Shuttle PSYOP

Those cousins keep delivering. Particularly interesting is their application of the dominant Strategic PSYOP on the home pitch. Leave it to the Brits (and Krauts for that matter) to (dare) think/work outside the box. Matrix-muddying dissonance out - Shuttle-PSYOP up!

Jacked & Hacked BBC (London) 2 April 2010 (H/T R. Sense)

Their faces etched from years of conflict in the war-torn deserts of Helmand Province, four senior Islamic scholars step into a pod on the London Eye.

As the giant wheel turns they stare in silence at the city spread beneath them; the River Thames, the Houses of Parliament and miles beyond.

It is their first time ever in Britain. As they soak up the sights, they know this visit is about much more than tourism.

It marks a new initiative in British government strategy; the recognition that military progress in southern Afghanistan will not hold unless international forces also win the battle for hearts and minds.

In the intense propaganda war on the ground, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office now hopes to improve communication with ordinary Afghans by targeting their religious leaders.

Jacked & Hacked BBC (London) 10 March 2010

There was a man from the other side of the world telling an audience that included Parliamentarians and other government officials what they had been wanting to hear. A clear, concise and quotable denouncement of al-Qaeda's worldview.

Canada-based Dr Qadri spoke for more than an hour on his reasons why the Koran forbids the murder and mayhem of suicide bombings.

"This fatwa is an absolute condemnation of terrorism. Without any excuse, without any pretext, without any exceptions, without creating any ways of justification," he said.

"This condemnation is in its totality, in its comprehensiveness, its absoluteness, a total condemnation of every act of terrorism in every form which is being committed or has been committed wrongly in the name of Islam."

[...]

Dr Qadri is a classically-trained Islamic scholar and his organisation, Minhaj ul-Quran International, has spent 30 years building a strong following in Pakistan.

Winning The Right War

The Brookings Institute has been kind enough to retrieve a new article on the "War on Terror" by one of their Senior Fellows from behind the paid firewall of The International Institute For Strategic Studies.

Never ones to fail to take advantage of an exploit, we hereby present an excerpt (and more valuably -- a link).

From Winning the Right War by Philip H. Gordon (30-page pdf):

Bush ... argues that, even though the terrorists hate freedom, it is the lack of freedom in their own countries that drives them to support terror­ism. The picture painted is thus one of some fixed set of ‘evildoers’, driven to terrorism by the absence of democracy in their homelands, who attack America and its allies because they hate the freedoms symbolised by those countries. As a basis for understanding – and therefore dealing with – the terrorist threat, this is a partial and exceedingly misleading explanation.

The idea that terrorists attack because they hate freedom is particularly mis­guided. The explanation is convenient, because it suggests that there is nothing we can do about it (since they hate ‘who we are’ rather than ‘what we do’), and it is harmful because it suggests that the only way to defeat such terrorists is to kill or capture them all, since we’re obviously not prepared to sacrifice our freedom to appease them. But there is little evidence to suggest that hatred of freedom is in fact a primary cause of terrorism, and much to suggest that it is not.

At the most superficial level, if freedom were the main target for terror­ists, they would be just as likely to attack Switzerland, Canada, Costa Rica or Sweden as the United States, which is clearly not the case. Indeed, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt have been much more frequent targets of attacks than the United States, and it is surely not because the terrorists hate the individual liber­ties and elected governments in those countries.

Extensive polling in the Muslim world also challenges the notion of a sig­nificant link between terrorism and a hatred for freedom. While many Islamist ideologues do often express revulsion with the personal liberties and sexual freedom enjoyed in Western countries, it turns out that even most of the Muslims who support terrorism and trust Osama bin Laden favour elected government, personal liberty, educational opportunity and economic choice. Some Muslim extremists may not like American-style democracy, but that is not why they become terrorists, and not why others support them.

(...)

