Robert Fisk: Glossy new front in battle for hearts and minds

[IndianaGreen]

Robert Fisk: Glossy new front in battle for hearts and minds

Once it was grainy video footage on websites. Now the Taliban believes its best chance of winning the propaganda war lies in a magazine

Friday, 2 April 2010

It's sleek, it's glossy, it's in eloquent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, and it pours derision on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan; it is the brand new propaganda wing of the Taliban: not just internet video of attacks on the western armies in Helmand and Kandahar, but professionally produced magazines, carrying stories of the Taliban's own "martyrdom" operations and the names of its dead fighters. For once, the cliché "well-oiled publicity machine" is correct.

Nureddin – or Abu Ahmed, as he preferred to be called, to denote that he is Ahmed's father – is one of the creators of Al-Samoud, which roughly translates as "Resistance" or "Stay Put!" The latest front page of the Taliban's monthly Arabic-language house magazine is adorned with photographs of a grim-faced General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, and the headline: "A surprise is awaiting the enemy in Helmand." Inside, an editorial asks: "Is the battle of Marja as decisive as they claim?" while an article on casualties is accompanied by a coloured photograph of a British military cortège passing through the village of Wootton Basset.

Abu Ahmed is from Logar province in Afghanistan but his Arabic is fluent and his arguments straightforward. "In the West," he says to me, "they say they have freedom of speech – so why shouldn't we have freedom of speech?" We are talking over lunch in the weird company of three pink storks and a peacock that prowl the Afghan-Tajik-Uzbek restaurant in Islamabad where he has chosen to meet me, wearing a white robe, a white cap and a carefully combed beard.

His spectacles give him a student's complexion, his arguments are exceptionally dry. When I ask him why he doesn't produce an English edition of Al-Samoud and sell it to the 150,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan, he shakes his head with the words: "They are seeing everything live and they would have no time to read it – they are too busy fighting for their lives."

Al-Samoud and the Taliban's three other magazines in Pashto and Dari – the bi-monthly Morchel ("Trench"), Saraq ("Flame") and Shahamak ("Dignity") – are obviously produced on modern presses, although Abu Ahmed will not reveal their location. I suspect they are in Pakistan and receive a sharp look by way of reply. But they reveal two new characteristics: an almost obsessive attention to detail, and the new name of the Taliban. The group now calls itself the "Islamic Emirate". That's the original name of the country the Taliban governed until 2001, and its readoption is an attempt to free itself from the thieves and mafiosi in Afghanistan who call themselves "Taliban" but who have nothing to do with Islam or hostility to the Western forces in the country. Al-Samoud describes itself as "the Islamic monthly magazine published by the media centre of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan". The Taliban distribute it across the Arab Gulf.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-glossy-new-front-in-battle-for-hearts-and-minds-1934020.html

[DJ13]

1. The centerfold's a knockout

(Just kidding!)

[Oregone]

2. Oh, they are in their final death throes

Or some crap like that