"Media as Global Diplomat" February 3

I'll be attending the above-captioned, USIP-sponsored conference at the Newseum next Tuesday, featuring Amb. James Glassman (late of Karen Hughes's old job at State) and Amb. Edward Djerejian of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. Ted Koppel moderates panels such as "Public Diplomacy 2.0: Rethinking Official Media" and "Independent Documentary and Participatory Media."

Beacon readers and assorted other characters: Feel free to e-mail my address at right if you're attending and want to chat over coffee or lunch.

How Goes the War?

REMEMBER THAT THE TALIBAN HAVE PUBLICISTS TOO, AND IT’S ACTUALLY GOING PRETTY WELL.


The question I get asked most since I got back from Afghanistan usually goes like this:

“So, since you got a first-hand look at things over there”—

and here the questioner’s volume usually drops to a loud hush, one better suited for shared confidences about whether the U.S. government may be pulling the wool over our collective eyes—

“How do you think it’s going? It’s sounding a lot worse.”

I always start to answer by saying that I spent little time outside the wire and interacted with essentially no Afghan civilians who were not press. I also note that I’m a partisan and think that this is the war the U.S. should be fighting, I admire the job U.S. forces have been doing, and that it’s going to take one to two decades to accomplish anything that looks like a win.

With those caveats out of the way, I continue that from what I’ve read since returning and what I hear from those still deployed, the war sounds like it’s going pretty well.

The pace of Afghan civilian deaths, whether from insurgent action or U.S. mistakes, seems to have dropped off, although there are still times when U.S. forces are accused of killing or actually do kill civilians. (This most recent episode is still up in the air.) The pace of U.S. military deaths, which was a worry last fall when I left, has dropped as it does every winter. Western-sponsored infrastructure projects continue to progress, at least in low-lying areas that aren’t snowed in. While insurgents may threaten much, they control little.

But it still looks bad through the lens of the Western media. According to many reports, the Taliban insurgency is growing, is spreading, is surrounding Kabul, and is winning through whatever means. The Kabul government is ineffectual, the Western forces clumsy and ill-informed, Afghan villagers terrified, at least when you read the papers. What explains this?

The thing I ask people to remember about the Afghan war is that it is a counterinsurgency conflict, not a stand-up fight. The goal of Western forces is to suppress the insurgents long enough for the Kabul government to start winning its people’s loyalty and trust by helping and protecting them. In short: Anything that strengthens Afghans’ bond with their government is good, anything that weakens it is bad.

The insurgents are well aware of this. These groups, whether Taliban, HIG, al-Qa’ida, or the notorious al-Three Guys with a Grenade Launcher, are extremely media-savvy, and Afghan civilians are no shrinking violets either when confronted with Western cameras and microphones.

Here’s the sequence of events that seems to happen when U.S. or, occasionally, ISAF forces conduct a raid or drop a bomb that kills Afghans, civilian or otherwise.

First, the insurgent groups work the phones. When their fingerprints are on some new act, they are quick to call the media and glorify their latest suicide bombing, crow about the latest Western casualty, or fume (correctly, in most cases) about corrupt officials in Kabul. In this case, they fulminate about the latest Western misstep, painting U.S. and ISAF forces as bloodthirsty.* These assertions plug in nicely to the insurgents’ broader narrative of a Crusader force propping up a feeble government whose writ doesn’t even extend to Kabul’s city limits.

In the ensuing days, Afghan civilians and survivors of the raid pile on. They talk to the media about the loss of their innocent relatives and demand cash reparations. Payment of such blood money is the accepted norm in South and Central Asia, and Western forces are generally quick to pay it. This fact, and the lack of a paper trail to prove conclusively that a named person did or did not exist, creates a broad incentive to inflate the numbers of people—especially women and children—who were killed.

Third, Afghan government officials express outrage at the killings of their constituents for days or weeks on end, just as the governor of Oklahoma would at tornado damage or the governor of California would following an earthquake or mass shooting. The Afghan officials demand an end to unilateral bombings or raids by Western forces and generally grandstand to the limits of their ability, again according to South/Central Asian regional norms.

The combined effect of these actions—insurgent PR savvy, civilian demands for reparations and apologies, and elected officials’ professed outrage—is to produce a constant stream of stories about Western mistakes. This, I tell people, is one reason why it might seem the West is losing the Afghan war.

