Pres. Obama and his top commanders Gens. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal believe that the War on Terror is a "war of perceptions." In a struggle between a superpower and small loosely linked bands of militants, the idea of a conventional military victory is not applicable. It does not matter how many insurgents are killed, how many terror attacks are carried out successfully, or what particular locations are occupied. What matters is that, in the minds of the global public, there is a perception that the US is winning, that the momentum is on our side. And when everybody thinks the US has won, it has.
The dramatic increase in targeted assassinations, the Iraq style "surge" of troops, the assault against the "Taliban stronghold" in Marja, the capture of "high level Talibs", even the reprimands issued to US officers for failing to prevent deadly ambushes, are all part of a single push to alter the public perception of the conflict.
So now that we find ourselves part of the battlefield, let’s ask the question: have our perceptions been altered?
The idea that a counterinsurgency is all about perception is not new. Many people, and the majority within the Pentagon, still feel that Vietnam was lost solely as a result of the failure to win the war of perception back home. That the Pentagon command believes that the current round of wars are a war of perceptions is no secret, they discuss it endlessly in their many many media appearances, such as the one by Gen. Petraeus on Meet the Press this past Sunday. In accordance with their belief that public relations are the essential component of victory, the President and his generals have been more than willing to make public statements, preceding military operations with the sort of media blitz previously reserved for movie openings. If Gen. Petraeus hasn’t done Letterman by now, he will. On the eve of the Marja offensive, McChrystal encapsulated his views as follows:
This is all a war of perceptions. This is all in the minds of the participants. Part of what we've had to do is convince ourselves and our Afghan partners that we can do this.
The American media has of course given them every opportunity to present without challenge their endlessly updated but always "guarded but unexpectedly upbeat assessments of the war effort." For example on February 5th, Gen. McChrystal delivered the following sober judgment:
"I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner," he said. "So I’m saying that the situation is serious but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress, and that we’ll make real progress in 2010..."
He then went on to preview the upcoming ground offensive in Marja as if it was his latest summer blockbuster. When asked why he was being so verbose about military plans which are traditionally kept secret, "General McChrystal acknowledged that the decision to go public with the broad outlines of the plan— but not the dates — was "unconventional." He said the decision to discuss the operation openly was "a way of telling the people of Afghanistan of their government’s efforts to expand security where they live — and to tell the insurgents and narcotics traffickers "that it’s about to change." While he did not explain what he was trying to tell the American public, to whom, after all, these statements were most directly being delivered, we can surmise that we are also being put on notice that things are changing for the better.
After the ground had been laid by dozens of such confidence raising proclamations from our leadership, on February 13th, thousands of American, British and Afghan forces commenced Operation Together, which consists of storming and occupying two mid sized towns in Helmand province which have been in Taliban hands for the past 8 years, but have now been judged of crucial importance to the war effort. The simple facts that wresting control of significant population centers from the enemy is still necessary after 8 years of occupation, and that each operation requires so many American troops and costs so many billions of dollars, might strike an observer as disheartening evidence of an occupation gone wrong. But after the Pentagon p.r. specialists explain it during their numerous appearances on America's most reputable news talk shows, the perception should be quite different. In the words of Gen. Peteraeus, who has emerged as the most adroit propagandist within the high command:
This is just the initial operation of what will be a 12 to 18-month campaign as General McChrystal and his team have mapped it out. We spent the last year getting the inputs right in Afghanistan, getting the structure and organizations necessary for a comprehensive civil military campaign, putting the best leaders we can find in charge of those."
Petraeus then went on to predict that the planned campaign will result in increased death tolls for everybody involved, and to reference repeatedly the Iraq surge, which has now been declared a success worth replicating by President Obama.
So far Operation Together has gone as one might have expected, given the disparity of forces. The Taliban largely melted away, but left behind many booby traps and mines, as well as suicide teams who are fighting back through hit and run attacks. The US and Britain have lost 13 soldiers dead so far, and killed a few dozens civilians. Clearing the town has taken longer than initially anticipated, meaning that many civilians, who had been urged to stay by NATO command, are now running out of food, but overall the short term outcome is not in doubt.