Even to the degree that stable democracy is part of the longer-term solu­tion to the terrorist problem, there remains the problem of how to promote it. Democracy seems to be the long-term trend among states based on historic national communities in Europe, North America and Latin America, but it is much harder to install where no strong ‘nation’ exists, which is sadly the case for most of the Muslim world. Only Iran, Turkey, Egypt and possibly Indonesia really meet the nationhood criterion, and even these countries are plagued by serious ethnic and religious divisions. Certainly Iraq – with artificial borders, diverse ethnic and religious groups, and unevenly dispersed natural resources – is not promising terrain for the establishment of democracy, notwithstanding the claims of some of the most prominent supporters of the war. In the long run, it is possible to imagine that economic development, social modernisation, a patient process of institution building, and more equitable distribution of resources among different ethnic, religious and social groups might create the conditions necessary for democracy to develop. But a counteterrorism strategy based on such uncertainties – the uncertain link between an absence of democ­racy and terrorism as well as the uncertainty that democracy can be implanted where the right conditions are not in place – will have very limited prospects for success.

(...)

The perception of foreign occupation of Muslim lands also seems to contrib­ute to terrorists’ decisions to carry out attacks. In fact, as scholar Robert Pape has demonstrated, suicide bombers are far more often motivated by a desire to fight against foreign military occupation and for self-determination rather than by a desire to promote democracy at home. Looking at Tamil, Palestinian, Chechen, and al-Qaeda suicide bombers, Pape found that what they most had in common was a perception that their communities were being humiliated by more power­ful outsiders, and that they could reverse that humiliation by inflicting pain on those countries and obliging them to withdraw.

None of this means that the United States should simply change its poli­cies to make potential terrorists happy. But to deny any link between political context and an individual’s decision to become a terrorist, or to wilfully mis­place blame on a vague hatred for freedom or lack of democracy, is to start the ‘war on terror’ with a huge disadvantage. It is hard to fight an enemy without being honest about its real nature.

(...)

There is nothing easy about confronting the murderous threat posed by Islamist extremists who use violence to achieve political goals. The Bush administra­tion’s ‘war on terror’ is failing, however, not only because the job is inherently difficult but because the president launched the wrong war. He misconstrued the nature of the threat, placed too much faith in the use of military force, paid too little attention to the importance of moral authority and ideological combat, conflated a diverse array of threats into a single monolith, failed to appreciate the importance of winning and maintaining friends and allies, and failed to supply the necessary resources for the kind of war he chose to fight.

In my book Winning the Right War, I argue that an alternative course of action is both possible and necessary. In such a new approach, the United States and its allies would approach the ‘war on terror’ as a long-term ideological struggle – in some ways like the fight against Communism during the Cold War – that we will win only when we have discredited the extremist ideas of our enemies.

(...)

In fighting the right war along these lines, we would demonstrate confidence that, in the long run, the hateful, repressive ideology we are fighting will collapse, like communism before it. Ultimately, violent Islamism is not likely to win enduring support. Terrorism is not a strategy with which Muslims will forever want to be associated, and it will create a backlash within Muslim societies. With time and experience, and if the United States and its allies make the right choices, Muslims will themselves turn against the extremists in their midst. They will seek to put their civilisation on a path that will restore its greatest era, when the Islamic world was a multicultural zone of tolerance and of intellectual, artistic and scientific achievement. The agents of this change might come from above – leaders fearful of losing their grip on power if they fail to change – or from below – citizens fed up both with secular autocracy and the fundamentalist alternative – but they will come as the inevita­ble if destructive effects of modernisation run their course. Islamist extremism, in other words, will end up on the same ash-heap of history as Communism did, so long as we do not play into the extremists’ hands and artificially prolong its life.

Propafghanda

As Canada deepens its commitment to a counterinsurgency campaign in southern Afghanistan, the public is witnessing the consequences of concentrated media power. Canadian foreign policy in Afghanistan is generally supported by the media: the debate is restricted and rarely strays beyond questions of what mix of "security" and "development" is the best recipe for victory.

This article will look at some general aspects of the transformation of Canadian foreign policy, while highlighting the centrality of the battle for Canadian hearts and minds in this transformation. The counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan represents the culmination of Canada's new foreign policy, but it is worth bearing in mind that Afghanistan, in the words of Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier, offers only a "glimpse of the future" of Canadian military operations. Given free reign, this aggressive new foreign policy will be readily applied elsewhere — unless Canadians can effectively challenge the blatant propaganda and blind patriotism being deployed to justify it.

