The Taliban was quick to respond to President Barack Obama's December 1 announcement of a new strategy for Afghanistan. It's worth studying the response to learn about the Taliban's propaganda themes, at least as directed toward the outside world. The response shows that the Taliban pays close attention to American political debate, echoing US politicians and aware of splits in the president's political base.
Points to consider:
- The Taliban opened its statement by taunting President Obama with the word that former Vice President Dick Cheney used: "dithering."
- The Taliban is trying to show that President Obama is not able to make decisions on his own, but is acting under pressure from those outside his natural support base.
- Obama is portrayed as being under political pressure from military generals, "neo-conservatives" (a term that critics use as a euphemism for Jews and for Jewish-oriented national security hawks close to President George W. Bush's administration, and specifically to Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Ironically, the Taliban is correct in saying that Obama's strategy is similar to the Bush policy; Cheney told the Center for Security Policy in October that he personally provided the Obama team with the policy options that President Obama was adopting in Afghanistan.
- Echoes of Soviet propaganda: The Taliban shows a Marxist analysis of US strategy, saying that the Obama policy is on behalf of "the wealthiest few . .. of America and for the protection of their interests. Hence is a strategy of colonialism aimed at securing interests of the American capitalists."
- The Taliban says that Obama is trying to appeal to two opposing constituencies: the military and political conservatives on one hand, and anti-war liberals on the other.
The point here is to show that the Taliban is becoming increasingly sophisticated about American politics and the president's own political base. The group is no longer as insular and provincial as it had been.
This development follows the Taliban's declaration in August that it was going to lessen its abuse, torture and deliberate killing of civilians (a.k.a. become more respectful of human rights), recognizing that such methods smothered its possibility of winning significant support - as well as tactical allies abroad.
It will be interesting to see if fringe elements of the American "anti-war" movement end up reaching out to the Taliban, just as they have done with other US adversaries such as the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein. Or if the new and improved Taliban reaches out to them. Once this connection occurs, we should expect to see an organized "anti-war" movement in the United States in which American activist leaders coordinate their political action at home with enemy action abroad. Just as we saw in Vietnam and elsewhere in the past.
Click here for the full text of the Taliban's statement as issued in English.
By the way - hats off to the White House for so quickly providing official transcripts of the president's speech (plus fact sheets) in other languages, including in Arabic, Dari, Hindi, Indonesian, Pashto, Persian and Urdu, and in the languages of other Coalition forces including Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Spanish, Turkish and so forth.