However, even the guarded optimists at the Pentagon admit that the success of Operation Together in occupying some portion of Helmand Province by itself is not going to be sufficient to defeat the Taliban, or to convince the skeptics in Afghanistan, in the US and around the world that the war is going well. The occupation authorities have lost control of large chunks of the country, and many Taliban strongholds remain to be stormed. Details of the next offensives, to take place in the province of Kandahar around Afghanistan's second largest city, where tens of thousands of Canadians have been waging a bloody and unsuccessful effort from which they will be withdrawing this year. This next phase will be "even more decisive" than the combat in Helmand Province, according to Gen. Petraeus, and its details are already being furiously leaked to the press. Not even the most adroit propagandist can deny that the upcoming ground operations are going to be a long, hard slog, with hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghans dead, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars per year, although they can still do their utmost to make this process appear romantically heroic and vitally necessary for the security of American families. To redirect attention from this stubbornly depressing picture, the Pentagon hopes to dazzle the public with successes in the other prongs of the new war of perceptions.
The most promising and heartening developments in fact have occurred not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, which President Obama recently, with a gloriously imperial flourish, amalgamated with Afghanistan into a single theater of operations, Af-Pak. There, American assassination strikes have skyrocketed since President Obama's election, with 64 drone strikes have occurred during one year of the Obama administration compared with 45 unmanned drone attacks which took place during the entirety of President George W. Bush's two terms. After some celebrated successes, such as the killing of Baitullah Mehsud, a feared commander of the Pakistani Taliban, this policy which had been viewed as somewhat controversial during Bush's tenure, has now been largely accepted by the American media, the public, and by Pakistan’s leadership, who have been compensated by a correspondingly large increase in American subsidies.
Counter intuitively, it was precisely the expansion of the illegal action that contributed to its normalization -- while the 5th or 6th attack can be protested plausibly and with some hope for a change in policy, by the 112th, any noise of condemnation appears ridiculous. As a result, the world and the American Left, including this site have largely come to terms with this blatantly illegal policy. While European leaders stand ready to condemn Israel for assassinating a single Hamas operative without any civilian loss of life, the death of another dozen Pakistani farmers during an attempt to take out some midlevel Taliban functionary will only draw a faint hiccup of concern from Islamabad, one which might have had been reported by the Western press back when this was Bush’s dumb war, but will be entirely ignored now that it is the centerpiece of Obama’s new smart war. This normalization and acceptance in turn has allowed the US not only to stop hiding their assassination campaign in the shadows, but to loudly brag about its latest kills, and to launch ever more attacks targeting progressively less significant resistance figures. A major milestone was passed last year when the Obama Administration expanded the list of targets from those involved in the Afghan insurgency to those whom the American deem to be enemies of its ally Pakistan.
The long term value of decapitation strikes and arrests is unclear. The decades of Israeli efforts against Palestinians had no discernible effect on the resistance movement, while Russia's war against Chechen warlords did seem to benefit from the killing of the top rebel commander, Shamil Basayev. Regardless, with its ever increasing scope and the introduction of newer, more lethal generations of unmanned drone aircraft into that theater, the American assassination program, which started out as a small number of controversial emergency measures under the Bush Administration, has become the most successful and well publicized of all of the components in Obama's War on Terror and has been expanded into the other theaters of American counterinsurgency such as Yemen and Somalia.
For their part, the Pakistanis have largely given up complaining about the air strikes, took their money, and have stepped arrests of top Taliban figures, most notably arresting Mullah Baradar (Brother), the reputed Taliban number tow and top operational commander, and two of Taliban’s shadow governors for the provinces of Afghanistan. The capture of high level insurgent figures have revived America's cherished dream of getting Osama Bin Laden himself, which has been cemented in the American public’s mind as the only thing to fully avenge the humiliation of 9/11. These arrests, and the tantalizing possibility of torture of our enemies that they raise, has been another successful part of Obama’s war of perception.
Less success has met Obama's and his Pentagon’s efforts to present a more humane and caring image of the occupation by the reduction in the level of civilian casualties among the occupied population. To that effect, the coalition rules of engagement have been repeatedly, and with great media fanfare, tweaked to convey the appearance that the US is really taking this problem seriously, not seriously enough to stop using Afghanistan as a hunting ground, but seriously enough to make the hunt more sporting. Permitted targets of occupation violence now have to exhibit "hostile intent" before being annihilated, while buildings have to affirmatively found to be free of civilians before being leveled. To draw the public’s attention to America’s voluntary self restraint and the hardships it causes for the conscientious hegemon, nearly every article describing occupation violence since the beginning of the occupation, contains a quote from some soldiers bemoaning the strictness of the rules of engagement, which the unscrupulous enemy is using against us. The "restrictive" rules of engagement have been further publicized by a secondary campaign in the "right wing: media, which criticizes and thereby confirms the effect it has on the occupation forces’ ability to carry on their killing duties.
