Engaging in the media battle space in Afghanistan

NY Times:

The Obama administration is establishing a new unit within the State Department for countering militant propaganda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, engaging more fully than ever in a war of words and ideas that it acknowledges the United States has been losing.

Proposals are being considered to give the team up to $150 million a year to spend on local FM radio stations, to counter illegal militant broadcasting, and on expanded cellphone service across Afghanistan and Pakistan. The project would step up the training of local journalists and help produce audio and video programming, as well as pamphlets, posters and CDs denigrating militants and their messages.

Senior officials say they consider the counterpropaganda mission to be vital to the war.

“Concurrent with the insurgency is an information war,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who will direct the effort. “We are losing that war.

“The Taliban have unrestricted, unchallenged access to the radio, which is the main means of communication,” he added. “We can’t succeed, however you define success, if we cede the airways to people who present themselves as false messengers of a prophet, which is what they do. And we need to combat it.”

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He is right. For too long we have let the Taliban get away with their media war. The US media has also been too compliant in dealing with the Taliban manipulations. They have shown far too much tolerance for Taliban war crimes and have sometimes given teh Taliban side without even mention of the enemy's war crimes such as camouflaging themselves as civilians in violation of the Geneva Convention. The Taliban's use of human shields has recently been given ore scrutiny, but many US air attacks have put all the blame on non combatant deaths on US forces.

Fundamentally, the Taliban do not stand a chance militarily. Virtually all their attacks are media events such as the explosion outside the NATO headquarters today. There is no strategic purpose in such attacks. They are acts of impotence that have the misfortune of killing non combatants, but they should have no effect on our ability to deploy our forces and take the fight to the Taliban. It is possible such attacks could eventually have some political effect back home. That is the Taliban's only real hope of survival.