Outfoxed in the Information War

Four weeks into the Afghanistan military operation, the battle for the information high ground has intensified as the Pentagon struggles to counter Taliban claims about civilian casualties and apparent U.S. military errors.

In Europe, public support starts to waver as the massive technological superiority of U.S. forces seems deftly undermined by the crude power of video images. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw complains about the voracious impatience of a 24-hour media cycle out of sync with military reality. “The press,” he says, “have almost no humility and no memory.”

The solution will be coalition “rebuttal” centers, including in Islamabad. But rebuttal is fine only if done with accurate, real-time information, not questionable, best-case claims to fit a political imperative. Just as bin Ladens network on Sept. 11 defied with box cutters the American assumption of inviolable national security, there is now similar asymmetry in information power.

The U.S. and its allies have an array of satellites and sophisticated intelligence-gathering systems. We in the media report their every official explanation and comment. Yet for public perceptions of how the war is unfolding, the Taliban are once again showing how low tech can challenge high tech and win.

After the 1999 Kosovo conflict, nato analyzed exhaustively its failures in information handling. Serb women were pictured dancing on the wing of a downed F-117 Stealth bomber before the U.S. Air Force even admitted its loss. It took military commanders four days to unravel why an Albanian refugee convoy at Djakovica was mistakenly bombed. nato learned painfully that speed and candor are crucial. But the Afghan campaign shows how lessons learned can be lessons ignored. Governments, too, abandon humility and lose their memories.

The issue is not perfect accuracy: much officially released information is as correct as it can be in the immediate fog of war. More troubling is the occasional whiff of deception, incompetence or economy with truth. Recently, U.S. officials made classic, self-defeating errors. When the Taliban produced jerky video of a helicopter undercarriage marked “Boeing,” the Pentagon dismissed it, citing the Talibans “completely outrageous . . . outright lies” and “exaggerations.” The next day, it admitted the undercarriage of a Blackhawk helicopter was ripped off flying at low level. At first, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted there was “absolutely no evidence” that the U.S. mistakenly bombed a military hospital in Herat. Turns out he was wrong. Undiscriminating contempt for Taliban assertions inevitably raises questions about his promise that from the Pentagon “you will receive only honest, direct answers.”

But what about accuracy? In the transparent, real-time information environment of new wars, trust is a commodity to be won, not assumed as of right. Officials want cockpit videos of bomb strikes to confirm immediate achievements. But post-conflict analysis typically shows that barely one-third of videoed explosions caused the purported damage. In Kosovo, Britains Chief of Defence Staff reported “significant” damage to Yugoslav tanks from nato bombing. After the fighting, most destroyed “tanks” were found to be crude wooden fakes. NATO officials later conceded that many war claims had been knowingly exaggerated to impress public opinion. So now should we believe British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoons statement that bombing has destroyed all nine al-Qaeda training camps?

Whether in government command centers or media newsrooms, limited information emerging from Afghanistan is rightly treated with skepticism, even if clearly sourced. But governments make a self-defeating mistake if they dismiss it all as “lies,” especially when it creates the impression that military errors with civilian casualties have occurred. The old Pentagon mindset prevailed when first it denied, then grudgingly confirmed, that its planes bombed four well-marked Red Cross warehouses, a U.N. demining depot and the Herat hospital. To retain credibility and what may become increasingly fragile global support, officials must acknowledge that Taliban videos and claims can reveal a truth of sorts, however thin and garbled the first details.

Despite their paranoid aversion to TV images, the Taliban are learning fast. Last week they admitted several journalists to witness bomb damage in and around Kandahar. More will follow. The worlds only military superpower has failed to embrace the new tyranny of real-time information transparency in war. Low-cost video cameras and mobile phones can nimbly upstage billion-dollar information-processing systems and hierarchical command-and-control structures.

For U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, the enemy is not only al-Qaeda, it is the complacent assumption of information supremacy.