the few top countries in the world.” And finally he recounts a story that seems to be a hadith from the Prophet Muhammad (again, an Arab), although I am personally unfamiliar with it. It relates that the Prophet once told his followers that “Iranians will [one day] guide and lead, and introduce the truth of Islam to the world.” This, Ahmadinejad says, proves that Iranians have a divinely decreed mission to lead the world (and they must act on it).

This rhetoric of racial or ethnic pride and supremacy goes entirely against Islamic ideals about the equality and universal brotherhood of all Muslims as a single ummah. And yes, I do mean ideals. On an everyday level, one can find examples of racism and prejudice in every Muslim country in the world, just as one can find it in any other country, including the United States of America. But what makes this case so peculiar is that most countries don’t claim to be an “Islamic Republic” or a righteous state representing God’s Mahdi on earth. Moral condemnation aside, it is a tremendous blunder for the theocratic regime to indulge in this sort of racist rhetoric and behavior. And I cannot see how the “Great Satan” or the “Zionist entity” can be blamed for this one. At the very least, Iran’s treatment of its Afghans, many of whom arrived as refugees during the Soviet invasion, will only further alienate its Sunni neighbors and produce further international isolation.

More importantly though, recent events in mind, I have to wonder if the “We are All Afghans” movement might coalesce into something much more. After all,  there is no shortage of grievances among the Iranian populace. Iran’s nuclear program has yet to produce anything but international tensions and sanctions. And the tragic martyrdom of Neda Agha Soltan amidst the 2009 election scandal has yet to be forgotten, despite the regime’s best efforts. Sound far-fetched? Perhaps, but who would have thought that a fatal case of police brutality in Alexandria, Egypt, would have led to the “We are all Khaled Saeed” campaign that grew into a popular revolution that overthrew the US-backed Mubarak regime? Perhaps there’s a “Persian Spring” on the horizon after all.

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The CSC has an article in the current issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism on casualty inflation by the Taliban in the Afghanistan conflict.  The abstract follows, and the full text is available here (subscription).

Cooking the Books: Strategic Inflation of Casualty Reports by Extremists in the Afghanistan Conflict

Chris Lundry, Steven R. Corman, R. Bennett Furlow, & Kirk W. Errickson

Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere are exaggerating their successes in inflicting casualties on American and other International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces. This article quantifies the exaggeration for the month of November 2010, putting the claimed casualty rate at approximately one-half battalion per month. It provides an analysis of how and why this is occurring, and links this extremist strategic communication effort to dominant historical master narratives in the region that may produce sympathy among intended recipients of the messages. The authors argue that these measures undertaken by the extremists can be countered successfully through the use of similar story forms, more timely reporting, use of side-by-side comparisons, and use of similar reporting venues. These steps could challenge the credibility of the Taliban reports, reduce sympathy, and diminish potential recruitment.

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It did not take long for the images of the US Marines urinating on corpses of Taliban fighters to go viral. A moment of lapsed judgment will circulate as long as anyone is interested in seeing it, certainly long after short attention spans move on to other things and the fallout – including, presumably, disciplinary actions for the soldiers – settles.

Predictably, extremist sites have been all over this. In Indonesia, the story has run on Voice of al Islam, Hidayatullah, ar Rahmah, and others. Voice of al Islam made a clever play on words in their headline; they cited the Council on American-Islamic Relations by using its acronym CAIR, which means “liquid” in Indonesia. The headline “CAIR Kutuk Penodaan Mayat Anggota Taliban oleh Marinir AS” means “CAIR condemns the desecration of Taliban Corpses by US Marines,” but it could be read “Accursed Liquid Desecrates the Taliban corpses by US Marines.” The story itself is a pretty straightforward account of CAIR’s reaction – writing to secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, issuing a condemnation, and hoping for justice.

VOI’s subsequent post ratchets up the rhetoric, however. “Animals! American Marines Piss on Taliban Mujahidin.” The story quotes Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, who stated that “actions such as this make the Taliban want to continue to attack America.” For emphasis, the quote was highlighted and used as a pull quote in the text. The behavior is condemned as abominable, wild, and animalistic.

Ar Rahmah’s coverage invokes the Crusader master narrative, linking the act to centuries of perceived conflict and occupation. The headline quotes Taliban Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed’s statement that there are hundreds of similar unreported cases.

The story is also being repeated in the Arabic-speaking world. The bladialyoum blog embedded the video, and refers to the soldiers as barbarians, condemning the occupation of Muslims lands, and linking the act to other perceived acts of aggression against the Muslim world. In this post on Arabic.rt, comments condemn the act, and link it to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed denounced the act as “barbaric.”

