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Exclusive: New 'Strategic Influence' book is finally available

After years of anticipation, my anthology, Strategic Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda and Political Warfare is now available to the public.

The book won't be available in bookstores or on Amazon until October, but you can get it online through this blog.

Strategic Influence is the work of 13 scholars and practitioners in the fields of public diplomacy, counterpropaganda and political warfare. The book surveys the subjects from the American Revolution, through the Cold War, to present-day wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We strove to make the book the best single volume on the subject. It's a combination of scholarly, personal narratives and the policy essays from some of the best minds in the business - some recognizable, some emerging. Here's the table of contents:

• The American Way of Propaganda: Lessons from the Founding Fathers. J. Michael Waller, Institute of World Politics;
• What 'Strategic' Public Diplomacy Is. Carnes Lord, Naval War College;
• Public Diplomacy and Soft Power. Carnes Lord;
• Cultural Diplomacy, Political Influence and Integrated Strategy. John Lenczowski, Institute of World Politics;
• Mediators of the Message: The Role of Religion and Civil Society in Public Diplomacy. Jennifer Marshall, Heritage Foundation;
• Conducting a War of Ideas with Public Diplomacy. Robert Reilly, former director, Voice of America;
• Counterpropaganda: We Can't Win Without It. Herbert Romerstein, former director, Office to Counter Soviet Active Measures, U.S. Information Agency;
• Recovering the Lost Art of Counterpropaganda. Andrew Garfield, Glevum Associates;
• The Interagency Active Measures Working Group: Successful Template for Strategic Influence. Herbert Romerstein;
• Political Warfare: Means for Achieving Political Ends. Angelo Codevilla, Boston University;
• Political War vs Political Terror: Case Study of an American Success Story. John J. Tierney, Institute of World Politics;
• The Importance of Words. J. Michael Waller;
• Hearts and Minds Online: Internetting the Messages in the Infosphere. Hampton Stephens, World Politics Review;
• Toward a Theory of Low-Intensity Propaganda. Stephen C. Baker, Institute of World Politics;
• Red-Teaming Strategic Communications and Political Warfare. David Spencer, National Defense University;
• A Comprehensive Approach to Information Operations. Andrew Garfield;
• Synchronizing Rhetoric, Policy and Action. Juliana Geran Pilon, Institute of World Politics;
• An Immediate-Term Wartime Message Strategy. J. Michael Waller;
• Getting Serious About Strategic Influence. J. Michael Waller.

Strategic Influence is published by the Institute of World Politics Press. The original edition was published for restricted circulation in 2007. This edition was revised in 2009 but was not available until today, and will not be generally available to the public until October 2010.

The book is only available at present - as a paperback and as an e-book - by clicking here.

Not getting it in time for Kandahar

It began as a brilliantly executed operation near the Taliban's main stronghold: the Marine-led campaign to take Marjah, Helmand province, Afghanistan, earlier this year.

Now we're finding that the operation is bogging down and that the Afghan people aren't helping us as we had anticipated. Somewhere along the way, the Marines apparently diverged from the playbook. They engaged the population very well in the initial successful offensive. But now, according to senior Pentagon officials who just returned from the area, they have failed to constructively engage the locals.

And Marjah was supposed to be a template for the much bigger Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Here's what AP is reporting, based on leaks from two senior Pentagon officials who recently came back from Marjah:

"The drive this summer to secure Kandahar was supposed to build on the success of the much smaller Marjah operations.

"But so far the U.S. and NATO haven't achieved their goals in Marjah, military and civilian officials said, as the government has been slow to provide services and villagers have not rallied in large numbers to the Kabul-based government.

"'We're still moving forward more slowly than the people would like,' Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative, said on a trip to Marjah this month.

"Sedwill still sees overall progress, and other civilian reconstruction specialists said it was unrealistic to expect a smoothly operating local government little more than two months after the initial assault on Marjah.

"Two senior Pentagon officials who visited Marjah in recent weeks said the Marines who provide the backbone of security in the district are not getting enough tips from the villagers or spending enough time with local leaders.

"People are hanging back, afraid to throw their lot with the government even if they hate the Taliban, military officials said, and the opportunity to win their trust is fading.

"The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

"The worry among military strategists is that if their tactics don't take hold in Marjah, with a population of roughly 80,000, what will happen in Kandahar?"

The Marines appear to have missed a very simple formula that the Army appears to have learned: Build and maintain the support of the local population through confidence-building measures that will prove to the locals that they can trust us, that we won't abandon them, that they'll be safe from the Taliban once we're gone, and that we will deliver on our promises.

