Is the U.S. military all talk?

A soldier speaks to an Afghan man during an anti-Taliban operation involving more than a thousand soldiers from the U.S., Canadian and Afghan armies at Sanjaray in Kandahar Province, May 16, 2009. (Jorge Silva/Reuters)

KABUL, Afghanistan — “You’ve all heard of strategic communications,” said the high-ranking U.S. official, holding an off-the-record briefing for journalists in Kabul last month. “It used to be called ‘psyops,' and before that, ‘propaganda.’ Well, the United States is about to unroll a major stratcom initiative. We cannot let men on motorcycles and flatbed trucks win the information war.”

Welcome to the Battle for Afghan Hearts and Minds, where — using the language of strategic communications, or "stratcom" — combat becomes “kinetics,” an accidental shooting becomes an “escalation of force” and assassination squads are known as “counterinsurgency operations.”

In this world, the message is king, and reality is fungible. Clearly discernible in every briefing, interview or conversation with a military official, is the stated policy of the U.S. administration.

The message, the official at the Kabul briefing said, was "complex yet simple: The United States is here to help you. We are not occupiers. And the Taliban are not great leaders of the faithful."

Unfortunately, that message fell flat in early May in Farah province, when U.S. forces dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs on two residential compounds, killing at least 97 people, most of them women and children. It is the largest civilian loss of life since the war began in 2001. The high death toll was due to the size of the bombs, and the fact that residents of the area had placed their families in the homes of tribal elders to shelter them from a firefight between the Taliban and government forces.

When the Afghan police and army were in over their heads, they called for help from the U.S. forces, which provided tactical air support and, later, a B-1 bomber. Convinced that insurgents were hiding in the compounds, the air crew dropped their payload.

The exact casualty figure is still in doubt, since many of the bodies were so mutilated by the blast that they could not be identified; partial remains were buried in a large common grave. But the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), after conducting extensive investigation, said that 65 children, 21 women and 11 men died in the air strikes.

The incident prompted Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to warn that the new U.S. strategy was in real danger unless measures were taken.

“We cannot succeed in Afghanistan … by killing Afghans,” he told scholars at the Brookings Institution, in remarks widely quoted in the media. “We can’t keep going through incidents like this and expect the strategy to work.”

That advice has yet to filter down to the operational level in Afghanistan, where clumsy efforts at “messaging” have sought to obscure the scale of the tragedy.

Judging by the response to the Farah bombing, “stratcom” is having a bit of trouble getting off the ground.

The U.S. military tried desperately to spin the story, initially denying that any significant civilian casualties had resulted from the air strikes. Carefully placed leaks in the media suggested that the Taliban themselves had killed dozens of innocent people with grenades to make it appear that they had been killed by U.S. bombs.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/090527/propaganda-wars