That extremist sites are reporting this story should come as no surprise, nor should it be surprising that mainstream media outlets are covering it as well. In Indonesia, for example, both English language dailies – the Jakarta Post and the Jakarta Globe – ran stories, as did most Indonesian language outlets such as Kompas, which embedded a link to the video on its website. Al Jazeera has been following the story, and updating it as details emerge (such as this report about the identification of US soldiers). These mainstream outlets reach exponentially more readers, and their coverage is nearly identical to the extremists, minus the hyperbole and the explicit anti-Americanism.

Not to say that those interested in combating extremism shouldn’t be paying attention to the extremist sites, but the readers of the mainstream sites are important too. Most of those few who follow the extremist sites have already chosen sides, but many in the mainstream media audience are “middle ground” observers, who may not have a strong opinion about the conflict. Stories such as this may push them toward sympathizing or even supporting extremists.

The story also shows the importance of non-verbal communication in the digital age. The despicable act itself was communication, but seeing and hearing it for oneself has much more of an impact than simply reading about it. Will the images inspire copycats and image manipulators in the same way the infamous images from the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib did? Will they become memes? Cartoon parodies have popped up, in both liberal and (neo)conservative media.

Domestic reaction to the images is mixed. Public officials and military spokespeople are nearly unanimous in their condemnation. So are many among the commentators on mainstream new sites. But many other sources  are not, arguing, essentially, that it is “no big deal.” Floundering presidential candidate Rick Perry’ argued, essentially, that it was no big deal, and criticized President Obama’s (and just about every other public figure’s) reaction. Islamist sites duly reported Perry’s words, and continue to follow the story, reporting on new details such as the identification of the soldiers.

It is, however a “big deal.” The internet age has drastically changed strategic communication, which is why it’s unfathomable that these soldiers thought it was a good idea to film this. As Robert Wright in the Atlantic writes in “The Banality of Urination,” that the act itself was committed is not particularly surprising:

You send hordes of young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, and the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface–and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.

It is, rather, the “transparency of war” and the danger that the act will spread hatred and revulsion among those who view it.

The attention surrounding this act gives the extremists symbolic ammunition and may make the “middle ground” readers forget about the Taliban’s horrendous atrocities, such as their bombings of weddings, volleyball games, and other events that kill Muslims, or training children to behead their enemies. It may appear that they have gained the “moral high ground” for a brief period. Swift and public disciplining of those responsible may help reduce the fallout, but as the conflict in Afghanistan winds down, this is another reminder why the US needs to go to great lengths to try to minimize negative perceptions in the Muslim world.

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Have you seen this picture?

Last Friday the always-excellent PBS Newshour ran a story that left me floored.  It featured interviews with several ordinary Afghans who were handed pictures of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. Of a dozen or so people asked, only one man (a police chief in Marjah) knew the story behind the pictures. All but one person said they had never seen the pictures before and did not know what they represented.

The conclusion of the segment mentioned a report published last November by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS).  It is odd that we were not previously aware of this report, and that it seems not to have gotten much play anywhere in the strategic communication blogosphere. It paints a concise picture of our narrative problems in Afghanistan.

One thousand participants from Helmand and Kandahar provinces were shown pictures of the 9/11 attacks, and asked if they recognized the pictures. About two-thirds said yes.

But then they were read the following story of the 9/11 attacks:

On September 11 2001, Al Qaeda attackers hijacked planes in the United States which were full of ordinary passengers, including women and children. They flew these planes, full of people, into two tall buildings in the city of New York. They destroyed both buildings, which were full of ordinary people. The attacks killed 3000 innocent citizens, including Muslims. They were organised and directed by Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, who was then living in Afghanistan protected by the Taliban government. The American government asked the Taliban to hand over Osama Bin Laden. They refused, so the Americans and their allies NATO attacked the Taliban, and came into Afghanistan to look for Osama Bin Laden and overthrew the Taliban.

When asked “Did you know about this event which the foreigners call 9/11?” only 8% responded “yes,” 11% responded “no,” and 81% responded “no answer/don’t know.”

There could hardly be a more stark illustration of the essential strategic communication problem of the Afghan conflict: Huge swaths of the population have seen foreign troops enter their land and launch attacks for 10 years but seem to have no idea why they are there. Since nature abhors a narrative vacuum, this is fertile ground for the development of alternative stories about what we are doing there.  These integrate to form a narrative that is not favorable to our interests.