Corrective action is needed now. I'm becoming less optimistic now. US military commanders in Afghanistan are issuing contracts to badly-needed subject-matter experts - not hiring the best people available, but hiring the cheapest. That's a very bad sign. Not a way to win a war.

(USMC Photo: US Marines in Marjah, 10 March 2010)

Between counterinsurgency & counterterrorism

A winning strategy in Afghanistan isn't as black-and-white as advocates of counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism would have us believe. The solution is a hybrid - and the Army is already putting it in place. All the Army is waiting for is for the president to hurry up and make a decision.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post shows how solidly he understands the issue in his recent column from Afghanistan. The column is titled,"The Real Afghan Strategy: Will Obama Give It a Chance?"

Ignatius looks at the quizzical look on the face of an Afghan farmer who is speaking with US troops who understand his culture. Perhaps the farmer is wondering, Ignatius writes, "Can these pleasant, tea-drinking American soldiers really be the same people who are assaulting Taliban fighters in this region of eastern Afghanistan?"

"The answer is yes. Even as US forces show a gentler side with their new stress on people-friendly counterinsurgency, they continue to conduct devastating attacks on the enemy. It's this mix of hard and soft that's the essence of the US battle plan here, but this reality is not well understood back in America.

"The Washington debate about the Afghanistan war - pitting advocates of a broad counterinsurgency strategy against those who favor a narrower counterterrorism approach - has sometimes been misleading, at least in terms of what actually goes on here. The fact is that U.S. forces are doing both missions every day and night - and indeed are becoming increasingly effective at each one."

There's a danger, though, as Ignatius observes. "A strategy that combines stroking your friends and pounding your enemies runs the risk of sending mixed messages. The public, here and around the world, may conclude that for all their new talk about drinking tea, the Americans are ruthless killers. Meanwhile, the enemy may conclude that whatever its firepower, the United States is impatient and will eventually go away. The wires may get crossed, in other words, with people getting the opposite message from the one intended."

Very true. Ignatius is in Afghanistan to discover what he calls "both sides of this complicated and ambitious strategy."

The first is the soft, "population-centric" approach, which Ignatius demonstrates in a pilot project to improve local governance. The US hopes to show that the locals won't see the central Afghan government as "a distant and corrupt force in Kabul" but as a better-than-Taliban local presence. The problem, Ignatius correctly notes, is that the illusion defies reality: "the Kabul government is distant and corrupt."

Representatives of the first wave of a US "civilian surge" that President Obama promised are already on the scene (though this stability operations initiative predates the Obama administration by several years). The US Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, State Department and other agencies have been at work on this for quite a while, with valiant - and often very successful - efforts that remain almost unknown here at home.

The "hard" side of the US strategy consists of widespread use of special operations forces: the lethal "black" side that kills or neutralizes enemy forces, and the soft "unconventional" side consisting of "A-Teams" to work among the towns and villages with Afghan soldiers, police, and tribal leaders.

"These are creative operations, employing some of America's best soldiers," Ignatius notes. "They reflect a growing understanding of what counterinsurgency experts call the 'human terrain map.'" And mastery of the human terrain, as this blog constantly notes, is key to winning the war.

"It's like all the instruments in an orchestra," a US military commander tells Ignatius of the battle plan's varied parts. "You have to know how to play them together." (This is the very approach of the Institute of World Politics, the graduate school where I teach.)

So the choice between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, Ignatius notes, "is a false argument. What the United States actually has in Afghanistan is a mixture. Obama must now decide whether to provide the resources - and take the risks - to test whether this combined strategy can succeed."

Photo: Human Terrain Team at work. An Afghan interpreter, left, and Jared Davidson, with Human Terrain Team, both attached to Regimental Combat Team 3 (RCT-3) and the Afghan National Army (ANA), talk with a villager during a mounted patrol in Nawa district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Sept. 23, 2009. The ANA and RCT-3 Marines are talking with village residents to try to gain public assistance in ridding the area of enemy forces. The Marines are deployed to conduct partnered counterinsurgency operations with Afghan National Security Forces in southern Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Gunnery Sgt. James A. Burks/Released)

Andrew Garfield's comprehensive approach to information operations

Andrew Garfield, the British-American information operations practitioner, has written a multi-part series on information operations for Serviam magazine.

Part 1: Opportunities for International Public-Private Partnership. March-April 2008.

Part 2: Understanding the Human Terrain. May-June 2008.

Part 3: Effective Engagement. July-August 2008.

For information on Garfield's contracting firm, Glevum Associates, click here.