I’m leaving out a lot of details for the sake of brevity, but this model is broadly valid for occasions when Western forces kill or are accused of killing civilians. There are several other templates for how the media cover or are forced to cover this conflict—Suicide Bomber in Marketplace was popular last summer, Kabul Government Linked to Opium Trade is a spring/summer perennial, School Opens in Tiny Village works year-round, as does Insurgents Are Surrounding Kabul.

But the model I’ve just discussed, Western Forces Kill Civilians, is the one that seems to get the most play lately in this hemisphere. Knowing that it and other models exist, and that they are entirely predictable and repeating, goes a long way toward understanding how the war goes in Afghanistan.

*Secretary Gates testified yesterday that the U.S. actually does need to apologize faster for causing civilian casualties:

Civilian casualties resulting from U.S. combat and airstrikes have been particularly harmful to progress in Afghanistan and must be avoided, Gates stressed. "My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of their problem rather than part of their solution, and then we are lost," he said.

Moreover, the U.S. military must immediately voice regret for any civilian casualties, rather than waiting to investigate the details, Gates said in separate testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday afternoon.

Gates said this is necessary to counter Taliban insurgents, who he said hide among the population and then report civilian deaths in coalition military operations quickly and widely on the Internet. "The instant we believe there may have been civilian casualties, we have to be out there" expressing condolences, rather than arguing over the numbers, he said.

Foreign Desk's Foreign Policy Awards

BEST MAKEUP? MY MONEY'S ON DEAR LEADER.

A brief plug: Today at The Foreign Desk, my colleague Andy Valvur has unveiled this year's nominations for foreign-policy Oscars. Highly recommended for indoor-pale policy wonks like us who delight in those obscure, page-A17 stories on the inner workings of Bangladeshi and Iranian politics. ...

The State of Smart Power

PLUS, SEN. MITCHELL IS CALLED OUT OF RETIREMENT (AGAIN!)


In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, Joseph Nye penned a post-Inaugural summary of smart power that describes the State of Things as They Are in U.S. foreign policy and reputation. It's the sort of piece Nye has written--or has been forced to write--many times in the past several years while foreign-policy pragmatists were shoved into the back seat by ideologues.

Now Dr. Nye has both a platform and listeners in the new presidential administration; as he notes, President Obama, Defense Secretary Gates and incoming Secretary of State Clinton are making all the right noises about restoring America's reputation, particularly with Obama ignoring the naysayers and going ahead with a Guantanamo closure post haste.

One Obama move is particularly impressive to those who remember Northern Ireland's seemingly endless civil war: He has recalled former Maine Sen. George Mitchell, who helped broker the Good Friday peace agreements in 1998, to his country's service as a special envoy for the Middle East.

I can't think of a better choice as Mitchell is one of those figures who seems beyond party and nearly beyond country, which is something the Middle East peace-brokering business sorely needs.

It's Morning in Amriika

Strange stirrings in the East: Senator Obama is about to be sworn in. Senator Clinton is about to become Secretary of State, replacing a justifiably exhausted Secretary Rice (and whatever happened to her? and President Bush?).

Secretary Gates, who I was sure would bolt Washington at the first opportunity, is not only staying on, but lobbying for more money for State, perhaps helping to end State's decades-long starvation diet. The war in Afghanistan is coming into ever-sharper focus as Iraq remains eerily quiet.

It's morning in Amriika, as Arabic speakers would pronounce it, and we'll see how well President-elect Obama's team tackles foreign policy even as domestic policy seems to overshadow everything outside the U.S.: Russia's stranglehold on natural gas, Israel's war with Hamas, China's deteriorating economy.

Someone should go to Washington to investigate how the Obama-Clinton-Gates team picks up President Bush's ball ... and that would be me. Next week I'll be heading to DC to live and work, reporting, for a change, from the belly of the beast. Stay tuned.

Smith-Mundt Symposium: Get Accredited

BECAUSE THAT'S THE ONLY WAY YOU'LL GET INTO THE SMITH-MUNDT SYMPOSIUM.

When I got back from Afghanistan in October, my colleague Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner was flogging a January 13 symposium in D.C. on the Smith-Mundt Act, the enabling legislation for U.S. overseas propaganda efforts. While funding overseas propaganda, it specifically prohibits the U.S. from propagandizing at home.

Silly, I initially thought, in an Internet age where all information is local. Still, I asked Matt to keep me informed, worried that he'd be standing there on January 13 with a stack of blank "Hi, my name is..." stickers and too much undrunk coffee.

Boy, was I wrong. All 200 slots at this one-day symposium filled up, the waiting list is apparently zaftig verging on large, and Matt's saying only accredited journalists get to jump the line.