In the same study ICOS asked participants: “Why do you think the foreigners are here?”  Here is a graphic I produced based on a table from their report (click to view full-size):

Half of respondents either don’t know why we are there or think it is for “evil” reasons–my term for a set of responses.  Only half think we are there for benign reasons (consistent with the narrative we favor).

Looking at the breakdown on the right, we see that of the respondents who see “evil” motives, around three-quarters believe we are there to create mayhem (terrorism?).  A bright spot is that few participants think we are there to destroy Islam, but the “evil” set overall is consistent with our opponents’ narrative that we are crusaders.

Among other interesting results in the report is the belief that foreign forces kill around two times as many civilians as the Taliban.  These figures are almost exactly opposite those released by UNAMA at around the same time, which show that anti-government forces kill twice as many civilians as pro-government forces (i.e. ISAF plus the Afghan military).  As I have argued before, we are missing a significant opportunity by allowing such beliefs to persist.

The ICOS study shows, and the more recent PBS interviews reiterate, that our narrative in Afghanistan remains remarkably murky.   Only a small number of people in that country know the story of 9/11.  As for why we are there, the reason that actually aligns with our domestic narrative–namely that we are there for self-defense–is believed by only one out of six respondents.  Over twice that many believe we are there for reasons that align with our opponents’ “crusader” narrative, and that we are killing most of the civilians.

This makes it pretty easy to understand why people there would support an insurgency.  As the tenth anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan approaches, we still have a lot of  ‘splaining to do.

Update 9/7/2011

A colleague from the UK informs me that a book just published by Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (Yale, August 2011) has a whole chapter on this subject and that the book “makes very sober reading.” Here is a reviewer who says it is “one of the most upsetting books I have read about Britain’s part in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Update 9/9/2011

A colleague forwarded me this link to a related story that ran yesterday on National Public Radio.

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President Obama’s speech from the Oval Office last night announced the end of combat operations in Iraq. The speech was largely driven by his choice of a defining metaphor:

“We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home” . . . “Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.”

But as I’ll explain, that page-turning metaphor fails to deliver the closure that is so important to a good narrative.

Ever since he assumed the presidency, I have been following Obama’s “narrative gap” on matters related to the conflict formerly known as “the global war on terror.” His speech in Cairo seemed like a good start for defining a new beginning in our relations with Muslims and with the Middle East.

Yet I found his subsequent speech at West Point to be a narrative failure. It neither advanced the themes of the Cairo address nor broke new ground in the way Americans (or indeed the world) were to understand our continuing role in the Middle East.

I was then greatly pleased to see a major leap forward in his masterful Nobel Prize address in Stockholm. There he not only outlined a clear and–in my view–responsible mission for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also complicated the dominant binary of war/peace that so divided public opinion.

Viewed as a narrative trajectory, the previous speeches defined the U.S. mission as a reluctant but noble quest, casting the women and men fighting the war in the role of reluctant heroes who aimed to secure the safety of war-torn countries and reestablish local authority for policing and governing them. The speeches reserved for Obama the behind-the-scenes role of a wise wizard who commands “the long view.”

In such narrative constructions–think of “Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars”–otherwise ordinary citizens are called to action (usually against their better judgment) to fight dark forces that threaten their way of life (or sometimes the security of the universe). The wise wizards provide helpful advice and direction, but rarely give final answers. Nevertheless, these oft-told tales–whether in fiction, film, nonfiction, or presidential speeches–provide powerful cultural expectations for not only “what should happen next” but also for “how it should (or must) end.” In other words they create expectations for closure.

The president’s speech last night offered him the opportunity to provide narrative closure on Iraq. Did our would-be wise wizard succeed? The short answer is that he did not. Those on the left wanted to hear our president blame his predecessor for an unwarranted war that cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and over a trillion dollars in treasure that has been a major cause of our burgeoning budget deficit. There was no blame for the Bush administration; in fact, the president was gracious in his avoidance of blame. There was even praise for Bush’s patriotism.

For those on the right it was (predictably) even less successful. As Representative John Boehner (R-OH) observed even before the speech was given, it didn’t give credit for the surge where it was due–the Bush administration. David Gergen, commenting on CNN on the speech on behalf of mainstream Republicans, said the message that Obama “loved the troops but hated the war” probably wouldn’t help. Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, when asked after the speech whether the war had been worth it, replied somewhat evasively if honestly, “It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run.”

