Afstan: West's information ops suck/Taliban influence in Kabul

Why we may be on the way to losing the war for popular support:

Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat
Afghan Outrage at U.S. Raid Highlights Challenges Facing New Military Push

The U.S. soldiers entered the sleeping village in Logar province in the dead of night on Feb. 20, sure of their target and heavily armed. They surrounded a mud-walled compound, shouting commands, and then kicked down the gate as cries of protest erupted within.

Exactly what happened next is disputed, but shots were fired and a man inside fell dead. Four other men were grabbed and arrested. Then the soldiers departed, leaving the women to calm the frightened children and the rumors to spread in the dark.

By midmorning, hundreds of angry people were blocking the nearby highway, burning tires and shouting "Death to America!" By mid-evening, millions of Afghan TV news viewers were convinced that foreign troops had killed an unarmed man trying to answer his door.

"We are afraid of the Taliban, but we are more afraid of the Americans now," said Abdul Ghaffar, a truck driver in the raided village. "The foreign forces are killing innocent people. We don't want them in Afghanistan. If they stay, one day we will stand against them, just like we stood against the Russians."..

Strategically...the incident was a disaster. Its most incriminating version -- colored by villagers' grief and anger, possibly twisted by Taliban propaganda and magnified by the growing influence of independent Afghan TV -- spread far faster than U.S. authorities could even attempt to counter...

[Lt. Col. Daniel] Goldthorpe [commanding the U.S. Army base at Altimur in Logar] acknowledged that the fallout from the raid in Bagh-i-Soltan was a surprising setback for the U.S. forces' image here. But he attributed the public unrest to superior Taliban propaganda efforts and strongly denied that any misconduct occurred during the raid.

"We did everything to the letter, but their media was a lot faster than ours," he said. "When a tree falls in the forest, the first to report the sound gets their version out. This was a huge learning curve for us and an important exercise in credibility [emphasis added]."..

The CF, for their part, are trying to do their bit in info ops--how successful?

Meanwhile, forward life for US Army troops in that area near Kabul:

From a Fortified Base, a Different View of Afghanistan

While Taliban threats working in Kabul:

Paween Mushtakhel is forced into hiding as Taleban return to Kabul

Paween Mushtakhel, centre, once one of the most recognisable female faces on Afghan television, now cannot venture outside without wearing a burka

Paween Mushtakhel was 19 and nervous when she made her stage debut in Kabul. She fell in love with acting and went on to become one of Afghanistan’s leading theatre and television actresses, a specialist in comic roles. Today, at 41, she says she wishes that she had never discovered the stage.

In December her husband was murdered by unknown gunmen outside their home after defying months of telephone warnings to stop his wife appearing on television. “I killed my husband with my acting,” Mrs Mushtakhel says, her face dark with fatigue and stress. She has spent the past three months in hiding, fearful for her life and those of her two young children. Her only option, she says, is to flee the country.

She is not alone. There is an unease bordering on dread among many working women as the restrictions of the Taleban era begin to encroach again on the relative liberalism of Afghanistan’s cities. “The atmosphere has changed,” she said. “Day by day women can work less and less.”

In the past 18 months the Taleban has reestablished a significant presence in five of the six provinces clustered around Kabul – and people have begun to talk about an infiltration of the city; not necessarily of armed men, but of Taleban influence...