As Afghanistan’s armed forces cede and regain ground in the searing summer offensive against the Taliban, they are losing a propaganda war that is affecting the morale of a fearful population waiting for reassurance that the insurgents won’t overrun their country.
Over the weekend, Taliban militiamen stormed districts in the north of the country, furthering the widespread perception that the insurgents are winning against a government that lacks strategy and leadership. Since May 1, the Taliban have stormed 60 districts, with active fighting now going on in some 64% of Afghanistan’s territory, according to the Institute of War and Peace Studies, though eight districts have been retaken by Afghan forces. Security sources said that Afghan forces often retreat in order to save civilian lives.
The Taliban onslaught, coupled with the looming withdrawal by September 11 of the remaining US troops, is escalating concerns that Afghan government forces may not be able to prevent Taliban battlefield gains without the presence of international forces. Close air support, in particular, has given ground forces the edge over their enemy but could be significantly curtailed with the withdrawal of US troops and private contractors who work with the Afghan Air Force.
The Taliban — much more adept at the use of media platforms than the Kabul government or its supporters in the international community — often post videos on social media of their militants raising flags in the central squares of districts where the Afghan forces have either been vanquished or forced into retreat.
“If we were looking at a breakdown of the war, it is 75% narrative and 25% actual conflict,” a senior Afghan security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Their narrative is ‘We have defeated the superpower’, and that is attractive to some young people.”
Some Afghan officials counter that the perception of the Taliban’s victories is due to faulty reporting.
“This is what exactly it is. A perception. A false perception. Helped by ‘journalists’ who are either not in Afghanistan or are blind to the truths of war and how many districts have been retaken. Ethics in journalism are important,” Colonel Naweed Kawusi, the Ministry of Interior’s police support director, wrote on Twitter in response to a US newspaper report.
While the Taliban trumpet their advances, there is little substantive response from the Afghan government — which lacks a clear communications strategy — or the US-led international forces. The NATO resolute support mission in Kabul declines to respond to requests for information. The US Department of Defence has referred queries back to Kabul. The British Ministry of Defence and the British Army, as well as other NATO partners, have also failed to respond to questions.
Afghanistan’s ministries of Defence and Interior are also silent, under advice, according to sources, from the international military. While some officials will speak to journalists on the condition of anonymity, the Taliban have effectively seized the high ground in claiming victory over the government.
“There is a flood of the negative narrative. But it is not a government narrative versus a Taliban narrative,” the senior security official said. “It is a narrative being propagated by international media. Their access to the ground is limited, the people they talk with is limited, they don’t really understand how things really are, they have to rely on a lot of the information they see in the public space, and not all of it is correct.
“The Taliban put out pictures, images, and videos that are not always reflective of the reality. The assumption outside is that this is it.”
At the same time, even as the battlefield heats up and more territory falls to the Taliban, government reshuffles are slowing a coherent response. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani just replaced, again, the ministers of defense and interior, a move that brings changes in key senior positions as each newcomer seeks to build his own team.
If government officials are frustrated with that narrative of Taliban victory, that’s because the insurgents rarely hold districts for long, have yet to take control of provinces or provincial capitals, and don’t provide government services in areas they do control.
Still, the Taliban are on the march. A fierce late spring-early summer offensive in Helmand and Kandahar provinces coincided with the poppy crop harvest, which earns the Taliban hundreds of millions of dollars a year and seasonally provokes fighting in the country’s opium belt. On Sunday the government moved reinforcements to northern Faryab province, where the insurgents were rolling over districts on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Maymana. That followed the deaths last week of at least 23 Afghan special forces commandos fighting a Taliban advance, including 31-year-old US-trained Colonel Sohrab Azimi, who was mourned across the country as a hero.
Lynne O’Donnell is an Australian journalist, author, and analyst. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.
I think a careful look at the politicians and military leadership will also disclose a lot of corruption. It may turn out that the Afgan army is substantialy hobbled because resources are secretly being sold to others including the Taliban. These guys hope they can escape the country before the crunch comes. Unfortunately for the ordinary citizen, especially the women, the country is stuffed.
If poppies are where the Taliban get their money it is incredibly easy and cheap to solve. Send in the drones and fire-bomb the fields. They’re not exactly difficult to find.
I wonder if the Taliban had to pay the CIA for the opium franchise?
I think rather that the CIA promoted and funded the Taliban when they were fighting the Russian invaders. Why do the Yanks get it wrong so persistently
Soviets. And the majority of the Soviet leadership in years served were either a Georgian or Ukrainians.
The USSR went to “assist” the government of Afghanistan (the same way the USA did in Viet Nam) at the request of the then recognised Government of Afghanistan, the US Administration determined that it would turn Afghanistan into the USSR “Viet Nam?