Beyond these partisan interpretations, Obama’s end-of-war speech was also notable for what it did not include. There was no declaration of “victory,” no mention of “democracy,” and no clean announcement of an exit from the country or region. There was no mention of the awkward ironies that permeate our seven-year involvement in Iraq:

• We declared victory after two months of war despite the fact that nothing has been won.
• The democratic government that we promised has yet to fully materialize and is possibly even in serious jeopardy.
• No clean exit was likely, there would be no immediate “happy ending,” because there is rarely a clean-cut outcome in this kind of conflict.

Instead we are “turning the page” from combat in Iraq to combat in Afghanistan, and the story goes on. This is a fact that is neither popular with the American people nor with politicians on either side of the aisle.

Realizing this, President Obama, in his role as wise wizard, once again affirmed the longer view:

“One of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power — including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example — to secure our interests and stand by our allies. And we must project a vision of the future that is based not just on our fears, but also on our hopes — a vision that recognizes the real dangers that exist around the world, but also the limitless possibility of our time.”

Given these responses to the speech, it would be wrong of me to suggest it was successful. There was good in it–praising the troops for their valor and sacrifice, ending the official combat commitment to Iraq, and reminding us that we still have responsibilities to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it was narratively and pragmatically unsatisfying because it clearly demonstrated a lack of closure so necessary to a successful “end of war” speech.

Put in the terms of narrative trajectories associated with heroic quests: order has not been fully restored and justice does not yet prevail. True to his theme, Obama announced only that we had “turned the page.” But what he failed to do was close the book.

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Yesterday the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released a report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan over the last year.  It concluded that “2009 proved to be the deadliest year yet for civilians since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.”  The surprise is what it says about the causes of these deaths, which in turn identifies an under-exploited opportunity to amplify ideological contradictions.

Sources of conflict-related civilian deaths in Afghanistan, 2009

Of the 2412 conflict-related deaths in 2009, 67%  were at the hands of “anti-government elements,” whereas 25% were attributable to ISAF and other pro-government forces.  Eight percent “died as a result of cross fire or by unexploded ordinance[sic].”

The anti-government figures represent an increase of 41% over 2008.  According to the report this is attributable to an increase in suicide and IED attacks.  Militants are also killing people they believe to be government supporters.

The pro-government numbers represent a decrease of 28% over the same period.  A report by Dexter Filkins in the New York Times attributes this welcome news to a tightening of restrictions on use of airstrikes.  To maintain the downward trend, American commanders also plan to reduce their use of night missions into villages, which often lead to unintended firefights with locals.

The state of affairs signaled by this report presents the UN/NATO/ISAF forces with a crucial opportunity.  As we argued in a white paper published last year, one of the critical functions of ideology is to smooth-over contradictions, like the one between the realities of extremist operations and the Qur’anic prohibition on killing innocents (especially when they are Muslim).

This function of ideology is why we were treated last month to a desperate video by Adam Gadahn, in which he said his buddies are not killing civilians, and are sorry for any civilians they have killed by accident. His dissembling is a clear sign of worry about the issue, and these new numbers show that there is good reason for worry on their part.

The pro-government response should be to push this contradiction into the open.  Norah Nilan, Chief Human Rights Officer for UNAMA, took a small step in this direction by saying in today’s release

Anti-Government elements remain responsible for the largest proportion of civilian deaths, killing three times as many civilians as pro-Government forces. It is vital that determined efforts are now made by the insurgency to put into effect the Taliban “Code of Conduct” that calls on them to protect the lives of civilians.

She added that “Anti-Government elements must realize that they too have obligations under international law.”

To me this statement is too tepid and deferential to the Bad Guys.  It more or less says that they have good intentions but have problems with execution, and they need to do better.  This is not unlike Gadahn’s argument.

Yet this assessment is at odds with facts stated in the same report that a number of the casualties are from cold-blooded political executions.  And isn’t killing 70 adults and children (and wounding 65) by bombing a volleyball game in Pakistan something more than a failure to stick with policy?

A better statement would be that the extremists are insincere in their claims that they want to protect civilian lives.  The Good Guys should be putting Gadahn saying “we don’t kill Muslims,” and quotes from the Taliban “code of conduct” about protecting civilians, side-by-side with press reports about and images of the innocent civilians who they are killing.

They should ask how the extremists can say they value and protect civilian lives when they bomb volleyball games and execute people.  And how could it be true that the extremists value innocent civilians while the Western forces hate them, as Gadahn claims, when the extremists’ deaths are going up and the Westerners’ numbers are going down?

Muslim allies in the region should be branding the extremists al-Munafiqin (or perhaps an equivalent in local languages).  Because like the Hypocrites of Medina they say they accept the word of God, but then act contrary to it when they see some advantage in doing so.  They are pretending to be devout Muslims for the sake of political expediency, but they are not acting like devout Muslims.

