Conservative Commentary

Michael Yon encounters the incompetence of British military-media relations:

Media Ops people—who do not leave their base or go on missions—who are spooling out “the message” to the media. They are clueless about the state of the war in Afghanistan. For instance, many of the Media Ops officers will insist that we have enough helicopters in Afghanistan. Those officers are either completely oblivious to the actuality of the situation or lying.

General Petraeus told me straight up that we don’t have enough and that we doubled our helicopters in the last four months and are in the process of fielding “two more fistfuls.” (He did not give specific numbers.) Those BS-filled officers who deny the obvious are, in fact, symptomatic to why we are losing the war.

He offers an insight into the myopic folly of this behaviour:

There is the maxim that a customer can judge the cleanliness of a restaurant’s kitchen by the restroom. After much experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have discovered another: Soldiers always treat correspondents they way they treat the local people. When soldiers treat correspondents badly, they treat local people even worse and are creating enemies. Those troops who brag about how they mistreat or detest correspondents are abusing and resentful of the local population, and they cannot win this sort of war. The people will kill them and the media will bash them and they will blame the people and the media. When a soldier alienates sympathetic correspondents, he has no real chance against mortal enemies such as the Taliban and al Qaeda, and they will defeat him. Yet there is subtlety: for “the people,” in the case of Media Ops, is you.

The Major doesn’t deal with Afghans. Afghans are not his target and it is not correspondents who are being denied access. YOU are being denied access. YOU are resented and deceived, and people like Minister of Defence, Bob Ainsworth, wish to separate realities from readers.

There are some media operations people in the armed forces who understand this, and do a sterling job. I have several media ops contacts who are nothing but candid and helpful. There is, however, an institutional bias towards censorship and spin rather than accuracy within the government. Truth is not just to be the first casualty of the war, but a hostile target to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Servicemen are unduly censored in a way that completely undermines the proper prosecution of the war.

Military-media relations was something I covered in a decent amount of detail as part of my degree. The attitude that a western liberal democracy can hope to censor its way out of an insurgency is utterly ludicrous. It offers no advantage with either the enemy or on the domestic front. Failure to be candid with the public about the failings and pitfalls of the war does far more damage than honesty ever could.

Bad stories cannot be censored because the technology and political culture exists to ensure that they get disseminated. Those who understand this, like US Lieutenant-General Wililiam Caldwell, realise that the question is not about whether or not a story comes out, but how that story is perceived. To do that effectively you have to be the first to “tell the story”. Shutting down authoritative reporting undermines that, and the very act of censorship, itself at odds with a war ostensibly fought in the defence of western values, only compounds the problem. Censorship on matters without a direct effect on operational security is simply counter-productive. Nonetheless it is easy for a risk-averse major who is more interested in brown-nosing than actually standing up for what’s right.

This is not some idealistic flight of fancy; censorship demonstrably damages our ability to win the war in Afghanistan at the political, strategic and operational levels. Operationally it promotes a mentality where difficulties and problems are explained away rather than properly addressed. Take the helicopter shortage: rather than being an operational concern, it is recast as simply a piece of adverse media, to be dealt with like any other piece of hostile fire. The policy response becomes one of deceiving the public about the number, capabilities and necessity of transport helicopters in Afghanistan. Failures simply become a matter of perception, regardless of the fact that they will result in us losing the war. The worrying thing is that if we are defeated, these people will simply shift the blame onto those who got justifiably angry at not resourcing a war properly, rather than those who thought you could fight a war on the cheap. It feeds the delusions of ministers who think they can avoid making hard decisions. Censorship prevents the addressing of operational problems.

On the political level it has an adverse effect on both populations engaged in the conflict. As Michael Yon points out, the Afghans are not the only people NATO needs to convince of its intentions and capabilities. When insurgents want to undermine support for the ISAF mission, they do so with both these audiences in mind. What they do is go for what is termed the “say-do gap”, i.e. the difference between our rhetoric and our actions. If we say we are in Afghanistan to promote democratic values, then acquiesce in ‘Hamid Karzai’s stolen election through political cowardice, then there is a significant gap through which the Taliban may drive a wedge. It undermines Afghan support for ISAF by undermining their claims of democratisation and showing them to be simply backing another set of warlords, and undermines western support by undermining our confidence in the moral case for our mission. This is one example, but there are many others, Abu Ghraib being a particularly prominent one in the fiasco days of Iraq. Censorship beyond that of operational security becomes problematic here in that, with the almost inevitability that the story will get out, it simply smacks of a cover-up. The say-do gap is further widened by our own actions.

Faced with this situation, we are in fact fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. The Taliban lie, exaggerate and manipulate the media. So do we. The Taliban, however, are better at the game than we are; it plays to their strengths as a supposedly-indigenous insurgency. We should not be fighting on their terms, but opt for those that play to our strengths. In other words, we should be fighting in a manner compatible with both our values and technology. We can beat the Taliban in both openness and speed of publication if we relax a degree of the hierarchical control of the media that the British military is used to. Our aim has to be to get our story out first, and make sure that we are more candid than our opponents are. That will, naturally, present difficulties, but they must be honestly addressed if we are to succeed. Truth must be our weapon, not theirs.

Competent senior officers are aware that this is not an effective way of fighting. Admiral Michael Mullen, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently wrote a paper lambasting the view of some in “strategic communications” that media management can simply be used like a conventional weapon, sending out the PR men to clear up after any mess. Although his article owes a decent amount to DoD politics in the US, his criticisms do hold true for those in British defence media operations who think that they can simply spin away bad publicity.

If we want to succeed, we have to be honest. We cannot hope to win a two-front war against both the Taliban and the truth. We should co-opt the latter to our side before we even think about talking to the former.

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