[Peace-discuss] More & better propaganda

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Published on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Inter Press Service
	McChrystal Looks to Spin Afghan Civilian Deaths Problem
	by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - At his confirmation hearings two weeks ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal 
said reducing civilian deaths from air strikes in Afghanistan was "strategically 
decisive" and declared his "willingness to operate in ways that minimise 
casualties or damage, even when it makes our task more difficult."

Afghan villagers stand near the graves of US air-strike victims in Garni village 
in May. US General Stanley McChrystal took command of nearly 90,000 US- and 
NATO-led troops in Afghanistan Monday, tasked with turning around the war 
against the Taliban as attacks reach record levels. (AFP/File)Some McChrystal 
supporters hope he will rein in the main source of civilian casualties: Special 
Operations Forces (SOF) units that carry out targeted strikes against suspected 
"Taliban" on the basis of doubtful intelligence and raids that require air 
strikes when they get into trouble.

But there are growing indications that his command is preparing to deal with the 
issue primarily by seeking to shift the blame to the Taliban through more and 
better propaganda operations and by using more high-tech drone intelligence 
aircraft to increase battlefield surveillance rather than by curbing the main 
direct cause of civilian casualties.

U.S. officials at a NATO conference in Brussels last Friday were telling 
reporters that "public relations" are now considered "crucial" to "turning the 
tide" in Afghanistan, according to an AFP story on Jun 12.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus also referred to the importance of taking 
the propaganda offensive in a presentation to the pro-military think tank Centre 
for a New American Security (CNAS) Jun. 11. "When you're dealing the press," he 
said, "when you're dealing the tribal leaders, when you're dealing with host 
nations... you got to beat the bad guys to the headlines."

The new emphasis on more aggressive public relations appears to respond to 
demands from U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan to wrest control of the 
issue of civilian casualties from the Taliban. In a discussion of that issue at 
the same conference, Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in 
Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said, "We've got to be careful about who controls 
the narrative on civilian casualties."

U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan "see the enemy seeking to take 
airstrikes off the table" by exaggerating civilian casualties, Barno said. He 
objected to making civilian casualties an indicator of success or failure, as a 
CNAS paper has recommended.

The U.S. command in Afghanistan has already tried, in fact, to apply 
"information war" techniques in effort to control the narrative on the issue. 
The command has argued both that the Taliban were responsible for the massive 
civilians casualties in a U.S. airstrike on May 4 that killed 147 civilians, 
including 90 women and children, and that the number of civilian deaths claimed 
has been vastly exaggerated, despite detailed evidence from village residents 
supporting the casualty figures.

Col. Greg Julian, the command's spokesman, said in late May that a 
"weapon-sight" video would show that the Taliban were to blame. However, Nancy 
A. Youssef reported Jun. 15 in McClatchy newspapers that the video in question 
shows that no one had checked to see if women and children were in the building 
before it was bombed, according to two U.S. military officials.

The Afghan government has highlighted the problem of SOF units carrying out 
raids which result in airstrikes against civilian targets. Kai Eide, the chief 
of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, has now publicly supported that 
position, saying in a video conference call from Kabul to NATO defence ministers 
meeting in Brussels Jun. 12 that there is an "urgent need" to review raids by 
SOF units, because the civilian casualties being created have been 
"disproportionate to the military gains".

But McChrystal hinted in his confirmation hearing that he hoped to reduce 
civilian casualties by obtaining more intelligence, surveillance and 
reconnaissance aircraft. Petraeus confirmed that approach to the problem in 
remarks at the CNAS conference last week, announcing that he was planning to 
shift some high-tech intelligence vehicles from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Petraeus referred to "predators, armed full motion video with Hellfire 
missiles", "special intelligence birds", and unmanned intelligence vehicles 
called Shadows and Ravens, which fly 24 hours a day.

Although such intelligence aircraft may make U.S. battlefield targeting more 
precise, Petraeus's reference to drones equipped with Hellfire missiles suggests 
that U.S. forces in Afghanistan may now rely more than previously on drone 
strikes against suspected Afghan insurgents. Given the chronic lack of accurate 
intelligence on the identity of insurgent leaders, that would tend to increase 
civilian casualties.

Petraeus's past reluctance to stop or dramatically reduce such SOF operations, 
despite the bad publicity surrounding them, suggests that high level 
intra-military politics are involved.

The Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC) has been involved in the 
most highly publicised cases of massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It 
was established by the Marine Corps only in February 2006, and the first MarSOC 
company arrived in Afghanistan just a year later.

MarSOC was unable to recruit the more mature officers and troops needed for 
cross-cultural situations, and its recruits had only a few months of training 
before being sent to Afghanistan.

The unit's commanding officer had been warned by one participant in the training 
before the unit had arrived in Afghanistan that his troops were too young and 
too oriented toward killing to serve in Afghanistan, according to Chris Mason, a 
former U.S. official in Afghanistan familiar with the unit's history.

In March 2007, a company of MarSOC troops which had only arrived in the country 
the previous month were accused of firing indiscriminately at pedestrians and 
cars as they sped away from a suicide bomb attack, killing as many as 19 Afghan 
civilians. Five days later the same unit reportedly fired on traffic again.

As a result, a powerful Pashtun tribe, the Shinwari, demanded to the governor of 
Nangahar province and Afghan President Hamid Karzai that U.S. military 
operations in the province be terminated. Within a month, the 120-man MarSOC 
company was pulled out of Afghanistan.

Significantly, however, a new MarSOC unit was sent back to Afghanistan only a 
few weeks later, assigned to Herat province. Last August, a MarSOC unit launched 
an attack against a preplanned target in Azizabad that combined unmanned drones, 
attack helicopters and a Spectre gunship. More than 90 civilians were killed in 
the attack, including 60 children, but not a single Taliban fighter was killed 
in the attack, according to Afghan and U.N. officials.

Karzai said the operation had been triggered by false information given by the 
leader of a rival tribe, and no U.S. official contradicted him.

When Petraeus took command at CENTCOM just a few weeks later, Afghans were still 
seething over the Azizabad massacre. That would have been the perfect time for 
him to take decisive action on MarSOC's operations.

But Petraeus took no action on MarSOC. Meanwhile, other SOF units were 
continuing to carry out raids that did not get headlines but which regularly 
killed women and children, stirring more Afghan anger. Petraeus may have been 
confronted with the necessity of stopping all the operations if he wished to 
discipline MarSOC, which would have been too serious a blow to the reputation of 
U.S. Special Operations Forces.

For two weeks, from mid-February to early March, the rate of SOF raids was 
reduced. But in early March, they were resumed, despite the near certainty that 
there would be more embarrassing incidents involving SOF operations. The worst 
case of massive civilian deaths in the war would come just two months later, and 
involved the MarSOC unit.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. 
national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of 
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 
2006.

Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service