These kinds of efforts would help amplify the extremists’ contradictions and show them for what they really are.  Chiding them about their obligations under international law, not so much.

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Adam Gadahn in mid-rant

Jarret Brachman just did a post on a new video by nice-Jewish-boy-turned-AQ-mouthpiece Adam Gadahn (a.k.a Azzam al-Amriki, video linked on Jarret’s site). Jarret points out that this is the first video in a good long while from as-Sahab, and it has notably lower production values than its normal fare.  But to me the most significant thing is the subject matter of the video.  I, with the help of Jeff Halverson, produced a transcript of the video that you can find here.

Gadahn devotes at least half his time to a refutation of claims that the mujahideen are conducting attacks that are killing innocent Muslims:

we have also begun to see an increase in random bombings and attacks that target innocent Muslims, often in  known centers of support for the mujahideen.  These criminal acts usually result in large number of casualties, especially among women and children.  And invariably the enemies of Islam and Muslims pin the blame for them on the mujahideen. The mujahideen’s denials of responsibility fall on deaf ears.

He goes on at length arguing that the mujahideen are the true vanguard of the Muslims, and that it would just make no sense for them to kill the people they are trying to save:

But I ask every intelligent and thoughtful Muslim to ask himself: Who are the likelier culprits in such brutal, heartless, and unjust attacks?  Are they the mujahideen who have sacrificed everything to defend and liberate weak and oppressed Muslim peoples, uh, wherever they might be, and who have dedicated their very lives to the implementation of Islam and its Sharia which forbids the taking of even one innocent life?

The best explanation for Gadahn’s rather desperate defensiveness is that the killing of innocent Muslims is turning popular sentiment against the extremists in SW Asia.  The recent suicide bombing of a mosque in Rawalpindi, Pakinstan (one of s string of such attacks in recent months) was especially horrific.  A former Pakistani military official expressed his outrage in a BBC interview on December 4, saying that if this incident does not unite Pakistan against the extremists, nothing will.  Perhaps it was indeed some kind of tipping point that resulted in the apparently hasty production of the rant by Gadahn.

Faced with momentum turing against his cause, Gadahn does what any politician does when the wheels start to come off his campaign:  Blame the media.

the uncorroborated allegations of the regimes are carried without criticism and in a one-sided way by the so-called independent media in Islamabad, Kabul, and other world capitals.  Why?  Because these media are now willing weapons of propaganda in the pockets of the crusaders and their puppet governments and armies allied with them.

Not only do these immoral and biased media organizations shamelessly slander the Mujahideen, they also conspire with the regimes to cover up the true extent of the losses suffered by the apostate puppets of the crusaders and even describe those killed as martyrs.

But it’s hard to make that argument stick when mujahideen forces are directly claiming responsibility for attacks, as they did for the Rawalpindi bombing.

Could it be that some rogue elements are doing the killing, rather than people associated with Gadahn?  If so then we are at a loss to explain why Gadahn spends the second half of his speech rattling-off Taliban talking points against the Pakistani government:

The corrupt puppet armies and the affiliated intelligence agencies who fight and kill their own populaces and displace them and leave them homeless for a few billion dollars of crusader bribes, they aren’t your friends and protectors. The atheistic, uh, ethnic and tribal nationalists who murder their own learned men (Alam) to advance their evil ideologies and please their polytheist-idolater (mushrik) patrons and paymasters, they aren’t your friends and protectors. The apostate secular regimes who oppress, rob, and imprison you and sell-out the sovereignty of your countries for personal profit, they aren’t your friends and protectors.

And anyway the record of Gadahn’s outfit with respect to killing Muslims is pretty clear.  As Helfstein, Abdullah, and al-Obaidi point out in a just-released study based on non-Western media sources:

The results show that non-Westerners are much more likely to be killed in an al-Qa’ida attack. From 2004 to 2008, only 15% percent of the 3,010 victims were Western. During the most recent period studied the numbers skew even further. From 2006 to 2008, only 2% (12 of 661 victims) are from the West, and the remaining 98% are inhabitants of countries with Muslim majorities.

Finally we have the fact that Gadahn directly contradicts himself in the video.  At one point he says “the mujahideen declare themselves innocent of these attacks” that have killed innocent Muslims.  But in the next breath he says “we also express the same [condolences] to the unintended Muslim victims of the mujahideen’s operations.”  Adam, if you expect your audience to believe your comrades didn’t intend to kill innocent worshipers in Rawalpindi when they detonated a suicide vest, then threw grenades and sprayed the place with machine gun fire, then it’s time to cut way back on the hashish, m’kay?

