[THS] Tom Hayden: The Military Occupation of Our Minds

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25345.htm

The Military Occupation of Our Minds

By Tom Hayden

April 29, 2010 "Huffington Post" --  As Congress weighs Afghanistan funding, the
military is escalating what it calls the "war of perceptions" at home and abroad. The
question is whether the American media and Congress will collaborate in the
Pentagon's press strategy or retain a critical edge.

It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the "information battlespace" by
welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries about
the Kandahar offensive to the American people.

Nor is it accidental that the US is soft-pedaling any public criticism of its crooked
crony in Kabul, Hamid Karzhai, as thousands of American soldiers are being
dispatched to face bullets in his defense.

Nor is there any question that Afghan civilian casualties are being downplayed or
covered-up. The agency in charge of counting the bodies, the United Nations
Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, published a footnote last year admitting "there is a
significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties."

Paranoia? Do we live under Orwellian thought control? Of course not. But we the
people, the media and the Congress, routinely accept taxpayer-funded Pentagon and
White House public relations narratives. These often take disgusting forms, such as
the false claims and cover-up that soldier Pat Tillman died under enemy fire, or the
recent Special Forces' killing of three pregnant women which was followed by digging
of bullets out of their bodies to cover up the crime.

The current cycle of military media manipulation began with the Iraq war, when the
Pentagon enticed generals, intelligence officers, and defense contractors to become
"message force multipliers" for the Bush administration's version of the war,
"sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated." It took
a New York Times' lawsuit to uncover 8,000 pages of documents showing that the
chosen surrogates could be counted on to deliver propaganda messages "in the form
of their own opinions."

The strategy goes far deeper than the sleaze of everyday public relations. This is
about the Pentagon's turning of computer science into a weapon in the emerging
field of information warfare, in which the deaths of men, women and children are
less important than the perception of those deaths, or whether they are perceived by
anyone at all. As Gen. McChrystal, whose entire career in Iraq remains a classified
secret, said during a February briefing:

    "This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you
capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants."

McChrystal also has said, in a recent London speech, that Afghanistan is not like a
football game but more "like a political debate after which both sides announce they
have won."

McChrystal went on a public relations offensive to promote his request for a troop
escalation earlier this year, giving interviews to the New York Times, Le Figaro,
Newsweek, and to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He was featured as a modern god delivering us from the impersonal forces of fate, in
a worshipful piece by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic in February. (In a 2003 Atlantic
piece by Kaplan, titled "Supremacy by Stealth," he advised that America's wars best
be fought "off camera, so to speak.")

Prior to the current media offensive someone leaked (or was it a pre-emptive
launch?) McChrystal's August 30, 2009 confidential assessment of Afghanistan, which
includes a length section on "Strategic Communication", where McChrystal declares
that "the information domain is a battlespace" in the war over perceptions.

The irony is that the Taliban insurgents, with little if any information technology,
"have undermined the credibility of the ISAF, the international community [IC], and
the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]", according to
McChrystal's own analysis. (It is noteworthy that the Afghan government is never
referred to in the American media as an "Islamic Republic," because the frame is
communicated to Afghans only.)

Shortening the term Strategic Communications to StratCom, McChrystal goes on for
five single-spaced pages with directives for dominating the information battlespace.
Of particular interest might be his plan for Offensive Information Operations [IO],
which consists of "a robust and proactive capability to counter hostile information
activities and propaganda", with every soldier "empowered to be a StratCom
messenger for ISAF." A key strategic goal is to win over European and Canadian
public opinion, or "the strategic center of gravity which is the maintenance of [NATO]
Alliance cohesion." Afghanistan, in other words, is the glue which holds NATO
together, as other official strategists have written.

The general does acknowledge, in one sentence, that the battle of perceptions does
require a change of behavior on the ground. But the overwhelming emphasis on
perception requires that the negatives always be minimized or covered-up, as in any
aggressive public relations campaign.

Already, Special Operations forces account for half or more of the American military
missions in Afghanistan, and all the operations in Pakistan. Clandestine raids against
the Taliban -- not al Qaeda -- more than quadrupled recently, with 90 raids in
November 2009. The Red Cross now reports that, as the Kandahar offensive begins,
the number of civilian deaths attributed to NATO has doubled, despite McChrystal's
orders to avoid such casualties.

>From 2004-2009, the Pentagon's PR budget increased by 63 percent to at least $4.7
billion in 2009. The entire video budget for Brave New Foundation's "Rethink
Afghanistan" campaign was approximately $350,000 in 2009.

This brings us to the US offensive in Kandahar, which might be called the mother of
all media battles. The deadly hubris underlying the US information battleplan was
recently exposed in a poll showing that Kandahar residents support negotiations with
the Taliban instead of a military offensive by a 19:1 margin, and that five of six see
the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers." [NYT, April 21, 2010]. As often happens, the
poll was uncovered and released by the Wired magazine blog, not by the Congress or
the mass media.

Given Afghan public opinion, the challenge for the Pentagon in shaping the
information battlefield in Kandahar, therefore, is overwhelming, even impossible.
That means the war of perceptions is going to be directed largely at American and
congressional opinion as the heralded offensive gets underway.

A few American journalists, like Doyle McManus of the LA Times, have noted that the
warm-up offensive in tiny Marja, back in February, has not met the military's
expectations. That it was hardly an "offensive" at all is proven by the handful of
US/NATO casualties, estimated in the range of thirteen by late February. The fatal
premise of the Marja plan was that the Marines could bring in "a government in a
box" after driving out the Taliban. That's a form of immaculate conception that will
not happen.

In Kandahar, as in Marja before, the local insurgents probably will fight defensively,
and probably launch spectacular bombing operations in other parts of Afghanistan,
before gradually disappearing as the Americans advance, bringing their "government
in a box". It's confusing, because that same "government" is actually there already,
in the form of Karzhai's brother who is widely seen as a corrupt drug-dealing warlord
with existing ties to the Taliban. So the US may gain a public relations victory which
will mean deepening of the quagmire. Kandahar is not going to be Iwo Jima, forever
frozen in a photograph as the turning point of World War 2.

Someday soon the White House and Pentagon will announce on camera that they
have captured the Taliban's "spiritual homeland" of Kandahar. While the offensive
goes on, few in Congress will be tough enough to take a hard look at the reality
behind the war of perceptions. And when the "victory" is announced, Congress will
pass another year's appropriation for the war.

This will go on, with American troops dying in vain, unless enough members of the
American public, the mainstream media and the Congress finally wake up to the
reality that we are no longer citizens but targets in a deliberate war for our minds.