Information Operations in Afghanistan: Why They Are a Necessity

Author: Philip Taylor
Posted: 06/08/2010 12:00:00 AM EDT

Dr. Philip Taylor is professor of international communications in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published 13 books on subjects ranging from diplomacy, influence and foreign affairs, and he tutors around the world on both civilian and military courses.

Let’s start off by talking about this recent project that you have been working on called the Global Engagement Plan. What is this project, why is it important now, and what are the key recommendations that have come of it?

Well it is an attempt to try to co-ordinate all of the various, what have traditionally been called “pillars of strategic communication,” which has now been rebranded, or the phrase has been replaced by global engagement. And what it is an attempt to do is to get all different parts of national and international influence activities…official influence activities…joined up with a recognition by each of the pillars of the importance of the other, because they’ve been tending to work independently of one and other.

And aside to this are there any other projects in the pipeline for you?

I am always working on various things. I have a book coming out on the media coverage on the Iraq war in 2003 that should be out later this year. And then there are ongoing projects relating to the war on terror.

There has been an increased emphasis of late on information operations in Afghanistan. Why do you believe that these changes have been necessary and what direction do you think that this type of strategy should be taking within that particular theatre?

Well it is long overdue. I mean the response, the kinetic response, was perhaps understandable in light of 9/11 but it hadn’t been thought through in terms of the long term objectives. Often kinetic results can severely jeopardise long term influence activities and we have seen that in both Iraq and Afghanistan. What is so surprising is that switching to a counter insurgency, hearts and minds type of operation has taken the top brass so long to realise that that is what is really needed. And so going into villages and trying to win hearts and minds and thenleaving them has been the major problem. Now there is a recognition that you have got to stay. And some senior officials said although it has not been picked up on by the media so much, but it has been realised that we are going to have to be there for a very long time in order to achieve that. Otherwise any kinetic efforts are going to be harmful to the longer term strategy which is an information conflict, not a military one.

I see. And are there any specific sort of innovative or ground breaking information campaigns that have perhaps caught your eye recently that possibly point the way towards the type of strategy we really should be looking to emulate in the future?

Well you know, this has all been done before. And the military have a phrase which they use called “lessons learned”, but what it really should say is “lessons forgotten”. I mean these kinds of counter insurgency information campaigns have been conducted in places like Malaya in the 1950s, in Kenya in the 1950s, to some extent in Vietnam, and the whole emphasis on hardware rather than information software has just somehow been lost in the years between Vietnam and the end of the Cold War. And twenty years after that we are just beginning to realise…I am not saying there are too many parallels to the Cold War, but that was an ideological struggle. There is now recognition, I think, that this is an ideological struggle not like the Cold War, because it is against an international organisation, a terrorist organisation, a non-state actor. But nonetheless, thanks to new technologies like the internet. It is an international and global struggle and the chief objective of which is to separate the terrorists, or what I prefer to call them–criminals, out from the people, which was what was done by General Templer in Malaya back in the ‘50s. We heard a lot about war amongst the people from the likes of General Smith and so on, but the translation of that, if you like, “military theory” into actual practice has taken bewilderingly a long time.

You say “bewilderingly,” but can you offer any possible reasons for why those lessons have been forgotten?

I think because soldiers, quite rightly, are interested in technology [but] they have let the technology dictate the strategy, rather than concentrate on what was done during the Cold War, which is human beings. It is human beings who flew those planes into building, and that was old fashioned technology they used to do that. There has been a sort of theoretical recognition of the importance of asymmetric fighting and so on. But in translating it into practice…perhaps it is a generational thing. I know this is controversial. But the generation of our senior commanders for the past twenty years, the senior commanders, are the very generation who missed out on the new communications technologies, and as the younger officers have been brought up taking Facebook and videogames for granted, as they become senior managers, I suspect that they will get the information in a way that some of the older generation have not quite understood. Because it is in that information space, in cyber space that Al Qaeda are fighting their main battle.

With that generational gap in mind, looking at internet based media, social media–where do things currently stand within the development of these tools as real game changers in the influence domain? Are we actually making full and proper use of them, as it stands?

Well I think we are getting better, but it is very slow. I think the generation of officers in their 20s and 30s understand it. But this in a sense goes up against the military culture because military culture has been for generations one of secrecy. Whereas these social network groups and the whole information piece requires you to actually put information out, not only hold it in. So I think apart from the generational issue, it is possibly also a cultural issue. Soldiers who are preoccupied with things like occupational security are worried that, for example, their own soldier bloggers are actually giving away secrets to the enemy. Whereas that is not the way to kind of approach information as a tool, you need to be proactive rather than reactive.

We’ve heard the proactive versus reactive argument in the past, but is it perhaps a bit of a brick wall then, with that military culture in mind. I mean, we are never really going to see those types of departments and divisions opening up fully. What perhaps can be done instead to offset that?

Well I think it’s patchy. I think that you can point at areas like the new American African Commands website, where there is recognition that these are the tools to take the whole game forward. But there are, as you say, pockets of resistance that just think we’ve got to keep the information to ourselves. That means we lose.