So the good news is that this video seems to confirm that the Bad Guys have opened up a say-do gap of stupendous proportions.  We here in the US know what a pesky problem that can be, and our say-do problems are nothing compared to murdering the very people you claim to represent and protect–while they’re at worship.  It’s going to take a lot more than a video to close that gap.

That said, I have to add that I’m a bit baffled as to whom as-Sahab conceives of as the audience for this video.  It’s produced in English and contains no foreign language subtitles or voice-over (unless there are other versions that have it).  Based on that you would think his audience would be the English speaking world.  Yet everything Gadahn says seems to be aimed at people in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.  Previous videos by Gadahn seemed clearly targeted at a Western audience, even addressing them directly.  It made sense that AQ would use an American traitor to deliver such messages.  But why they would choose him as the messenger for this message is a mystery to me.

UPDATE 12/13

Re that last paragraph, mystery solved.  See Aaron’s comment below.

UPDATE 12/15

Leah Farrell concurs that this video shows that the AQ media wing has seen better days:  “If ever one needed proof that As Sahaab is going down the tubes here it is.”

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Yesterday’s speech by President Barack Obama at West Point about the future of American commitment to Afghanistan contained no real material surprises for anyone paying attention to the news reports that led up to his carefully planned and executed event.  It was an Obama speech that lacked his usual rhetorical flair but came down hard on pragmatics, including a frank assessment of time, costs, and the real problem that is less Afghanistan than it is Pakistan.  But I, for one, who appreciated the President’s directness and honesty on pragmatics, was surprised by one glaring omission:  the absence of a compelling narrative that links who we are, as a people, to what we are trying to accomplish over there.

Why was I surprised?  Because in the 92 days of deliberation and considerable press build-up to the President’s address the multiple audiences for the speech–both at home and abroad–were made aware of most of the debates about the plan and, finally, the details of the plan prior to its delivery.  We already knew what the plan would be.  Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and other administration officials slowly and methodically released those details over the weekend, and on Monday Gibbs ended public and press speculation and told a war weary and economically challenged nation that “the commander in chief issued the orders” for an additional 30,000 troops for Afghanistan.

That was not “the news” in the speech.  It is the same narrative about the success of the surge in Iraq.  A surge in troops for Afghanistan, will be combined with a corresponding “surge” in financial assistance  that is required to secure neighborhoods, build schools, roads, and hospitals, and otherwise provide gainful employment to citizens who, without it,  might become (once again) insurgents.

So what did the President’s speech accomplish as a narrative?  He began by reaffirming the Bush message:  We are still after those who started this fight and who were responsible for the tragic events of 9/11.  He admitted that the distraction that led us to invade Iraq was a mistake that he didn’t support it; moreover, that our invasion of Iraq has led to a world whose once good opinion of us has been seriously tarnished.  So far, the narrative of Obama begins with 9/11, a desire for justifiable revenge, a need for securing our future against future attacks, and the support of the world against terrorism.

Next he positioned himself as the inheritor of a bad situation.  The announced new Afghanistan strategy of “a surge” and mission to turn over control to the locals, combined with a timetable for initial troop withdrawal–by July of 2011– offers a narrative sense of an “ending” to this so-far-never-ending story, if not exactly a fully articulated exit strategy.  But as far as endings go, it isn’t a very satisfying one.

Other themes in the speech were that the real problem is less in Afghanistan than it is in Pakistan, less with the Taliban than with nuclear weapons.  Also we cannot afford a longer term commitment without jeopardizing our economic strength at home.

In my mind these elements do not add up to a coherent, compelling narrative about what we are doing there.  I recently posted a blog here about this “Narrative Gap” in which I observed that

what the Obama administration is missing is a collection of stories that provides a clear explanation of our military mission in Afghanistan. We don’t have a well-imagined view of the future of the world with our troops active in Afghanistan, or absent from it. We lack a firm (or better yet passionate) resolve among our leaders not only to accomplish our mission, but also to enact a particular storyline.

Apparently this observation was shared by columnist Thomas Friedman, who, shortly after my post and for the first time used the idea of a “narrative problem” to describe Obama’s inability to provide a clear and compelling case for “nation building at home“:

He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

He used it again to discuss Obama’s failure to adequately provide a counter-narrative to “The Narrative” currently dominating discussions in the Muslim world:

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

As Steve Corman pointed out, what is needed is what Friedman overlooks.  We do not simply need Muslims to speak out against The Narrative, but instead we need a president and other military, diplomatic, and interested citizens to offer the world a better narrative about ourselves.