Despite these highly publicized self restraints, 2009 was the bloodiest year for the Afghan population and several dozen more were killed just yesterday during the bombing of three minibuses packed with civilians, whose behavior was unfortunately interpreted to convey a hostile intent by some drone operator. Unable to reduce the numbers of casualties, and in fact anticipating an increase in all casualty counts in 2010, the Obama team has had to try to mitigate the effects with a quicker and more aggressively apologetic response to each incident. It is not uncommon now for Gen. McChrystal to already be appearing in the media, with Dari and Pashtu subtitles, regretting the tragic loss of life while the carcasses of the butchered women and children are still warm.
Additionally, the counterinsurgency forces have resurrected a very tired canard to explain the high level of casualties they are inflicting on the population they are ostensibly trying to protect -- the diabolical use of human shields by the insurgents. This charge has been made frequently during the Marja offensive, although the actual unsubstantiated allegation has been left to the Afghan counterparts, whose charges, if proved untrue, can be easily disclaimed. Although these charges were easily dismissed by the world community when deployed by the Israelis during the latest Gaza offensive, this time they appear to be gaining traction even on the so called "Left.", with references to the dastardly practice frequently cropping up here at DKos as well. Nevertheless, one must admit that the Pentagon’s efforts to neutralize the issue of the killing of thousands of innocent people by their protectors and liberators of the occupation forces, have so far not been fully successful.
In case either of my readers (so few, but so astute) is wondering how to reconcile the humanitarian restraints placed on air strikes in Afghanistan with the increase in the Pakistani assassination strike campaign, there is no connection. Rules of engagement in place for Afghanistan do not govern US behavior in Pakistan, since Pakistan is not under occupation. The reactions of the Pakistani population have not been deemed a significant enough detriment to the mission to even make a pretense of restraint, and have been made the Pakistani government's problem, for whom it has been a thorny problem indeed.
The last and possibly the least publicized piece of the most recent p.r. push have been the internal investigations launched by the Pentagon against its own mid level commanders in Afghanistan to find those responsible for a spate of high casualty attacks against American occupation forces in 2008. The findings of two high level investigations are in, and it turns out Pat Tillman did it. Actually, two officers received mild rebukes, while Gen. McChrystal has been exonerated. Though some might find disciplinary actions against American officers depressing rather than uplifting, it is clearly the top command's view that publicly holding a few officers responsible will have a positive effect on the public’s perception of how well the war is being fought. The largely symbolic punishment sends the signal that the high casualty attacks were isolated incidents, with the casualties being the result of a few poor American command decisions, and not the Taliban’s strength or American weakens, or any flaw in the American strategy, and to convey the message that from now on, officers will be expected to perform at a higher level. Additionally, the investigation’s findings put to bed the continued murmurings within the US officer corps blaming McChrystal’s highly politicized handling of the war, and specifically his past decisions to keep unnecessary and hard to defend outposts open for political rather than military considerations. McChrystal was fully exonerated, and the fast tempo of the operations will hopefully not permit any second thoughts on the subject, which will disappear into the river of obscurity much like the death of Pat Tillman, which McChrystal had also been accused of politicizing at the time.
Now that we have generally mapped out the elements that the Obama White House and the Pentagon hope will turn the perception of the Af-Pak operations into a positive one, please permit me to ask: How do you think they are doing? Do you feel within yourself a growing hope that things are looking up? Are the news you are hearing finally encouraging after all these years?
Based on my personal observations, this p.r. offensive is having some short term effects. As I write this, the Yahoo Home page features an AP article entitled "Finally, a glimmer of hope for US in Afghan war," which opens as follows, and then goes on to dutifully regurgitate the Pentagon quotes of the day, many of which appear above.
The arrests of key Taliban leaders in Pakistan and slow but steady progress on the battlefield of Helmand province have offered the first flicker of hope in years that the U.S. and its allies may be able to check the rise of an insurgency that seemed unstoppable only a few months ago.
The leading indicators of success are thus 1) The arrests of key Taliban leaders in Pakistan; and 2) slow but steady progress on the battlefield of [Marja]. Because the Marja offensive has become bogged down, it has been relegated to #2 and termed "slow but steady." Apparently at this point the ability of 5,000 U.S. Marines to push back, at a snail's pace, several hundred lightly armed resistance fighters comes as a pleasant surprise, an underdog win if you will, and is a portent of impending victory. The article then goes on very curiously:
That's a long way from victory — a word that has fallen out of favor within a U.S. military keenly aware of the complexity of Afghanistan and the dangers of elevated expectations among a war-weary public in the United States and Europe.
