“Wars today cannot be won without media.

Media aims at the heart rather than the

body, [and] if the heart is defeated, the battle is won.” Alemarah or the Voice of Jihad (Taliban official
website), editor Abdul Satar Maiwandi

In his new book, Taliban Narratives, based on over fifteen years research in Afghanistan,
Thomas Johnson is unequivocal in claiming that the Taliban has won the information war
against the US Coalition and the Afghan government.

In short, America has no narrative to sell to the Afghan people, and the Taliban do, which is why Washington
has no realistic prospect of ever winning the conflict.

The Taliban’s messaging is concise, to the point, and uses an effective information discipline that is in tune
with the target audiences they wish to influence. Much of their messaging is also supported and funded by
the Pakistani military, especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate.

The US as well as their Kabul allies, on the other hand, have blundered greatly
in their messaging by basically failing to present narratives and stories that
resonate or can be understood by their targeted audiences. In other words, the
United States and its allies have lost the “battle of the story” in Afghanistan.

Despite its conventional and technological superiority,

the US military lost the battle for the most valuable terrain of all, the
trust and confidence of the Afghans themselves; much less their “hearts and
minds,” that we never had a chance of winning in the first place.

Moreover,and intimately connected to the Taliban information campaign, the US and

Afghan government have failed to meet the rural Afghan population’s basic
expectations of improving their lives through good governance and effective
security, stabilization, transition, and reconstruction efforts. And this has
proved fatal in a war that turned out to be primarily a Taliban rural insurgency
wrapped in the narrative of jihad.

The Taliban quickly learned how to wage a sophisticated and effective information campaign against the
“crusader” invaders and the Afghan “puppet” regime. This was in stark contrast
with the initial view of the Taliban in 2001 as a bumbling, technologically
backward enemy with few connections with the Afghan people.

The Taliban have proved to have an adept understanding of guerrilla warfare strategy and
tactics in which “the guerrilla fighter is primarily a propagandist, an agitator,
a disseminator of the revolutionary idea, who uses the struggle itself as an
instrument of agitation.”
While primarily assessing the messaging, delivery means, and central narratives
and stories of Afghan insurgents, especially the Taliban and Hezb-e-
Islami Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (HIG),
Thomas Johnson’s book also assesses US PSYOP and
IO operations and compares them to the Taliban’s campaign.

In his briefs to senior officials responsible for US information and PSYOP operations over
the last fifteen years, he suggested that American forces include in their messaging allusions
to Afghan poetry, folktales, legends, and oral traditions—essentially the
kind of sources that the Taliban use in their information operations—but he
was basically or at least implicitly told that this was “too hard.”
Such a response and position is one of the central reasons why America’s efforts proved
unsuccessful in Afghanistan. We ultimately proved too “lazy” to develop
Afghan-resonating stories and narratives that could have complemented our
operations and policies in the country.
Tthe Taliban’s information operations as well as the process by
which they were distributed, as witnessed by Thomas Johnson, represent almost
a kind of metaphor for the problems that the
United States and NATO/ISAF have faced in Afghanistan. That is, the West
has attempted to apply methods and pursue policies in both military and
civil–political domains without understanding the impact on individual
Afghans. The West has clearly not understood the influences that sway and
inspire Afghan behavior. The US and its NATO allies developed objectives
based on their views and desires for Afghanistan, not based on the views and
requirements of the common Afghan who represents the “center of gravity”
for this conflict. The US and NATO then made promises that they did not
deliver, at least in the eyes of Afghans (a disastrous and dangerous situation in
Afghanistan). As a villager from Sperwan Ghar, Panjwayi district of Kandahar
province suggested to Johnson, “they [the Coalition forces] promised to
build, but they destroyed instead.”

The US and NATO would have been well advised during the initial stages
of Operation Enduring Freedom to ask simple questions about what
Afghans—not just the elites in Kabul, technocrats, and expatriates—really
wanted from the West’s engagement. What are the messages and frames that
motivate and influence Afghans? What is the best way to spread a message?
Such questions were never systematically asked, resulting in many policies as
well as strategies being misapplied in the eyes of the Afghan population. Many
of the Taliban’s information messaging, on the other hand, appear to be deeply
rooted in the Afghan psyche. They appeal to emotions that the West do not
and have not tried to understand. This lack of understanding, in part, has
ultimately doomed Western engagement in Afghanistan and contributed to
the West losing the battle of the story in Afghanistan and, therefore, the war.