That’s not an easy task. Nor was it one that Obama addressed in his speech.

Other commentators, including John Brown as well as a host of television and news reporters, have collectively argued that Obama’s narrative about our continued efforts in Afghanistan admittedly confronted the President with significant rhetorical and logical challenges that he needed to address at West Point.  Most importantly, as Brown observed, Obama has demonstrated an “unwillingness (some would call it a failure) to craft a clear, simple, ‘saleable’ message of ‘why we must fight’ in a little-known land, thousands of miles from our shores.”

By my own reckoning, since roughly 9/12 we have tried, and abandoned several attempts at an overarching narrative, from  “they’ve got WMDs in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan” which morphed into “we need to rebuild Iraq and, by the way, al-Qaeda is no longer a threat,” that recently became “even though al-Qaeda is no longer a threat we still need to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and ensure a stable government.”  All of which has coalesced, as of yesterday, to become “disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies, and … to better coordinate our military and civilian effort.”

In his blog, John Brown goes on to detail possible alternative storylines to continue our presence in the region, which he generously referred to as “oxymorons”:  “we-are-getting-in-it-to-get-out” or “we-do-it-to-avoid-it,” both of which ended up as part and parcel of Obama’s speech.  As Brown points out, narrative strategies such as these rival Woodrow Wilson’s infamous (and, as it turned out, untrue) pronouncement that our involvement in World War I would be to participate “the war to end all wars.”

At least we didn’t hear that.  But neither did we hear answers to the most important questions that still define us, as a people, to the world.  So, did Obama’s speech help to close the narrative gap?  In my view, not very much.

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A colleague in the UK military recently sent an e-mail remarking on the brewing controversy in the UK about casualties from the war in Afghanistan.  Growing numbers of citizens are witnessing “repatriations” of dead soldiers, and Prime Minister Brown is under fire for botched communication with a grieving mother.

Brits are crowding the route between the Lynham Air Base and the Oxford Coroners Court.  Here is a YouTube video of one of the processions, not unlike Canada’s Highway of Heroes.  The spectacle hasn’t escaped the attention of those responsible for the deaths, the Taliban, who use the image on their web site as evidence of the pain they are inflicting on their enemies (see inset screenshot).

UK Repatriation on Taliban Site

PM Brown is also in the midst of a controversy over his communication with a grieving mother, Jaqui Janes.  Her son, Guardsman Jamie Janes, bled to death while awaiting evacuation by helicopter, which Ms. Janes is blaming on substandard equipment levels for British troops in the theater.   Brown sent her a handwritten note of condolence in which she claims he misspelled the name of her son.  Learning of the controversy, he telephoned her to straighten things out by claiming the perceived slight was a matter of bad handwriting.  For more details see this story in The Sun.

Note to Mr. Brown:  Though a handwritten note is more folksy, that only works if the recipient can read what you write.  You really do have atrocious handwriting, so a typewritten note would more reliably prevent miscommunication.  Also once a miscommunication has developed, listening is a better choice than defensiveness when dealing with an angry, grieving mother.

Says my colleague: “These are incredibly tense times – not sure even the meltdown of Major or Thatcher compares.”  The tense times also come as President Obama weighs additional troop commitments in Afghanistan, for which he would like to see comparable support from allies.

As this colleague points out, there is a strategic communication issue here for the UK government.  What started out as a few people paying their respects to fallen soldiers has self-organized into gatherings of thousands of people, at times shutting down one of the major routes into Oxford. The traction the Janes controversy is getting is further evidence of growing public discontent with the UK’s participation in the war. For me it is hard to avoid a comparison to the Vietnam, when nightly scenes of returning American dead at Dover Air Force Base fueled growing public opposition to the war effort.

David Betz has recently complained that in the West “we do not focus enough effort on winning and maintaining the hearts and minds of the most critical and accessible population: our own.” Bud Goodall concurs in an earlier post (also drawing a Vietnam comparison), saying that there is no coherent narrative about what we are doing in Afghanistan.  Until one is developed it will be hard to convince Brits to tolerate lengthening processions of coffins toward Oxford–or Americans to send tens of thousands of additional troops.

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One of the important challenges of President Obama’s administration is to sell the continuation of our “overseas contingency operation” (or perhaps FATAVE) in Afghanistan to an increasingly disenchanted audience at home and abroad. But there is a worrisome absence of a good narrative–a coherent collection of stories–about why we are there and what we hope to accomplish.