In this effort to turn Afghanistan into a Viet Nam for the USSR the US supported mujahadin recruited by the Saudi Wahhabi Salafi preaching jihad, funded and equipped by both the CIA then run by William Casey, and the Saudi GID, then run by Prince Turki bin Faisal and trained it camps with assistance from Pakistan’s ISI. These “freedom fighters” were greeted in the Oval Office by Ronald Reagan
The Saudi financed Sunni Wahabi Salafi preached jihad against the “godless” communist USSR and its assistance to the then Afghan Government. The House of Saud provided vast amounts of money, the CIA provided funds laundered through BCCI from the trafficking of heroin grown in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, incidentally boosting the flow of narcotics to Europe and U.S.A.
The CIA provided most of the military equipment, initially of Eastern bloc origin, from that great bazaar that is the black market in weapons world wide. This enabled the recruitment of thousands of mujahadeen, their arming, equipping and training all done through the good offices of the Pakistani ISI.
May I suggest reading Buda’s Wagon : a brief history of the car bomb by Mike Davis. Chapter 13 Car Bomb University An institution jointly funded by the Saudi GID and the CIA t
At Car Bomb U they were trained by CIA operatives whose experience came from their work in Viet Nam and other parts of IndoChina, Central and South America and Europe. They were instructed in the construction and use of IED, pipe bombs, VIED even camel bombs! These devices were then employed with other weaponry to attack the Soviet Occupying Forces in Afghanistan.
The US learnt nothing from the Viet Nam Farrago. The US military seems incapable of ever learning from past mistakes.
“Chasing Ghosts” by John J.Tierney Jnr. is a study of the American involvement in unconventional warfare starting with the early settlement of the colonies. It takes in Revolutionary Terrorism use by Whig supporters of the Revolution against Tory Loyalists, the Confederate use of raiders, through all the early American adventures in Cuba, the Philippines, Central America and on to Indo China and the current adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an enlightening and interesting book.
Missing from the book is any reference to Sir Robert Thompson, who had fought in the Burmese jungle with the Chindits in WWII, and was Permanent Secretary of Defence for Malaya. He was the main driver of the change in strategy and tactics to defeat the MNLA.
The British realised early on, at Thompson’s insistence, that it was winning hearts and minds that would accomplish their mission. Despite this it took 12 years and involved up to a maximum of 40,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen/women including Ghurkas plus the Malayan Police Force, against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist guerrillas who were ethnic Chinese from a distinct dialect minority.
Thompson was appointed was to help the US in its adventure Vietnam by Harold Wilson,who refused to partake of the stupidity in Vietnam, unlike Ming the Mendacious. JFK was receptive to Thompson’s ideas but the US military refused to implement them in any serious fashion. His warning not to bomb villages went unheeded and dismissal of US air supremacy was ignored. “The war [will] be won by brains and on foot”, Thompson told the US, but interests in Saigon and Washington marginalised him so his ideas and plans had no effect.
So,now in The Afghan Imbroglio and the later Iraq Fiasco, along comes Rumsfeld with the RMA and Network Centric Warfare and all those other wonderful acronyms. He and the rest of the White House Cabal really believed “All you need is Technology” and you can hang out the “Mission Accomplished” sign.
Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History
by John J.Tierney Jnr.
Potomac Books; Illustrated edition October 1, 2006
ISBN:597970158 978-1597970150 LC:U240 .T59 2006
The US managed quite well in the deforestation of Vietnam, a few poppy farms should have been a easy.
No probably it was just passed over over to them as the US and the CIA know all about drug trafficking , as did the Australian based Nugan Hand Bank,a CIA front, with its links to not only drug trafficking but also illegal arms dealing.
Politics of heroin : CIA complicity in the global drug trade / Alfred W. McCoy./Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II.
Brooklyn, N.Y. : Lawrence Hill Books, c1991 ISBN:155652126X : LC: HV5822.H4 M33 1991
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia brings to light that by 1958 there was a revival by Ngô Đình Nhu, the brother of Ngô Đình Diệm, of heroin and opium trafficking. This in order to fund Diệm’s Cần Lao Party and further the repression of a growing armed insurgency and political dissidence.
The drugs, as well as gold shipments, were flown from Laos to Saigon by South Vietnamese Airforce transports commanded by Nguyen Cao Ky, later Premier and Vice President of South Vietnam.
There was also the shipping out of large quantities of heroin inserted into the corpses of US military shipped back to the USA.
Many of those who did leave Viet Nam after reunification were party to much of this malfeasance.
Then with cocaine there is their involvement with the Contras* and other narco crooks when under the cover of national security and covert operations, the US. government has repeatedly collaborated with and protected major international drug traffickers.
Cocaine politics : drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America / Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall.
Berkeley : University of California Press, c1998.
ISBN: 0520214498
LC: HV5840.C45 S36 1998
*”You know the truth about them, you know who they’re fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.”
As said by President Ronald Reagan, who later claimed that he knew nothing about the Iran Contra Affair.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/02/world/reagan-terms-nicaraguan-rebels-moral-equal-of-founding-fathers.html