[It appears that they are drawing inspiration
from the Islamic State’s propaganda-first strategy. In the past, the Taliban
released elaborate videos of suicide bombings long after the fact, their
material falling far short of the Islamic State’s slick production values.
Recently, though, they have been aiming for close-to-real-time updates and have
greatly improved on quality. A few days ago, the insurgents released footage
filmed by drone-mounted cameras of a suicide car bomb targeting the Nawa
district center in Helmand Province.]
By Mujib Mashal
KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban fighters posed
for the camera, their shawls and bandannas covering their identities but not
their jubilation, as they captured the main roundabout in the northern Afghan
city of Kunduz early this month in what could have been called “operation hoist
the flag and pull out a smartphone.”
The shaky cellphone video directly
contradicted Afghan and American military spokesmen, who were promising that
Kunduz was safe from falling for a second time within a year. During the
invasion, insurgents live-tweeted their victory and flooded social media with
videos, often shot by fighters narrating their movements in close to real time.
In the video from the roundabout, one of the many fighters in the background is
heard saying into a phone: “I will call you back. The flag is going up. I have
to film it.”
It was not an isolated incident. When the
Afghan government said the insurgents were far from the southern provincial
capital of Lashkar Gah, the Taliban quickly put out a video showing a fighter
driving around the city’s outskirts in a seized government Humvee, steering
wheel in one hand and microphone in the other.
The video, shown below, is aimed at
displaying the ease with which Taliban fighters are moving near the city. But
it is also rubbing salt on the wound: The Taliban are making constant use of
the American equipment they have captured from the Afghan forces, including the
Humvee the fighter is driving.
Increasingly, the Taliban — who, when they
controlled the government, banned television and jailed people for photography
— rely on their front-line fighters not only to gain territory and strike at
the Afghan security forces, but also to record the moment and share it.
It appears that they are drawing inspiration
from the Islamic State’s propaganda-first strategy. In the past, the Taliban
released elaborate videos of suicide bombings long after the fact, their
material falling far short of the Islamic State’s slick production values.
Recently, though, they have been aiming for close-to-real-time updates and have
greatly improved on quality. A few days ago, the insurgents released footage
filmed by drone-mounted cameras of a suicide car bomb targeting the Nawa
district center in Helmand Province.
In a country where social media use is
becoming more and more vital, the Taliban are making sure to flood the
information channels with their message. And with the government already on the
defensive both on the battlefield and in the fight over perceptions, the
insurgents are also going out of their way to deny the government access to
those channels.
In places like Helmand Province, as soon as
the fighting intensifies, the Taliban force the cellphone network providers to
shut down their signal towers. Government officials struggle to get their
message out, with local officials and press officers often out of reach.
“We don’t touch their towers, but we tell
them to stop the signals of certain towers close to the battlefield,” the
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said. He said they had appointed media
officers in the front lines because “we want to fill the vacuum ourselves.”
Physically, too, they have limited the reach
and movement of the Afghan government over the past year. The insurgents have
often cut off the main highways, and sometimes struck government convoys on
them, starting firefights with Afghan forces like the one this video shows near
the main highway in Baghlan Province. By sharing videos of such acts, the Taliban
clearly want to project the vulnerability of the Afghan forces’s supply chain.
In the early days of the war, there was a
motto that rolled off military tongues: the battle for hearts and minds. In the
war’s 15th year, many here feel that the Afghan and coalition forces have given
up on those hearts and minds in the countryside, where the public has been
trampled by both sides.
The government that was supposed to be a
better alternative has let people down with corruption and abuse, and has now
limited its ambitions to just hanging on — concentrating force around urban
centers and hoping for a political resolution to the war.
The Taliban’s effective turn to social media
tactics does not change the fact that, ideologically, they represent a dark
past.
“Their propaganda is aimed at their own
fighters — they want to exaggerate their victories to give them morale and to
create fear,” said Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of
Interior, who has a unit of his own for the online battle. “They cannot win
over the people with such propaganda.”
Still, for the most part, the government’s
public communication is stilted, and often limited to bombastic slogans or
undeliverable promises that do not match the reality that most of the Afghan
people are living.
By owning the information channels moment to
moment, the Taliban are spreading their perception of putting the government on
the defensive beyond the battlefield, in a way that resonates with a growing
segment of the Afghan public. And there has been little so far to counter it.
Fahim Abed contributed reporting from Kabul.