In recent press conferences and briefings, President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates have maintained a consistent posture of support for a continued U.S. military presence, despite polls showing a growing lack of popularity for that posture. In a recent (September 22. 2009) Pew Research Center poll, the results were striking:

The poll shows that even though 76 percent of Americans see a Taliban takeover of the country as a major threat to U.S. security, 43 percent favor pulling out all U.S. and NATO troops as soon as possible. The number of those advocating withdrawal has increased five percent in just three months (from 38 percent in June), while the ranks of those set on ‘staying the course’ shrank by seven percent during the same period.

Since that poll was released there has been an upturn in debate over direction and policy in the White House, including a plea from General Stanley McChrystal for an additional 40,000 troops. As a Washington Post story about the apparent disagreement between McChrystal and the White House put it yesterday:

Obama may take weeks to decide whether to add more troops, but the idea of pulling out isn’t on the table as a way to deal with a war nearing its ninth year, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. “‘I don’t think we have the option to leave. That’s quite clear,” Gibbs said.

With due respect to Mr. Gibbs, I think nothing about this decision is yet “very clear” and much of the storyline is simply “missing.”

What is missing from reports about the ongoing debate over the future of our military mission in Afghanistan? From a strategic communication perspective, it is any mention of narrative. As Scott Ruston pointed out in a previous post:

A narrative is a system of stories that hang together and provide a coherent view of the world. People use narratives to understand how their world works. Narratives contain patterns that fit the data of everyday life (events, people, actions, sequences of actions, messages, and so on), explaining how events unfold over time and how one thing causes another.

In other words, what the Obama administration is missing is a collection of stories that provides a clear explanation of our military mission in Afghanistan. We don’t have a well-imagined view of the future of the world with our troops active in Afghanistan, or absent from it. We lack a firm (or better yet passionate) resolve among our leaders not only to accomplish our mission, but also to enact a particular storyline.

Without such a coherent system of stories to provide a clear and credible narrative storyline, American and overseas audiences are left with what narrative scholars call “the presence of an absence, and the absence of a presence.” That is, what we lack is the knowledge that there is, in fact, a believable, credible storyline guiding the trajectory of political decisions and military actions in Afghanistan.

What fills this gap for audiences is increasingly made up of competing narratives, which further fragment the issues and divide citizens and politicians from each other. Our public discourse about Afghanistan is a disconnected series of conflicting news accounts and press statements, daily political opinion polls, the (often inflamed) rhetoric of commentators on the left and right, and the rantings of our opponents overseas. The gap is also filled by widespread public and political anxiety. We fear what we do not know, and in this case, what we do not know is the narrative guiding vital decisions and actions.

Meanwhile, are left with one consistent pattern, one coherent, credible and disturbing storyline. Our leadership seems impotent as an undeclared war goes on, Americans continue to die, the leadership in Afghanistan remains corrupt, the Taliban grow stronger, and our treasury is drained of resources.

This narrative–constructed out of the noise of media stories and images–is eerily similar to the one that corroded support for the White House during the Vietnam War. It eventually led to political defeat, military withdrawal, and a resulting genocide as insurgents sought revenge on those who had assisted U.S. efforts.

It does not have to be this way. The American people expect a believable, credible narrative from this White House. We have learned to expect it. We want a story that closes the gap and provides us with a hopeful view of the future, whatever policies that future must embrace. More importantly, we want to have confidence in the resulting storyline. We want to understand where and how this story ends and have some way of accurately assessing the effectiveness of the steps taken to accomplish those ends.

We will not be satisfied by “a never-ending story.” Notice how short-lived was Secretary Rumsfeld’s rhetoric of “a long war.” Nor will we be content to support characters who don’t demonstrate what we expect from our national leaders/heroes. Bravery, honesty, and justice are all qualities that depend on connecting the narrative to desired ends.

Finally, there is an important principle from narrative theory that ought to guide the reinvention of America’s role in Afghanistan: The story determines the content, not the other way around. Translated into political language this simply means that until our leadership has settled on the narrative, there should be little discussion of specific policies (those smaller stories that make up the system) in the public sphere. A narrow focus on policy absent a compelling narrative will only confuse the popular audience and anger the pundits, leading to a further division of citizens from whatever the resulting storyline might be.

So, to fill the dangerous narrative gap, our leadership must first get the story straight. Then they should keep to it, measure success against it, and demonstrate those qualities of leadership, and leadership communication, that we associate with stories worth living, fighting, and/or, even dying for.

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