So actually, the US military command, which has spent the last three months trying to shift the public's perceptions with a series of optimistic assessments and p.r. moves, had no intention of raising expectations or implying that we might be winning. No, what they are actually doing is trying to dampen "elevated expectations among a war-weary public," but evidently they have failed at it (the track record of these guys is starting to be troublesome), as events on the ground overtake them and by themselves instill a new spirit of optimism in the people.
The AP writer then becomes almost prophetic in his prose: "The progress won't be quick." Not only does he know that there will be progress, but he is level headed enough to know that it won't be quick. He is not just a prophet, he is a realistic prophet. Have I missed something? Can you guys tell me, has embracing Obama's Message of Hope made you see the future, or given you any other kinds of superpowers? Because my cynicism gives me only arthritis.
This article is fairly typical of the delicate marketing campaign undertaken by the war's leadership through the media. Nearly all American media outlets have obligingly put out articles with headlines such as "U.S. offensive & air strikes turning tide in Afghan war." The degree of jingoistic elation vs. cautious optimism corresponds to the pecking order of American media, and the top echelons, such as the New York Times, mostly allow the US top commanders to do the talking: "Top U.S. Commander Sees Progress in Afghanistan"
Here on the DailyKos, the reported victories of American arms have been greeted with enthusiasm, because they represent victories for President Obama. A triumphalist diary series now regularly occupies the rec list, updating us on each new glowing Pentagon press release about the latest "get," and receives many more recommendations than all anti war diaries for the past month put together. Please do not misconstrue my reference to this series to be criticism directed at its writer or its content. Filled with praise for President Obama's relentless pursuit of the bad guy and links to neocon war sites which were off limits here when their jingoistic coverage reflected positively on Bush, not Obama, these diaries bring nothing but joy to this Soviet expat’s propaganda craving eyes. Plus sometimes they have pictures, something which I am too lazy to do for my readers. As my whorish countryman, Yakov Smirnoff might have said, "In Soviet Union, propagandists had to be paid a lot and had to hide their face, but in America, they do it for free and are widely respected! What a country!"
Hopes have been raised sky high, with the capture of Bin Laden not only anticipated, but also expected to allow Obama to achieve dramatic progress in his domestic agenda. Of course there is still a sizeable anti war contingent here, but after wavering a bit during the first months of the Obama Administration as the Democrats struggled to bring their lukewarm feelings about the war in line with the enthusiasm of their Commander in Chief, after a few months of the p.r. offensive the general consensus is now safely in support of the war effort. The thinking appears to be that since Afghanistan is now Obama's war and we support Obama, we support the Afghanistan war, especially now that "it’s going well." With great relief, the previously closeted liberal hawks, turned into vociferous doves during the Bush Administration, can now joyously spread their wings and crow praise for our victorious might. "Finally, a smart war to cheer for!" This should hopefully dispel any lingering illusions that because of its opportunistic opposition to the unpopular Iraq war, the Democratic Party was somehow the "anti-war party," and keep the next generations of anti-militarists from making the mistake made by those who voted for Obama in 2008. I know, I know, this is a Democratic website, save me the FAQS quote, please, because I’m not trying in any way to lessen Obama’s reelection chances or the chances of the next great Democratic militarist hero. Nobody in the US will ever lose an election by alienating the contemptible "peaceniks," so really what I’m saying here is, the more hajjis Obama wastes, the more likely he is to beat the dreaded Sarah Palin.
While it appears that the Pentagon's p.r. campaign is having some early effect, it is unclear how tangible this is and how long it will last. First of all, the effect appears confined to the American and British public, the most militaristic and imperialistic Western populations. Remaining Western public opinion appears unimpressed, with the Dutch and Canadian governments confirming that their forces will leave Afghanistan in the fall of this year. Effects on the Afghan and Pakistani populations, or on the Muslim world at large are impossible to gauge and would be nothing more than conjecture at this point. The steady drum of casualties both among the occupation forces and the occupied population will continue to counter the President and the Pentagon's best efforts to obtain positive publicity for their efforts. As the US pours ever more firepower into the theater, the casualty levels are expected to rise again this year, as the Pentagon has repeatedly acknowledged. Without a steady stream of good news to feed to the American public, the efforts to more fully publicize the war efforts might well backfire. What is clear is that, while the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and many less well known places feel the might of America's righteous wrath, those of us behind the lines will be deluged by a torrent of carefully coordinated propaganda issuing from both the civil and military authorities. Our reaction will be as key to the outcome of the war as the efforts of those fighting in the resistance.
As a thank you gift for anybody who made it this far, and to make up for another horribly botched poll, here's a link to a hilarious Soviet era manual for Afghanistan's previous occupation force.