Somebody please get accredited today and let me know what goes on, as I won't yet have arrived in D.C. at that point. ...

Beacon Hiatus

Dear Reader,

Due to what I expect will be an all-consuming work engagement, I'm putting Beacon on hiatus for about the next six months. I'll try to post if and when I can, but meanwhile please look at some of the excellent soft power, public diplomacy and foreign policy blogs in my sidebar.

Thanks for reading,

Paul Kretkowski

The Madrasa We DO Know

...HAS A CURRICULUM THAT MAY ACTUALLY INCLUDE SCIENCE.

Andy Valvur forwards a story from the Financial Times on how a U.S. provincial reconstruction team is building madrasas in Afghanistan's Khost province.

So much for separation of church and state, you might think--is this where U.S. taxpayers' dollars are going?

But wait: The PRT is making a rational calculation that it's better to build a madrasa in Afghanistan, where the government at least has some say in the curriculum, than have Afghan parents send their kids to madrasas over the hill into Pakistan and spend all their time memorizing the Qur'an. And State is on board as well:

John Kael Weston, the State Department's political representative in the Khost reconstruction team, holds weekly meetings with madrassa students.

"Just look at it from their perspective - if we just talk about girls' education, for example, it just plays into the propaganda about the US. They think that the Americans will be opening up strip joints and restaurants selling alcohol on every corner."

Building madrasas dovetails nicely with something I wrote awhile ago about how U.S. policymakers must address the primacy of religion in many other cultures. Chalk one up for this PRT's pragmatism.

Terrorists Don't Even Have to Succeed Once

WHEN SOME U.S. SOLDIERS SHOOT THEMSELVES IN THE FOOT BY KILLING DOGS.

You can spend years developing counterinsurgency-warfare doctrine, deploy a fairly successful "surge" to tamp down violence, and train U.S.-born linguists until you're blue in the face, but if your own civilians stop supporting your efforts--if they lose the "will to fight"--you lose.

Charges that U.S. forces kill civilians in war zones--as happens unavoidably and usually by accident--enrage the people that counterinsurgents are trying to pacify.

Videos of U.S. forces killing or tormenting dogs in war zones create a whole different set of problems--on the home front. (I should note that the accompanying videos are graphic.)

These knuckleheads aren't Lt. William Calley, but they'll do until Calley comes out of retirement.

Looking Long in Pakistan

THE DIFFICULTY OF PATIENCE, AND EVEN DOING NOTHING, IN PAKISTAN.

The BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones wrote a nice piece for the Stanley Foundation, Iowa's surprisingly prolific and well-funded foreign-policy think tank. In "US Policy Options Toward Pakistan: A Principled and Realistic Approach," Bennett-Jones argues that a long view is everything in American policy toward Pakistan--first because the U.S. left Pakistan to groan under the burden of millions of Afghan refugees during and after the Soviet war, and Pakistanis think the U.S. will shortly cut the country loose again; second, because a short-term focus on pressuring Pervez Musharraf to move against Taliban and al-Qa'ida elements in Pakistan has backfired; and third, because the only way out of Pakistan's consistent poverty, corruption and ineptitude is through a focus on education, which takes well over a decade to have any effect.

Bennett-Jones argues that the U.S. should grit its teeth and say less about perceived front-burner problems such as the Taliban, al-Qa'ida, and Pakistani internal politics and nuclear command-and-control, while increasing accountability for how Pakistan spends U.S. military funding and boosting the percentage of overall U.S. aid that goes to education.

I agree with Bennett-Jones' diagnosis and prescriptions but worry that it's unrealistic for the U.S. to do nothing when it has a wanted militant in some Predator's sights. However, he argues strongly that killing militants via missile attack is a short-term gain that only causes long-term harm in terms of Pakistani public opinion; the average Pakistani sees Islamic militancy as a lesser threat than day-to-day problems like inadequate medical care, and is outraged by perceived U.S. violations of Pakistan's sovereignty.

The problem with Pakistan for U.S. policymakers comes down, as it always seems to in counterinsurgency, to winning small today versus possibly, maybe, hopefully winning big sometime after you're out of office.

I could only advise them to think about Ronald Reagan, who was out of office by the time the Berlin Wall came down but is revered for taking a long view of facing down the Soviets, or Rep. Charlie Wilson, who only recently started to receive public recognition for aiding the Afghan rebels' decade-long war against the Soviets.