Public support is crucial to this shift. Canadian planners are aware of the challenges faced as they attempt to maintain the legitimacy necessary at home to support their expensive foreign adventures. ...

Numerous policy documents indicate that the Canadian military began its transformation in the mid to late 1990s. However, it wasn’t until the official release of the Martin government’s International Policy Statement (IPS) in April 2005 that the desired shift moved from the obscurity of policy papers, parliamentary committee meetings, and military journals to the public domain. Martin’s IPS named the new policy approach the “3D” approach to foreign affairs: diplomacy, development, and defence.

According to the IPS, globalization is identified as the key driver of the world’s recent "period of change and uncertainty." This "new reality" is typified by "fragile, failed and failing states" (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti among the most prominent, where Canada is concerned), and "global terrorism." Of course, the desirability of continuing to pursue the policies that lead to "failed states" and "global terrorism" is not discussed.

The IPS describes today’s operational environment in terms of a three-block war scenario:

"Increasingly, there is overlap in the tasks our personnel are asked to carry out at any one time. Our military could be engaged in combat against well-armed militia in one city block, stabilization operations in the next block, and humanitarian relief and reconstruction two blocks over."

Although the IPS does not credit it, the three-block war is a U.S. concept. U.S. Marines commander Charles C. Krulak first articulated the idea during an October 1997 speech to the National Press Club, where he described three-block war as "the landscape in which the 21st century battle will be fought." It didn't take long for Canada to begin incorporating three-block war principles into its training methods and doctrines. An article in the Spring 2006 issue of the Canadian Army Journal said the ability to operate simultaneously in all parts of three-block war must be the Army's guiding vision. ...

"The idea of the three-block war now encapsulates that which we have done in Afghanistan, and what we will do elsewhere," Lt. Gen. Andrew Leslie told a January 2006 conference titled "Beyond the Three-Block War," organized by the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies. The CISS subsequently published a short book by the same name based on the proceedings. The publication reveals much about the hearts-and-minds campaign being waged against the Canadian public. "Beyond the Three-Block War" reproduces an essay written by students at Royal Military College who attempt to broaden the concept of the three-block war by introducing a fourth block, which "involves the government's communications strategy on the home front." Among other things, it "entails proactively conveying Canada's international intentions to the Canadian citizen." The activities carried out by the government and the military-industrial complex are intended to foster "a strong national consensus behind [Canada’s] foreign policy." Elsewhere, Canadian military strategists have defined this fourth block as the perception war for Canadian hearts and minds.

Canadian editorial support for the Afghan adventure has been near unanimous, even though public opinion is deeply divided. ...

The Royal Military College's Robert Adinall further highlights the importance of public perception and the media in counterinsurgency warfare. In a paper presented at the Ottawa-based Conference of Defence Association's eighth annual symposium, Adinall suggests that "the ubiquity of interactive media makes it part of the strategic environment. . . [Interactive media] is the technological and cultural transformation that makes the 21st century an era of true Perception War."

Canadian Forces Second Lieutenant Jessica M. Davis also sees the media as central to the perception war. Writing in August 2005 in the Canadian Military Journal, she states: "Indeed, influencing public opinion, both at home and abroad, is one of the most important aspects of modern warfare. . . . The media reaches not only the homes of citizens, but also their minds." In short, "The media is difficult to control, but it can be key in winning (or losing) an information war."

Again, such concepts are hardly new. In the 1960s, British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson wrote in his classic study, Defeating Communist Insurgency, "The chief role of the foreign press [in a counterinsurgency campaign] will be to condition its own people."

In the U.S. Army counterinsurgency manual of 2006 — one of the models for the Canadian version currently under development — the question of the perception war is dealt with bluntly: "The media directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their operations, and the opposing insurgency. This situation creates a war of perception between insurgents and counterinsurgents conducted continuously using the news media."